Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment

Ask any service designer to list their top 5 or 10 people in the industry who have influenced them, and it’s a fair bet that most of them will mention Lou Downe.

Lou literally wrote the book about service design in the public sector in the UK. And pretty much introduced the concept into UK Government.

Alongside This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing by Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence et al, it’s a slim volume that has genuinely become canon.

So when Lou, as a freelancer, shared the Good Services scale, it was news, and it was exciting.

Here was a way to assess the health of any service, avoiding our inevitable biases. It’s simple and straightforward. You can do it in a morning.

Ideally you’d run through it based on user research, but it’s also amenable to what used to be called a “service safari” (the term has, rightly in my view, been deprecated because of its colonialist overtones) approach – a kinda service design equivalent to a UX heuristics review.

One thing always bothered me though. (And this is a limitation, not a criticism.)

Lou offers the tool – freely, in both senses – as an Excel sheet and a Google sheet – as well as a PDF and a Miro template.

The PDF you can download, print, and scribble on, I suppose. All the other options are expensive, in one form or another.

What I mean by that is:

• A licence for M365 (or O365 or Office 365 or whatever they’re calling it today) will cost you, or your organisation, money
• You can create a Google account and it will cost you nothing financially, but only in exchange for some privacy degradation
• You can create a free Miro account but any attempt to do so with a domain-controlled Enterprise account will end in failure

So, I thought I’d do something about that

I took Lou’s methodology, content, and logic and applied it to a simple web app that does, essentially, the same thing.

But you don’t need a licence or an account with Microsoft, Google, Miro, or anyone else to use it.

When you’re done, you can print it out. Most modern browsers offer a “Save as PDF’ alternative now as well, if you need a record.

One caveat

In Lou’s original version, the scale goes:

• 0-20
• 20-30
• 30-40
• 40-50
• 50-60

Logically, a score of “20” can’t be in both sets of 0-20 and 20-30. (I’m dealing with computers here, gimme a break. They’re remorseless.)

Likewise, 30, 40 or any other number ending in 0

So, in line with the original document (and with Lou’s conditional formatting rules on the Excel version of their sheet, which I think reveals Lou’s thinking,) I’ve gone with the following:

• 0-20
• 21-30
• 31-40
• 41-50
• 51-50

Anyway.

Good Services scale