Duncan Stephen

Article — 3 November 2026 — 704 words

Building on our incomplete Lego analogies

Anyone working in digital is bound to reach for a Lego analogy at some point. But this disguises the very thing that makes these structures actually hold together.

Note — 23 October 2026 — 39 words

Personal

Sorry. I bulk published a bunch of old posts I had unpublished, not realising it would send out a new email for each one. Many apologies for bombarding your inboxes and RSS readers. I’ll be more careful next time.

Article — 20 October 2026 — 2,007 words

What you get is what you mean

Accessibility — Content design — Digital — Web

Standing for “what you see is what you get”, wysiwyg has become so ubiquitous that many people consider it a must-have for a writing environment. But it is leaving the integrity of content in tatters.

Article — 27 September 2026 — 1,503 words

The LLM in the room — Going beyond using AI to do someone else’s job badly

Economics — Human-centred approaches — Society — Technology

People mostly use artificial intelligence to do the jobs they didn’t value anyway. But this amounts to cutting our colleagues out. Value must be created through human-to-human exchanges. So we should rapidly focus on uses of AI that go beyond trying to do someone else’s job badly.

Article — 26 August 2026 — 1,587 words

Understanding what we mean — Ontology in information architecture

Business — Information architecture — User experience

Work: Scottish Government

Just as human-centred approaches as a whole have suffered from being flattened to a superficial layer, information architecture has suffered its own flattening. Ontology helps us deepen our practice and improve user experience by getting alignment around what we mean.

Article — 20 August 2026 — 2,461 words

Protected: Seeing over the hill

Personal — Society

This is password-protected as it describes gruesome medical events I have recently experienced. If you wish to read it, you can guess the password with this clue: It is a colloquial name given to the sensitive body parts that have been affected; also objects commonly used in sports. You have been warned.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Article — 21 July 2026 — 1,159 words

The third horizon of human-centred approaches

Business — Human-centred approaches — User experience

The way we work as human-centred practitioners needs to change. From its beginnings as an engineering technique, through its transition to being a product design tool, user experience now needs to be adopted as a strategic approach.

Article — 3 July 2026 — 1,193 words

Restoring the elements of user experience

Business — Human-centred approaches — User experience

Some human-centred practitioners have been consigned to increasingly superficial considerations. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.

Article — 25 June 2026 — 167 words

Ethical personalisation of public services — Talk at Services Week

Digital — Information architecture — Service design

Work: Scottish Government

We have developed a set of ethical personalisation principles to guide our early work to deliver personalised public services. I will present about this work as part of Services Week 2026.

Article — 22 June 2026 — 1,837 words

Don’t make me thick

Information architecture — Society — User experience

We say “don’t make me think”, and “less is more”. But a naive application of these principles risks limiting our users when we should be helping them grow.

Article — 12 June 2026 — 8,340 words

Towering Inferno

Music

I don’t normally write about music any more, but I feel compelled to write about the new Boards of Canada album, Inferno. It has far exceeded my expectations. I can’t remember the last time I was so immediately hooked on an album — 15 or 20 years ago, or longer.

Article — 26 May 2026 — 3,473 words

Grounding AI the webby way — Taxonomy Boot Camp London 2026 takeaways

Business — Information architecture — Technology — Web

Work: Scottish Government

There was a heavy focus on artificial intelligence. But what really struck me was that the semantic approaches that are preparing us for our AI future are well-established web standards that have been around for decades.