Email: contact@duncanstephen.net
Blog
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Find your dream job by letting go of the title
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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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Reflecting on two years as a user experience consultant; looking ahead to working on structured content
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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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Getting to the root causes of usability errors and accessibility problems
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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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Speaking at UX Healthcare conference in April
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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.
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Imogen Kit Oliver Stephen
In late January our second daughter Imogen was born.
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Meeting up with Pulp in the years 2023 and 2024
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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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Busi-ness and blogging in 2024
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A busier life, and recent events on the internet, mean a new direction for my blog.
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Britpop, braindance and broken politics — How 1990s optimism became passé
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.
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The gradual death of AM radio takes with it a curious part of Britain’s psyche
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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20 years of blogging
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Today marks the 20th anniversary of my first blog post. Blogging is important to me, but it has seen many changes. The online publishing ecosystem is having a moment right now. So what’s next?
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One twit can make a service a dodo
I have complicated feelings about the apparent imminent demise of Twitter in the hands of a reckless owner.
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12 years in higher education web and user experience management
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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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Nudge in user experience — Website and Communications Blog
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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 […]
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Ouch to 5k
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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From personas to behaviour modes — Website and Communications Blog
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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 […]
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Half a year on parental leave with a broken ankle
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.
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How often do YOU buy Valentine’s Day gifts?
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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Could you be our nudge intern?
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We have a fascinating opportunity for a University of Edinburgh undergraduate student to join our team as an intern this summer. The job has a cool title: nudge intern.
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UX in universities — UX Soup
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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 […]
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Practitioner Stories — A self-initiated research project exploring service design practice
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 […]
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Awooga! The metaverse was better 29 years ago
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What’s most surprising about the metaverse is just how lacking in ambition it is. This is a half-hearted rehash of a 30-year-old idea.
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I return to work regularly today for the first time in almost 25 weeks
I return to work regularly today for the first time in almost 25 weeks
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Be usable, not consistent, not uniform
Consistency is often seen as a slam-dunk argument in favour of an initiative. But if you don’t know what you want to a design to be consistent with — and why — then consistency risks confusing your users.
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Design approaches aren’t sufficient to be human-centred
Many designers talk about user-centred design. But design approaches alone aren’t sufficient to ensure we are human-centred. Design approaches can be used carelessly — or even maliciously — to centre the designer and sideline the user.
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List of things Google Assistant thinks I want to do instead of make oat milk
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.
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Overlaps between user experience and other disciplines — a benefit, not a problem
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.
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Ask us anything — UX Glasgow
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. […]
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I’ve broken my ankle
At the weekend I broke my ankle while playing bubble football on a stag do.
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Pace layers in experience design — Stabilise innovation by understanding people’s needs
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Innovation falls flat when it doesn’t respond to a human need. Use human-centred approaches to understand people’s fundamental motivations and needs. These are the stabilising forces for innovation.
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Why I talk about human-centred approaches
It is difficult to find a phrase that exactly describes my work and the way I approach it. I’ve started to talk about human-centred approaches. This post explains what I mean by that.
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Demonstrating the impact of human-centred approaches — Further reflections from the UCD Gathering conference — Website and Communications Blog
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.
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Lessons on readability and bias — Reflections from the UCD Gathering conference — Website and Communications Blog
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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Beginner’s guide to content design
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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.
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Service design special — UX Glasgow
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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Access for all — my final plea for human-centred design — Lizzie Cass-Maran — Website and Communications Blog
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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 […]
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Two months of parenthood
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.
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How to make this winter not totally suck, according to psychologists — Sigal Samuel — Vox
I really like the evidence-based advice in this article. It shows how the pathway to true happiness is to, in a way, forget about yourself. Instead of thinking about the myriad negative feelings you want to avoid and the myriad things you can buy or do in service of that, think about a single organising […]
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The UX sense of service — Carrie Neill interviewing Cyd Harrell — dscout
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
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From 40 sets of ideas to one in 20 minutes — A collaboration experiment with the Web Publishing Community — Website and Communications Blog
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Here’s another post I published to my team’s blog over the summer and forgot to link to from here. Back in June, I ran an experiment in mass remote collaboration at our Web Publishing Community. This was, of course, at the height of lockdown, as we were adapting to the new reality of a prolonged […]
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Vote by mail: Mistakes are too easy — Kara Pernice — Nielsen Norman Group
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 […]
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A service design approach to improving student experience
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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James Middlemass & Co — Boys’ Outfitters — found under the floorboards
During our kitchen renovation, we found this under the floorboards. It is a “Boys’ Outfitters” catalogue for James Middlemass & Co. We think it dates from around the 1880s.
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Meeting the challenges of collaborating remotely — Website and Communications Blog
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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 […]
