Bad Services

Bad Services explores one of the biggest challenges facing organisations today: why services that begin with the best intentions so often become frustrating, inefficient and disconnected from the people they are meant to serve.

Building on the ideas introduced in Good Services, author Lou Downe examines the organisational behaviours, structures and assumptions that prevent services from improving over time. Rather than focusing solely on design methods, the book looks at the wider conditions required for successful service delivery, revealing how distance from users, internal complexity and broken feedback loops can gradually erode service quality.

Through practical insights and real-world examples, Downe demonstrates that creating effective services is not just about good design, but about building organisations that can listen, learn and adapt. The book unpacks the common barriers that prevent meaningful change and offers straightforward ways to address them, whether you’re working from within an organisation or trying to influence it from the outside.

Accessible, thought-provoking and highly practical, Bad Services is an invaluable resource for designers, leaders, policymakers and anyone responsible for improving the experiences people have with products, systems and services. It provides a compelling framework for understanding why services fail—and what can be done to make them better.

Author: Lou Downe
Cover: Paperback
Dimensions: 198x130mm
ISBN: 9789063697211