The Service Design in Government 2019 conference took place in Edinburgh last week, with three students from our university taking the opportunity to volunteer and get some great insight and experience from experts in the field.

Public sector design community colleagues have been meeting to talk about service design; what it is and why it matters. The podcast they’ve produced is relevant to our service improvement work at the University and well worth a listen.

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.

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.

Last week I took part in my first ‘unconference’, the inaugural get together of OneTeamGov Scotland. People from across the public sector and third sector getting together to share the joys and challenges of building better services.

A programme of projects centered around user experience (UX) are now up and running, providing new processes, services and training to key University-wide initiatives.

Last week I was invited to Scottish Enterprise to learn a bit about their agile development set up and how UX and service design are integrated into their practices.

Reaching consensus on the ideal user experience can be challenging. It’s even harder when the product doesn’t exist yet. I’ve been helping the Cityscope development team focus their attentions to deliver something that’s both useful and easy to use.

I recently surveyed the University’s digital development & management communities on what was important to them. In this post I’ll share the results and a few opinions on the value of design principles.