Good Services. Lou Downe

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СКАЧАТЬ – like learn to drive, buy a house or become a childminder. This means that, to a user, a service is very often an activity that needs to be done. A verb that comes naturally from a given situation, which will more than likely cut across websites, call centre menus and around carefully placed advice towards its end goal. The problem is, this isn’t how most organisations see their services. For most organisations, services are individual discrete actions that need to be completed in a specified order – things like ‘account registration’, ‘booking an appointment’ or ‘filling a claim’.

       Because these isolated activities need to be identifiable for the people operating them, we’ve given them names, nouns, to help us keep track of them and refer to them internally. Over time these names become exposed to users, even if we don’t mean them to be initially.

       In government, these are things like ‘Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR)’ or ‘Statutory Off Road Vehicle Notification (SORN)’ – but the names private organisations give these things are no less obtuse. Names like ‘eportal’ or ‘claims reimbursement certificate’ are commonplace in the private sector.

       Good services are verbs

       Bad services are nouns

       Google is the homepage of your service

       Without understanding what our users are trying to achieve, and reinterpreting our services in language that our users can understand, we often place users in a situation where, to find something, they need to know exactly what they’re looking for. For a user to find a service like RIDDOR or SORN, they first need to know what you call your service, resulting in an additional step being added to your service – that of learning the name that your organisation calls the thing they’re trying to do.

       As with the case of the dead badger, the less you know about the situation you’re in, the support available to you or what you should do, the harder you will find this search. Needless to say, even the most patient people wilt at the prospect of this almost impossible task. Instead their confusion drives to them to call centres or, worse, they won’t use your service at all.

       Google is the homepage for your service. Whether your service is usable online or not, this is likely to still be the way that it will be found and accessed. When it comes to finding your service, nothing is more important than its name. Beyond making it easier for search engines to index and list your service, the name of your service makes a statement to your user about what that service does for them.

       The UK Ministry of Justice found this out when they set about changing its Fee Remissions service in 2017. The Fee Remissions service helps to pay for or subsidise the cost of court fees for people who aren’t able to pay themselves. However, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that the word ‘remission’ is not the most frequently used word, particularly in a financial content. Given that the financial literacy of those applying often wasn’t high, the title of the service was not only hard to understand for most people, but served to weed out precisely the users who were eligible to use it.

       The reason this happened is simple, and happens every day in the creation of services. The title of the policy, somewhere long ago, had simply been made into the name of the service, without a thought to what language a user might use.

       Nouns are for experts

       Verbs are for everyone

       Several rounds of research with the users of the service and staff providing it revealed that it was often referred to as ‘help with court fees’ rather than ‘fee remissions’, so the team renamed the service, meaning that users with low levels of financial literacy were able to use it.

       When we design services with noun-based names like ‘Fee Remission’, we are designing them for use by experts, something that worked well when services were provided by trained expert humans, but means that they don’t work unassisted on the internet.

       Instead we often find that other professionals willingly offer support to our users – at a cost. This happened with Fee Remissions, as it so often does with many of the more obtuse services, from insurance buying to visa applications – when several third-party providers offered their services in helping users apply for what should have been a free service.

       In the past, we used advertising to ‘educate users’ in our nouns, forcing the kind of brand familiarity that came naturally to well-used objects like Sellotape, Hoovers or Biros. But unless you’re confident that you will get the kind of market ubiquity that comes from being a household name (and this happens to fewer companies than you’d think), your service is likely to be one of the thousands a user will use infrequently or once in their lives.

       Equally, if you’re a household name that has more than one service, this tactic is out. Your users still need to be able to sift through the many things you do to find the one thing that they need, and they aren’t going to be able to do that if you’ve got a jumble sale of nouns to wade through.

       Naming your service

       Rather than using the words your organisation uses to describe the tasks it has completed, try to find out some of the words your user would use to describe what they’re trying to achieve. What names work for users will depend on two things:

       1What your user wants to achieve

       2How knowledgeable they are about what services might be available to help them achieve their end goal

       For example, someone moving house might not think that the service ‘move house’ exists, based on their previous experiences, but instead might think to look for ‘removal companies’ or ‘estate agents’.

       In areas where a service is less ubiquitous than moving house – for example, registering a trademark – a user’s knowledge of what they might be able to get help with might be so low that they may try to find the noun they think most applies to them and hope for the best. This obviously means they may end up using a service that isn’t applicable to them. Your job is to understand how that overall task breaks down into smaller tasks a user identifies as something they need help with.

       It might help to think about the name of your service existing somewhere on a spectrum between verb and noun, where the thing users think to look for will inevitably be somewhere in the middle. Most importantly, base your name on a solid understanding of the words your users use.

      1Avoid legal or technical language For example, rather than ‘fee remission’ use ‘help with payment’.

      2Describe a task, not a technology Avoid words that describe a technology or an approach to technology that your service uses, such as ‘portal’, ‘hub’ ‘e-something’ or ‘i-something’. Your approach to technology is rarely of interest to your user, and words like these only serve to date your service to a particular era of technology.

      3Don’t use acronyms Acronyms might make it easier for you to refer СКАЧАТЬ