For practitioners of human-centred approaches to design, where face-to-face interaction is often so important to enhancing our understanding, our current requirement to maintain social distancing creates obvious barriers. However, this doesn’t mean our work to ensure we’re meeting people’s needs has to stop. In fact, there are some perhaps surprising advantages to working remotely as a user experience practitioner.

Making your content accessible is more important, not less so, during an emergency. Most of the UX books out there are light on advice as to when the world shuts down completely and every aspect of our lives has been utterly turned on its heads. It’s not even covered in EdWeb training. What were we […]

Last week I attended the Service Design in Government conference, held here in Edinburgh. This event brings together design practitioners from across the public sector and beyond, from across the UK and beyond.

Following last year’s successful series of usability testing showcase sessions in support of the Learn Foundations project, we are carrying out some more in 2020.

Card voting based on colours, text and shapes are an accessible way to do quick polling in small groups. There can be a myth that if you work in digital, everything must be digital. Get the latest app or high-tech solution for your problems. And don’t get me wrong, there are loads of people at […]

An inspiring day in Manchester underlined the importance of remembering the human beings at the heart of our work.

At this week’s user-focused meetup, around 20 people came to hear me speak about my reflections on studying for a PDA in Service Design with the Service Design Academy.

At September’s Web Publishers, we did a group card sort as part of our project overhauling the Editorial Style Guide. We had some workshop time at last month’s Web Publishers, and I used it to establish some basic information about how people engage with the Editorial Style Guide.

Throughout 2018/2019, the User Experience Service has been collaborating with the Learn Foundations project team to undertake a comprehensive programme of user research with students and staff. Through this we have discovered how students’ experience in Learn is closely intertwined with how staff work with it. This post summarises all our work, and outlines how we have ended up taking a service design approach.

As part of our comprehensive programme of user research in support of the Learn Foundations project, the User Experience Service has conducted contextual enquiry to better understand the contexts and needs of staff members working with Learn.