Transcript of "Good Services, with Lou Downe"

Clare: Hello and welcome to Making Tech Better, Made Tech’s fortnightly podcast bringing you content from all over the world on how to improve your software delivery. My name is Clare Sudbery, my pronouns are she and her and I am a Lead Engineer at Made Tech. On Wednesday 1st December 2021, I spoke to Lou Downe. Lou used to be the Head of User-Centred Design and Service Standards at the Government Digital Service, otherwise known as GDS and they’re the author of Good Services the service design bible which has already been recommended by a couple of other guests, so I was very pleased when Lou agreed to come on the show.

Clare: Hello Lou!

Lou: Hello Clare.

Clare: Thank you for coming on the podcast. It’s really great to see you. I’m going to start with the same question that I ask everybody. Who in this industry are you inspired by?

Lou: It’s a really good question. When you sent me this question, I had a really good think about it. My answer is not going to be someone that is in the industry, unfortunately. It is somebody who has inspired me really recently, Peter Tatchell. Some of you might know Peter Tatchell, some of you might not, but Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, particularly for LGBT+ issues, who has been tirelessly campaigning for, human rights for every person in the world for a number of years.

I recently watched the documentary about it him called Hating Peter Tatchell, which if you haven’t seen, you should absolutely watch. It’s a true example of dedication to making the world a better place for everyone. I would thoroughly recommend it.

Clare: Fantastic. I first came across Peter Tatchell a long time ago, when I was campaigning against Clause 28, way back in the late eighties. He has just been constantly campaigning, hasn’t he?

Lou: Absolutely.

Clare: Fantastic. Can you tell us a bit about what you do?

Lou: I run the School of Good Services, which is a very small organisation of one, currently. Does that class as an organisation? I think it does.

Clare: Absolutely, yes.

Lou: Essentially, I help organisations to design and deliver better services, and help them to overcome all of the different problems that they encounter along the way, through coaching and training. It’s based on the fifteen principles of good service design that I wrote in the book, Good Services.

Clare: Fantastic, and we will come onto those fifteen principles. Always when I talk about services, I ask people to define what they mean by a service. The word gets used in lots of different contexts, and if you’re not used to it, you don’t necessarily know. Can you do that for us?

Lou: I’m so glad that you asked that question, Clare. It’s my favourite question. It’s so important for people who are practising service design or interested in the field to be able to have a really clear explanation of the thing that they are designing. It’s vital. For me, a service is something that helps someone to do something. That can be very simple like buying a chocolate bar, it can be very complex and long like helping someone to regain health after an accident. So really, a service is something that helps someone to do something.

Clare: Fantastic, thank you. I know that you spent some time as – I’ve got this written down as Head of User Centred Design and Service Standards at the Government Digital Service, which general gets shortened to GDS. We’ve actually had a few people on the podcast who are ex-GDS. It’s such an iconic organisation. How did it feel to have such an influence on the citizens’ experience of government digital offerings?

Lou: I suppose it felt like a huge responsibility, as it should do because, as a public servant, you are there to make sure that the most vulnerable people in society are cared for and looked after. When your job is to manage all of the designers and all of the people working on making sure that those services come up to standard, that’s a huge responsibility to take very seriously.

So, yes, I was very aware, every time I went into work, of the responsibility I had not just to users, but also to the huge community that we built of over 2,000 designers, user researchers and context designers across central government.

Clare: 2,000.

Lou: Yes, at the time, I don’t know about now, it was certainly the biggest design team in the UK. Not really surprising, I suppose, considering that the government is the largest service provider in the country. Really, we should have the largest design team. Certainly, the largest number of service designers working on those services. I think it’s always interesting to encounter people’s surprise about that.

I suppose unless you knew that those people were there, you wouldn’t know that they were there. I suppose that’s part of the power of it in a way. You shouldn’t really notice that all of these designers have been there. You should just notice better services.

Clare: Yes. There is maybe a perception though that if something is in the public realm, if it’s something funded by government, that therefore it might be underfunded and therefore, it might not be getting the same attention or investment as something in the private realm. Actually, in terms of service design, GDS is actually leading the way, isn’t it?

There are people in the private sector who are following the example that is set by GDS.

Lou: Absolutely. I think that’s for a really good reason. GDS and the government more widely, most of the designers who work in government don’t work for GDS, they work for DWP and HMRC and all of the other amazing departments that are doing really good work. Part of the attraction is that ultimately, you get to work on things that really matter in people’s lives. That will always attract people who want to do really good work.

Equally, for service designers, having a consistent design language means that you don’t have to worry about what colour you are using, what font you’re using. You’re designing a black and white website. That’s incredibly attractive because it means that you can actually get on with the really important stuff, which is what is actually happening to that person, and what are we helping them to do?

All of that work is possible through the really amazing graphic design and interaction design that is done as well, so it’s a product of that huge diversity of different perspectives on design, and that huge diversity of skills that is still there throughout government today. It’s amazing to see.

Clare: Just for clarity actually, you talked about those 2,000 people and you also talked about the fact that GDS is just one part of it, so there are lots of other organisations that make up central government, like GDWP. When you said 2,000, were you talking about the people in all of the different government departments, rather than just people working for GDS?

Lou: Yes, absolutely. Those 2,000 work across government, and not just at GDS.

Clare: Fantastic. So, you don’t just have that pedigree, you’ve also authored this amazing book, Good Services, which has come up more than once in the podcast. People have recommended it, people really look to it almost as a bible on service design.

In the blurb, it says that it ‘…won’t tell you how to wow your users with something they didn’t expect. Instead, it will tell you how to design a service that your users can find, understand, and use without having to ask for help.’

Do you want to talk about that distinction between wowing and serving, so to speak?

Lou: Yes, I’m glad that you picked up that bit to talk about it first. I think it’s one of the most important things about good services. I decided to write Good Services after a long career of working on goods, and often very bad services. Not just in the public sector, but in various different organisations.

One thing that I noticed was that I was constantly brought in to make a service amazing. To make that experience fantastic for someone going through it. Even in the context of public services, we often get distracted by this idea that somehow, we can create this unique, beautiful experience for someone, but we forget to send them the bill on time. We forget to tell them how much something will be, or to tell them that we’ve decided, or to help people to find a service.

These really basic, fundamental things that we need to get right before we can actually start to focus on those fantastic things around the outside of it just don’t get done. The reason they don’t get done is because they are the hardest to do. Sending someone a bill on time is a lot harder than sending them a Parker Pen in the post. Not that I’m saying that gives someone an amazing experience, it might have done in the eighties. I’m not sure it even did then, to be honest.

Clare: Parker Pens, yes, that was a thing, wasn’t it?

Lou: It was.

Clare: People would send you a Parker Pen as some kind of reward.

Lou: We used to have a bit of a saying at GDS, No innovation until everything is fixed. Which was controversial to say the least, because of course, everyone is desperately trying to innovate in all sorts of different directions and put everything on the block. They talk about AI and machine learning constantly. But unless we can actually get people the right benefits at the right time, and unless we can help people actually find those government services in the first place – which often they can’t, because they have got completely obtuse names and you wouldn’t know to look for them unless you knew what they were called – then we’re not going to be able to have functional public services.
So, that was really the basis of Good Services, trying to lay out some basic standards of what good looks like for those services, regardless of what type of service it is. They are; being able to find a service, being able to use it without getting stuck in dead ends because you’ve lost your phone, and two-factor authentication doesn’t work, or for that service to be accessible and inclusive.

Those are the things I often think that as designers and user researchers, every single time we do a new project, we discover miraculously that people need to have expectations set. We shouldn’t be spending our time doing that. We know that those are things that people need from services. This was in part also a way to help people that are working on service design – either service designers or anyone else – to be able to bypass that stuff that we just already should know about services, and spend their valuable time, money, resources on actually understanding and learning the things that are really unique about that particular service. It’s a bit of a cheat sheet, as much as it is an instruction on how to build services that work.

Clare: Yes, that’s fantastic. Also, particularly with government but actually with a lot of organisations, when they are offering services, what the user is interested in is just getting something done. If you are ordering your bins, who cares if it’s got amazing animation or graphics? Really, you just want to get the job done and move on.

Lou: Exactly. I think that’s often something that people working in the private sector struggle to get their heads around a little bit. You spend your time in a bank or a supermarket or a luxury brand, thinking about that person’s experience of that brand. You don’t necessarily realise that user really doesn’t actually care which brands they are interacting with. Even if they absolutely love the product and the experience they are getting from you, getting to that thing should be as quick as possible. Even services that are there for pleasure and enjoyment are things that we should be considering as a means to an end, to help someone to get to a goal rather than an experience that people want to have.

Clare: Yes. It’s really noticeable as a citizen that my online experience of accessing public services has been gradually improving over the last few years. Now that I have done work with GDS, I really can see, because I have been involved in actually building sites that use the service standard, but you can tell when there’s been some GDS influence. It’s really simple and straightforward, you can just do what you need to do, and you can see those improvements.

It’s still happening, there are still organisations that are catching up, but you can see them appearing in more places. That’s really satisfying. I guess for you, that must be satisfying because you have had an influence on that.

Lou: Yes, it is lovely to see, I won’t lie. It’s really nice to see the services becoming more accessible and inclusive, and using the design patterns and standards. Particularly where you see that in a team that is from a very small organisation, from local authorities, even from charities. Not a lot of people are aware of the fact that the design system is an open standard for anyone to use. Obviously, the gov.uk colours and font and specific to gov.uk, but all of the different prototyping toolkits, all of the different other patterns, all of the style guides in terms of how to ask questions to users about various different things, all of those are totally accessible to anyone who needs to use them.

It’s really fantastic seeing that permeate through the public sector and into areas where perhaps those teams don’t have the resources to hire their own designers and user researchers, so they can make their services better with a little effort. That’s really lovely to see.

Clare: Your book Good Services defines fifteen principles of good service design. I thought that fifteen was quite a lot. So, I wasn’t going to ask you to list all 15, does that seem fair?

Lou: That is fair.

Clare: We won’t do all fifteen.

Lou: We’d be here for a while.

Clare: Do you have any favourites within the fifteen, or ones that you think are particularly important?

Lou: This is my favourite topic. I’ve been delivering training and masterclasses on these for a while now. I can talk about the ones that people find the most difficult, and the most important to them.

The first one is actually principle number 4: A good service should help a user to achieve the outcome that they set out to do. The reason this is so important is because this is really the fundamental principle to any service. If you go back to that original definition of what we mean by services, as something that helps someone to do something, if it’s not doing that then it’s not really a service.

The interesting thing about that one is that often, particularly larger organisations have often forgotten why it is they are doing that thing in the first place. That might seem a strange thing to say, but over time, we focus on how we are going to do something, rather than on what we are trying to do and why we are doing it. So, we know the process inside out, but we can’t really remember why we are doing that particular thing. That’s always the one that we start with, actually, in the Good Services Masterclasses. It’s really trying to pull apart what we actually mean by someone wanting to do something. What is it that they are trying to achieve? What are we trying to help them with? That’s the first one that anyone should start with.

Clare: I love that. As a consultant, often one of the first things that we have to establish with our clients is to try and help them understand what it is that they are trying to achieve. It sounds ridiculous. When you first describe that principle, it seems like a no-brainer, but actually when you ask people what it is they are trying to achieve, why their team exists or why their product exists, it’s amazing how often people struggle to answer that question.

There’s almost two parts to it. You’ve been doing the thing for so long that you’ve forgotten why you are doing it, there’s that. There’s also the other thing you said that organisations need users to do things, so that the user can achieve their aim, but organisations build up their own bureaucracies and their own paperwork, so that internally they need a bunch of stuff to happen. It ends up being that they’re just getting the user to do their internal processes, without it being at all clear to the user why. How does that get the user to where the user needs to be? Can you change that journey so that it’s clearer to the user? Often, when you do that, it often makes the journey simpler and more effective anyway.

Lou: Yes, and it’s really hard to do. Most of our jobs are spent focusing on how we do things, improving the how rather than going back to the why. If you focus so much on how you are doing something, you forget that over time perhaps the how needs to change. Helping people back into work could be done more effectively through another means, or maybe helping people to stop smoking or whatever it is you are trying to do, there might be other ways of doing that thing.

Going back to that concept of innovation, which is really a thing that stifles people from innovating the most, forgetting why we are doing what we’re doing.

Clare: Yes. That’s your first principle, what is your next favourite or most important?

Lou: The next one is actually being able to find a service. Principle number one: A good service should be easy to find. That is really connected to that principle about being able to help a user to achieve an outcome. Unless you understand what someone is actually trying to do, you’re not going to be able to understand what they are searching for and what they are looking for. You’re going to end up calling your service form V1-11, the MyPortal, the i-Hub. And those names are essentially nouns not verbs. We know the names of them and that’s great, we can shorten them to acronyms that we can be really quick about writing in emails and that’s really good for us, but it’s completely useless for our users, because they don’t know what those things are called.

I always like to think about where your service should start, and the name of your service almost being a bit of a spectrum between the verb of the thing that you want to do – for example, I’m converting a barn and I want to turn that into housing – and the thing that an organisation needs to do. To give you a barn-shaped example, if I was converting a barn in the countryside – I don’t have a barn to convert but I do watch a lot of Grand Designs, so you can see why I use this example.

Clare: Me too.

Lou: I’m converting a barn, that barn is full of mice and rats and bats and various other bits of lovely wildlife that have moved in and made it their home. Now, for the mice and rats, I would probably go, okay, I can move these on myself, I can put in place humane traps and put them in the woods or whatever I need to do. For the bats, I’m probably going to look at them and go, oh my god, how do I relocate a bat? What is involved in bat relocation and can I do it legally on my own?
So the service in that instance, is probably going to be someone sitting down at Google, going ‘How do I move bats legally?’ or, ‘move bats’. So that, for me, is where the service starts. But if we look at this service actually in the way that it’s provided – again this is a government service – it’s actually called the Wildlife Mitigation License that you need in order to be able to actually move bats legally.

That is the challenge that we’ve got. The thing I need to do is converting a barn. The thing the organisation thinks about providing is the Wildlife Mitigation License. Somewhere in the middle is this kind of sweet spot of the service that I think exists as a service, that someone might be able to help me with.
Thinking about the context of how knowledgeable people are, how niche your service is, how aware of it people might be, is really important when it comes to naming a service and setting its scope. A name isn’t just a name, a name sets the scope of a service and how big or small it is, and what it actually does for people. Renaming your service can be a really simple and quick exercise to do, to think about actually, am I getting my user needs right, do I know what people need to do? Is the scope of my service actually, right? Is it too big or too small?

Clare: That’s a really nice example. Have you used that example before?

Lou: It is my favourite example, yes. You can tell that George Clarke is my secret hero.

Clare: It’s funny, as you were speaking, I was thinking about how that applies everywhere. I was thinking about how it applies to my own personal organisation of my own stuff. I am a big notetaker and I have electronic records that relate to pretty much every area of my life. But I will quite often go looking for a piece of information that I know I have made a note of somewhere, but I can’t find it because I haven’t used the right words.

Once I do find it, I quite often find myself adding in some of the words that I was using when I was looking for it. I add in some keywords. Because I realise that when I wrote it down, I wasn’t thinking about future me who was going to come looking for it and wouldn’t be using the same words.

Lou: Absolutely. You end up second guessing yourself and going, what on earth would I have called that thing? It’s a great example. What you are doing is a microscale of what people are doing every day when they are looking for services and they don’t know whether or not they might exist out there.

Clare: That’s why user research is so important, isn’t it? When you are a bunch of people sitting in a government department, you already know a bunch of stuff, you already have a load of terminology. The services that you are providing, you are seeing from your own bureaucratic point of view. You’re not necessarily seeing them from the user’s point of view. It’s very difficult to put yourself in those users’ shoes. Particularly as some of those users will be people whose entire life experience is just completely different to yours and have requirements that you would never have thought of. That’s why going out and trying to find those users and trying to find a diverse range of them and ask them what it is they are trying to do is so important.

Something I’ve noticed, I think it’s part of this natural human drive towards tribalism. The idea of the in-group and the out-group. When you discover that your users are trying to access your service using terms you hadn’t thought of, and they didn’t know how to find it, it can be tempting to judge them. ‘Silly users’. The whole idea of the ped cat problem exists between chair and keyboard. The shorthand that we all end up having to describe our stupid users. Really, they are not stupid, they are just different.

Lou: Absolutely. It goes back to that definition of what we mean by a service in the first place. If a service is something that helps someone to do something, it is your user that gets to decide what that service actually is. They decide that they want to learn to drive, they are deciding that they need help to support a loved one when that person can’t look after themselves. They decide that they need to get treatment. The scope, the definition and the naming of those services is something that we don’t actually get to decide, they do.

They have to, at the moment, stitch together all sorts of other pieces to create that service, but that is still a service in that person’s mind. Just because we don’t provide that entire service of learning to drive, buying a house or whatever the thing is, doesn’t mean we are not in some way responsible for helping that person to reach that goal. The provision of services is a collective act that we are all part of. We are there to help that user reach that end goal, regardless of which organisation or team is involved in doing that. Once teams understand that I think that really starts to shift their mindset around how they work with users, and what their role is in supporting them to reach that outcome.

Clare: Yes, brilliant.

Clare: While I’ve got your attention, let me tell you a bit about Made Tech. After 21 years in the industry, I am quite choosy about who I work for. Made Tech are software delivery experts with high technical standards. We work almost exclusively with the public sector. We have an open-source employee handbook on GitHub, which I love. We have unlimited annual leave. But what I love most about Made Tech is the people. They’ve got such passion for making a difference and they really care for each other. Our Twitter handle is @madetech. That’s M A D E T E C H. We have free books available on our website at madetech.com/resources/books and we’re currently recruiting in London, Bristol, South Wales, and the North of England via our Manchester office. If you go to madetech.com/careers, you can find out more about that.

Clare: Before the break we were talking about making services easy to find. In order to do that you have to see things from your user’s point of view. Okay, we’ve covered your top two principles, is there a number three?

Lou: The third one is that a user shouldn’t really have to know which organisation they are interacting with, in order to be able to get something done. A good service is agnostic of organisational boundaries. This is probably the hardest one, actually, for organisations to get their heads around and be able to deliver. When we go through an exercise of helping people to assess how well their service is doing against the 15 principles, using the Good Services scale, it’s always the one that people struggle with the most.

I think it’s because once we have understood services as things that help people to do something, once we have understood that ultimately, we are just one small part of that, we then start to realise that actually, if we were to look at that whole journey, those things are much more siloed that we first appear to be. I think that realisation that we need to then start doing things like sharing data where it’s appropriate, making our language consistent, making the experience of the service consistent, that’s the moment we start to realise we’ve got a lot more work on our hands than maybe we thought we did.

Clare: You’ve talked about data sharing, consistent language, and consistent experience. It can be hard sometimes for individual teams within organisations to collaborate effectively with one another. So, doing that across organisations…

Data sharing sounds like there could be logistical problems, but it’s a pretty simple concept. Having consistent language between two organisations, how do you broker something like that?

Lou: It’s difficult. I would never pretend that it’s easy. It’s a really good question. I think there are three phases to dealing with organisational siloes. The first one is to actually own up that silos exist. Often what we do instead is we redraw the boundaries of our user journey, so it fits within our team or organisation.

In order to avoid conflict or difficult conversations, we just deny that those silos exist. We reshape our service accordingly. So, the first thing for anyone to do is to realise the full extent of that service and spot where those silos exist, between different teams or organisations.

The second bit is to realise what is causing those silos. It’s really easy to hold up your hands and go, we couldn’t deal with this because of the silos. When we call something a silo, it makes it sound like this really nebulous, complex thing that we can’t change. In reality, there are three main causes for silos.

Clare: Before you do that – hold that thought – three main causes for silos. It’s just occurred to me that we haven’t defined the word silo. It’s a word that is used so ubiquitously, but there probably will be people thinking what do you mean, what is a silo? I feel a bit mean asking you this, because I’m not sure how easy I would find it to answer it. Do you want to have a go?

Lou: I’ll have a go. So, a silo is for me a break in a service. It’s a gap between one thing and another, often caused by the gap between one team that is operating one thing, and another team that is operating another thing. Those two different teams can be in different organisations, they can be in the same teams. But Conway’s law describes silos most effectively; that ultimately organisations tend to design services that copy the shape of their organisation. If you have an organisation that has three different teams, you are more likely to provide three different services than you are to provide one service, or two services, for example. It’s just easier for us to do those things within our own boundaries if that makes sense.

Clare: Yes, that makes sense, thank you.

Lou: Cool.

Clare: Okay, can you remember where you were when I interrupted you?

Lou: Yes, three main causes of silos. Data that is not shared is the biggest one, where we’re not able to share particularly user or customer data between different parts of a service. So, a user tells you their name, address, date of birth and location in one part of the service, then because we don’t record it in the same way, another part of the service, they have to tell that person all over again. So, data is the biggest cause of silos.

The second one is inconsistent processes, where essentially, you might have one bit of the service that says you need to have done this six months ago, and this bit of the service says you need to do it tomorrow. So, either the timelines or the processes just don’t match up.

Then there is inconsistent language, which is again probably one of the most common causes, but the easiest to solve. Which is where we tend to call things different words in different parts of our service. I might call it a customer reference number; you might call it a VIN number. Although those two things are the same, they are also to all intents and purposes completely different, because most of our services are mostly words. So, if you use different words, then essentially, they are different things.
Without understanding what is causing those silos, you can’t fix them. A fix for data is very different to a fix for language.

The next thing we need to do is actually, the hardest bit, which is creating an organisation that can overcome those silos. If you go back to what Melvin Conway originally wrote that led to the creation of Conway’s law, it was that the quality of the software he was producing at that time, was directly related to the quality of conversations he was able to have. I think that’s the clue for that next step. How do we encourage our organisation to be able to have conversations that are agnostic to the structures that they currently sit in?

Those things don’t come for free. Realising that collaboration is a privilege, and that not everyone in our organisation is going to have access to that privilege, is a really important realisation, and one that actually leads a lot of people to realise that they need to put real time effort and money into supporting people to be able to collaborate. That was certainly something that I learned at GDS. We had a programme called Service Communities, which is still running. There are large groups of people coming together across different government organisations to work on services like Start a Business or Come to the UK and Stay.

It was only through creating a safe space for people to collaborate and supporting that with express permission, time and very often money, that those groups were able to start to collaborate outside of their organisational structures. So, realising that is something you need to really focus on actively doing, rather than just something you expect people to do, is the most important part of that.

Clare: Yes, that’s a wonderful point. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about it like that before, that, collaboration requires investment, it can’t just happen. And that collaboration is a privilege. Yes, thank you.

Lou: Yes. If you think about it, not everyone has the ability to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Not everyone is in a position where they can risk that job that they’ve got. Often, where we ask for collaboration to happen, but we don’t support people to do it, we end up with very un-diverse groups of people getting together and talking about stuff, but not actually doing anything, unfortunately.

Really getting people to productively collaborate and share things like user research, share their user journey maps, share in procurement activities or redesign, requires real investment and support for those people.

Clare: Yes. Okay. Do you have any favoured techniques that you use or have used when helping to design services?

Lou: Good question. Do I have any favourite techniques? I suppose I don’t really.

Clare: Okay.

Lou: I know, it’s controversial but I wasn’t originally trained as a service designer. I actually studied fine art and then economics, linguistics and loads of weird stuff.

Clare: How wonderful. I think the more unusual, unexpected things people have in their histories, often, the more effective they are. Everything comes and synthesises in ways that are unpredictable.

Lou: Exactly. I suppose if there are any linguists listening, you can probably work out why there are so many references to verbs and nouns in the book, now. Thinking about it, the reason why I don’t have any favourite tools or techniques is because every scenario and every situation is different. I think where you fall in love with those techniques is the moment you stop being sensitive to the needs of the people you are working with and to your clients.

On a completely random tangent, there is a wonderful book that inspired me to take this approach, which is Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale. A weird one to reference, but it’s absolutely fantastic. If you read it as an analogy for how you should work in consultation with your clients or your stakeholders. It’s a slightly strange metaphor, but seeing them as patients that need you to listen and learn and understand, and be sensitive to their needs, completely shifted my mindset on how I operate as a designer in those instances.

That’s why I don’t have a favourite method. One thing I would say though is that actually, going back to the weird backgrounds, my background in economics has really made me focus quite heavily on money when it comes to service redesign. I think that’s an area we need to get better at talking about as an industry.

The ability to see where a service is costing more money than it should, or not making as much revenue as it should.

I think learning the language of risk and money would probably be my recommended tool, if I had to have one.

Clare: That’s great, thank you. As always, we are running out of time. I always lose track of time because it is so nice talking to people. I’m going to ask you to play the little game that we play. I’m going to ask you to tell me one thing about you that is true, and one thing that is untrue. Then I will ask you to tell me the answer, but it won’t be published in the podcast episode. People will have to subscribe to our newsletter to get the truth about the truth. Can you tell me one thing about you that’s true, and one thing that isn’t?

Lou: I’m allergic to liquorice. A strange thing to be allergic to, quite inconvenient, particularly if you’re going to go to Scandi countries. Everything seems to be liquorice flavoured and I am allergic to liquorice. Which is convenient because I really hate liquorice. That’s one thing.

I am a trained sailing instructor.

Clare: Now I’m going to be really mean and ask you a few more questions. What happens if you inadvertently eat liquorice?

Lou: I get a really bad rash. I can’t tell you where.

Clare: How long have you been a sailing instructor?

Lou: I have been sailing for about two years. I learned to sail, I realised I absolutely love the sea, I’m slightly petrified of it. No one in my family sails, it is something that mostly very posh people do, so it was a very weird thing for me to learn how to do. Mostly it’s also people in their 60s and 70s who tend to do it as well. I was the youngest person by about 40 years, learning how to sail.

Clare: Wow, okay. I have recently realised that I always ask people the next two questions in a particular order. I’m going to ask you whether you have anything coming up that you would like to plug, and I’m also going to ask you what is the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so.

Given that the best thing question is deliberately put at the end because I want to end on a high, I think it should go at the very end. So, I’m going to start by asking you where people can find you, and do you have anything coming up that you would like to plug?

Lou: You can find me at the School of Good Services which is at good.services, and the School of Good Services more generally is there to help people to understand good services, and to deliver them more easily in their organisation. Do take a look at that, there are loads of free tools and resources also there, so you can assess how well your service is doing against the fifteen principles of good service design, using the good services scale. That’s free to use, and there are various other bits and bobs there, that are always really helpful when it comes to helping you and your organisation to deliver better services.

Clare: Brilliant. The very last question. What is the best thing that has happened to you in the last month or so? It doesn’t have to be work-related, but it can be if you want.

Lou: The best thing that has happened to me recently, is actually seeing my wife taking a different direction in her career. Some of you might know her, Sarah Drummond, she used to be the co-founder and director of Snook, which is another well-known service design agency. She has recently started making a film about Section 28, which as you were saying earlier, Clare, is the clause that was brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 80s, that stopped local authorities and schools talking about homosexuality, or anything to do with being trans in schools, for a period of 15 years.

That 15 years was the entire duration that both me and Sarah were at school for. You can guess my age by that. She started making a film about the effect that has had on people who are anywhere between twenty-one and in their 40s. She has just started making it, and it is absolutely wonderful to see that story come to life, but also to see her work on something that she is so passionate about. I’m incredibly proud of her, and incredibly excited about seeing this film.

Another small plug, if anybody has any experience of being at school, or being a teacher during that time that they want to share, please do contact Sarah.

Clare: Wow. It’s funny because when I mentioned Clause 28 earlier, I did think oh, some people will have no clue what I’m talking about. So, I’m really glad that you explained that. It was a Clause and then it was a Section, and that was just legal stuff, it was enacted or a bill or whatever. To be perfectly honest, I lose track of these things. It sometimes gets called Clause 28 and sometimes Section 28. A couple of years ago, more than a couple of years ago, I was at a reunion in Manchester for people who were at the big demo.

There was this giant demo against Clause 28 in Manchester. Manchester led the way because Manchester had a really big gay scene. So, the campaigning against Clause 28 was almost centred in Manchester rather than London, which is unusual. We had this giant demo, and there are lots of famous, iconic photos of all the people filling Albert Square in Manchester. I was involved in a very small way in organising the demo and in the campaign. There was a reunion on the anniversary of the demo. We all got together again, and it was just fascinating seeing all those people again. I was about nineteen, I think, when we were campaigning in 1988. It was so funny seeing each other again.

Some of us hadn’t seen each other in the intervening period. There is something when you’re involved in a political campaign, you are involved in fighting injustice, it kind of brings you together in a really interesting way. But I feel terrible for the generation that were impacted by that, because it had a really, really bad impact on young people. It was a horrendous, horrible, hideous, evil piece of legislation.

Lou: Yes. It’s amazing, seeing some of the stories that people are telling about it. Amazing, and so sad. What you realise is that the most effective way of shutting down a culture is to stop it from having a history and stop it from talking to its children. That’s what happened. Both Sarah and I both grew up in environments that were reasonably accepting of us, but we had no idea who we really were until we got to university and much later on in life. We didn’t know that gay people existed. I didn’t know that trans people existed. It was this strange period of time where nothing really bad happened, but nothing happened equally.

We were denied something that I think seems strange to people now. We’re in our thirties and a lot of people from an older LGBT generation would think that we should be much more liberated than we are, but we didn’t know that any of that stuff existed. And the internet didn’t come along until the nineties, early 2000s, so we had no idea.

Clare: We’ve reached the end of our time. Thank you so much for talking to me, that was wonderful.

Lou: Thank you, it’s been really interesting and lovely to meet you.

Clare: As always to help you digest what you’ve just heard I’m going to attempt to summarize it. A service is anything you’re enabling your users to do, and Lou is an expert at designing good services. The government is the largest service provider in the country so Lou’s experience at Government Digital Service, GDS, was invaluable. When dealing with services it’s always important to focus on serving rather than wowing. It doesn’t matter how fancy the graphics are if the user can’t achieve what they came to do. Never mind the Parker pen, what about this vital document I’m trying to get? Not everyone realises the design system developed by GDS is an open-standard, that anyone can use to improve how they interact with users and make their services better. In Lou’s book, they talk about 15 principles of good service design, so people don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel and considering the same issues repeatedly. We didn’t have time to discuss all 15, but we could cover Lou’s top three. So the top principle is that a good service should help a user achieve the outcome they set out to do. Which seems obvious, but often organisations get so lost in the “how” they forget about the “why”. What is the outcome you’re trying to achieve? Get that sorted and you’re flying. Lou’s second most important principle is to make your services easy to find. Think about names and terminology that are meaningful to and findable by your users. Remember their experience and perspective are likely quite different to your own internal staff. Focus on verbs rather than nouns. And Lou’s third most important principle for designing good services is that the user shouldn’t need to know which organisation they’re interacting with in order to get something done. This is probably the hardest one because it means you have to collaborate across organisational boundaries. There are three causes of silos and these are: data, processes and language that are not shared. So in order to collaborate across organisational boundaries share your data, try to find common ways of doing things and use common language. This means creating organisations that are capable of overcoming those silos. As Melvin Conway said: “The quality of the software you produce will be directly related to the quality of conversations you’re able to have. Collaboration is a privilege – invest in it, support people to do it. And finally, don’t be afraid to focus on cost. Learn the language of risk and money. Ok. Stick around for extra content.

Jack: Hi, I’m Jack Made Tech’s events coordinator. Now every other episode, we’ll dedicate this last segment to the hack of the month where one of our work colleagues and in the future, our listeners too, we’ll share a life or a work hack. Today’s hack comes from our Head of Marketing, Lara Plaga on achieving your goals by setting targets. Laura, do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

Laura: I find that setting a goal, can really, really help you if you want to achieve something. Having a goal in mind really motivates you. It gives you something to strive towards, and it really helps if you break things down into smaller steps that are more achievable. I’ve done this personally, when I set myself a goal to run a marathon, I mean, having the goal in the calendar, looking forward to it, having a plan to follow, really gave me that motivation to actually accomplish it. So it did really work for me. I would recommend it to all of our listeners.

Jack: That’s wonderful. I have to ask, how did the marathon go?

Laura: I finished it. I survived. So yeah, I would say pretty well.

Jack: Hello, working in the public sector means that at Made Tech we really care about making a difference. So for this final Making Life Better segment, myself and my colleagues, will be sharing small pieces of advice to make the world a better place. Today’s advice comes from Owen Pigott, one of our senior engineers who has some advice on building better team cultures, taking time to talk about non-work stuff. So, Owen, do you want to tell us a little bit more about why that’s important?

Owen: Yeah, sure. So I think it’s probably easier to make your life better and your work better if you know the people around you. It makes everything from just basic teamwork better to being able to discuss slightly hotter topics or being able to have healthy debates. If you know people better, I think it’s easier to avoid disagreements that, might come out of the unknown.

Jack: Awesome. I find it, it makes such a difference because especially when we’re working at distance like this, you have to have that little reminder that we’re actually speaking to real people. And it’s nice to remind yourself of that.

Owen: Yes, I think it’s most prominent when you only spoke to people by a text as well, which can happen these days when we’re all remote. So when, when you’re only speaking over Slack or Teams or whatever you’re using, if you’ve only interacted, in that way, it’s very easy for somebody to become very distant and to get the wrong end of the stick when you’re discussing things and the closer you can get to sort of real interaction, I think the better it is to avoid that sort of thing.

Jack: Absolutely. I’m king of the overthinkers and any message from, “Do you have a moment for a chat?” to “Do you have a moment for a chat?” It gives that person a certain bit of perspective. That’s absolutely brilliant Owen, thank you so much for your time today and have a good one. Thank you.

Clare: And that’s the end of another episode. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do leave us ratings and reviews, because it pushes us up the directories and makes it easier for other people to find us. I’ve got a few talks coming up. You can see the details on my events page on Medium, which is linked to from my Twitter profile. And you can find that at @claresudbery, which is probably not spelled the way that you think. There is no ‘I’ in Clare, and ‘Sudbery’ is spelt E R Y at the end, the same as surgery or carvery. You can find Made Tech on Twitter @madetech, M A D E T E C H. Do come and say hello, we are very interested to hear your feedback and any suggestions you have for any content for future episodes, or just to come and have a chat.

Thank you to Rose, our editor, Gina Cady, our virtual assistant, Viv Andrews, our transcriber, Richard Murray for the music – there’s a link in the description – and to the rest of our internal Made Tech team: Kyle Chapman, Jack Harrison, Karsyn Robb and Laura Plaga. Also in the description is a link for subscribing to our newsletter. We publish new episodes every fortnight on Tuesday mornings. Thank you for listening and goodbye.

[Recording Ends]

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