Email: contact@duncanstephen.net
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Every discipline feels hard done by in the current climate. But looking beyond your own discipline could help you get your next role.
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The latest chapter in my career has closed, as I have found an incredibly exciting new opportunity. But the past couple of years have given me a lot to reflect on.
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Perception–Cognition–Action (PCA) analysis is a method of uncovering the root causes of usability errors and accessibility challenges in systems. Read my article to learn more, or come to this week’s UX Edinburgh meetup to hear me speak about it.
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I will be speaking at the UX Healthcare conference in London on Friday 12 April. Book now to learn about using Perception-Cognition-Action analysis to improve accessibility and outcomes in healthcare products.
In late January our second daughter Imogen was born.
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I went to just two concerts in 2023, and they were both of Pulp’s performances in Scotland.
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A busier life, and recent events on the internet, mean a new direction for my blog.
Britpop has been having a moment again this summer, prompting investigations into why the scene fizzled out. The conventional explanations are unconvincing. Electronic music tells us why.
1215 AM. Not quarter past midnight, but a radio frequency familiar to generations (although perhaps not any of the younger ones). Today it has stopped broadcasting. As AM radio slowly disappears, a bit of British folklore goes with it.
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Today I have started a new job. But while I’m looking forward, I have also been reflecting, as this moment marks my first real move away from higher education. Despite the differing natures of the three organisations I worked for, there were many parallels across them.
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Over the summer my user experience team at the University of Edinburgh had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Behavioural Insights (Nudge) Intern. There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches. Working with a behavioural […]
Yesterday I completed my first 5k run since I broke my ankle exactly one year ago. It was on the first ever Holyrood parkrun.
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This post on my team’s blog outlines why and how we have moved away from using personas to behavioural archetypes. Existing personas had served the team well for over 10 years. But with our work to reimagine the future of our web services, and our attention turning to the development of a new Web Publishing […]
Becoming a parent is a huge privilege. But it’s no secret that it’s also hard work. You don’t plan to break your ankle during the first year of your child’s life.
How often do *you* buy Valentine’s Day gifts? More often than once a week? Less often than once a month? Stop making people complete terrible surveys that you won’t even be able to interpret the results of!
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I have been interviewed for the podcast UX Soup. The host Chris Schreiner was interested in the User Experience Service’s work at the University of Edinburgh. He spoke with me about: how the consultancy model works in a higher education context the history of our service the projects we get involved with the methodologies we […]
For the past two years, a group of service designers have been researching and understanding the state of service design practice in Scotland. Angela F Orviz, Serena Nüsing, Stéphanie Krus and Vinishree Verma have been doing this in their spare time and with no funding. Their insights are fascinating reading. The study shows how far […]
I return to work regularly today for the first time in almost 25 weeks
Occasionally I make my own oat milk. When I run out of oat milk, I ask Google Assistant to remind me later in the day to make oat milk. It normally misunderstands me. Interestingly, it misunderstands me in a variety of different ways.
Have you ever been told that by doing human-centred work you’re stepping on someone else’s toes? I have heard it a number of times. More and more people are exploring the apparent overlaps between human-centred approaches and other disciplines.
Join me at next week’s UX Glasgow ask us anything event. I will be on a panel of eight human-centred professionals answering your burning questions about user experience, interaction design, user research, content design and service design. You’ll have the opportunity to join two or three breakout sessions with rooms for your choice of topic. […]
At the weekend I broke my ankle while playing bubble football on a stag do.
The second of my two posts on my work team’s blog about UCD Gathering, the remote conference I attended in October. This blog post covers the third theme I wanted to highlight: how we can better demonstrate the business impact of human-centred approaches.
Back in October, I had the opportunity to attend the UCD Gathering conference, a new virtual event for practitioners of user-centred design in all its forms. Over on my work blog, I have published the first of two posts reflecting on what I learned. This first post covers two themes: Being aware of bias, and […]
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Many people are intrigued by content design but unsure if it’s the right fit for them. So here is my beginner’s guide to being a content designer. Find out why it might be a better fit for you than you might think — and why it might not be.
I will be speaking at next week’s UX Glasgow meetup, which is a service design special coinciding with Services Week.
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Last month our brilliant colleague Lizzie Cass-Maran left our team after more than 10 years. In her final blog post for our team’s blog, she has written this plea to keep humans at the centre of all our decision-making. For the past few years I’ve been working with Lizzie, I’ve always been impressed at the […]
Isobel is our first baby, so it’s difficult to compare having a baby during coronavirus to other times. But it does seem like a strange time to have a baby. There are many disadvantages to the current situation. But there are also some interesting advantages, particularly for me as a father.
This interview with the civic tech leader Cyd Harrell covers interesting ground around user experience, including: the differences between the public and private sectors making privacy a priority avoiding “attention theft”, where we bombard users with more and more notifications
An analysis of the design of postal voting materials in the US. Where are all the UX designers and researchers, service designers, and content writers and editors when voting process and materials are designed? Not there or simply beaten by bureaucracy or deadlines? A good reminder that user experience goes way beyond technology and even […]
Slides from my UCD Gathering talk on Thursday 15 October 2020, about the work we’ve been doing at the University of Edinburgh to improve the experience of students and staff working with course materials digitally.
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I realised that while the summer got pretty busy for us, there are a few work blog posts that I haven’t cross-posted here yet. So I will drip-feed them here over the next little while. This first one is from July, where I outlined some of the lessons we have been learning from getting collaborative […]