Last week I attended the first Service Design Network meet up to take place in Scotland. Organised by some of the team at Nile, around 80 like minded people came together to hear talks from three great speakers.

Last week I presented an update to the Digital Transformation Board on what the User Experience (UX) Service has achieved so far and what lies ahead for the coming year.

Once again, we’re lucky to have a world-class user experience conference happening on our doorstep down at Dynamic Earth in central Edinburgh. We’ve been long-time advocates and once again, members of our team will be attending and sharing their thoughts.

If you’re interested in predicting the future, our next lunchtime UX meetup is for you. Find out how adopting a user-centred approach to developing services and experiences can help you get ahead of the curve.

Our latest showcase event for the User Experience Service focused on case studies of recent projects. Lightning talks were followed by a chance to chat with members of project and service teams who had commissioned the work.

It’s just over a year since we trialled our first user experience training package. We’ve run the sessions 4 times now, receiving excellent feedback from attendees and refining the provision each time to better meet staff needs.

Yesterday I ran a practical introductory session to some collaborative UX research and design practices for Edinburgh students, as part of our Festival of Creative Learning. It also gave colleagues an insight into how students approach their studies.

We’re running another of our showcase events to highlight how the pilot User Experience (UX) Service is helping a wide range of projects get closer to their target audiences and make better decisions. Booking for Wednesday 4 April is now open.

At our last user focused meet up at the end of January, we were fortunate to have guest speakers from Registers of Scotland talking about the relationship between the disciplines of user experience (UX) and business analysis (BA).

The open, democratic and quick way to set an agenda known as Lean Coffee, has been working really well for us at our monthly UX meet ups. In the post I run through how it works, why we like it and why you should try it too.