Linknote — — 81 words

Business — Service design

Comparing service design and business design — Ben Holliday

Business design can be very different to service design if it’s focused on the wrong things. But Ben Holliday notes:

Service design is business design when we focus on and care about designing for both internal staff and external user experience together as front and back stage of how a service works.

All too often business design is narrowly self-serving. If it’s not focused on ultimately improving things for your users or customers, it will do damage in the long run.

Linknote — — 90 words

Business — Digital — Human-centred approaches

Building a design team from scratch in a large and complex organisation — Simon Dixon

I especially like the points this article makes about why design needs to go beyond digital.

Even though I have worked primarily in digital teams, I have always believed in making things better not just digital. In health especially, we need to remember that people are complex human beings in a whole variety of circumstances and not simply a collection of user needs.

More food for thought as I begin thinking more about how we need to move beyond individual user needs and design for something that goes beyond that.

Linknote — — 173 words

Business — Web

Khoi Vinh on how his blog amplified his work and career — Own Your Content

Khoi Vinh illustration

An interview with Khoi Vinh on the benefits of blogging.

Blogging has always been pivotal to my career. When I was offered my first ‘proper’ job as a web editor at the University of St Andrews, I only really had my blog to speak for. Yet it was enough to get my name out there, and to enable me to develop web skills.

Since then, I’ve had less and less spare time. Now it’s a huge challenge to find the space for myself to blog.

I’d done well last year by publishing something every day. But recently I fell off the wagon. So this line from Khoi Vinh’s interview stood out to me:

> I think you’ve just got to do it consistently, repeatedly, and you’ve got to be undeterred by the time it requires and the inconvenience in your life that it generates.

I’ll try to be more tolerant of that inconvenience. It will probably pay off in some way I can’t imagine just now, like it did 10 years ago.

Linknote — — 190 words

Business — Digital — Economics

Own it! — Matt Jukes — Notbinary

On the incredible story about Hertz suing Accenture for a failed “digital transformation project”.

Alarm bells ring at the best of times when website redesigns are described as “digital transformation”. But to then completely outsource the product owner role — to the same management consultancy firm that was carrying out the redesign — underlines just how much the top brass seemingly didn’t get it.

Particularly important is this:

The private sector is NOT intrinsically better at these things than the public sector. Occasions like this and the TSB meltdown should never be celebrated but should surely be greeted by a wry smile by those of us who have been hearing about the incompetence of public service digital for years from some corners — and particularly why there was never any need to bring things in-house because all the expertise was with the big suppliers.

I would argue that this isn’t even just about digital. The idea that public sector organisations are inherently worse at anything than the private sector has long been spurious. Large organisations perhaps do find certain things more difficult — but in both the public and private sector.

Linknote — — 153 words

Business — Digital — Media

Want to see what one digital future for newspapers looks like? Look at The Guardian, which isn’t losing money anymore — Joshua Benton — Nieman Journalism Lab

"The Guardian (actually makes money now)"

How the Guardian finally started making a profit, in three steps.

With a functionally infinite supply of free news available, the relationship your reader has to you has to be a lot more like the one public radio listeners have with their favorite station. They’re not buying access; they’re supporting a cause.

I’d also add that the Guardian has one major advantage over almost every other publisher in the world. They uniquely decided not to go down the rabbit hole of autoplaying videos, pop-up adverts, and other infuriating ways of getting in the way of what the readers actually came for.

This week I visited the Scotsman website, and one of the ads inserted a nasty redirect that my browser told me was taking me to an untrustworthy site. There are lots of news sites that I simply can’t trust for this reason. The Guardian is one I can still trust.

Linknote — — 71 words

Business — Technology

A man checking dials

Why data is never raw — Nick Barrowman, the New Atlantis

Why it’s wrong and perhaps even dangerous to expect “raw data” to be neutral and strictly factual.

How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions about what exactly to measure, when and where to do so, and by what methods. Inevitably, what gets measured and recorded has an impact on the conclusions that are drawn.

Linknote — — 135 words

Business — Technology

Why big companies squander brilliant ideas — Tim Harford

How inflexible organisational structure could be one of the main inhibitors of innovation. This article is full of fascinating examples, but I found the Sony example the most striking.

…the silo that produced the PlayStation had almost nothing to do with the silo that produced portable CD players. The Memory Stick Walkman was like the tank: it didn’t fit neatly into any category. To be a success, the silos that had been designed to work separately would have to work together. That required an architectural change that Sony tried but failed to achieve.

Seemingly, there’s no straightforward answer to this:

Kodak’s position may well have been impossible, no matter what managers had done. If so, the most profitable response would have been to vanish gracefully.

Linknote — — 85 words

Business — User experience

Someone using a screwdriver as a hammer

How harmful is the net promoter score? — Jeff Sauro, MeasuringU

A very useful contribution to the debate surrounding the usefulness/harmfulness of net promoter score. Jeff Sauro transcends the often polemical nature of the debate, by analysing actual research on the effectiveness of net promoter score.

The news still isn’t all that great for proponents of net promoter score. But at the same time, it’s not quite as bad as its detractors make out.

Kudos to Jeff Sauro for doing some actual research on this.

Note — — 225 words

Business — Personal — Society

Work:

It’s 10 years since Woolworths closed down. I worked there at the time. To this day, the whole experience is among the most surreal of my life.

At the time, I wrote a lengthy series of blog posts detailing my own story of the goings-on around the failure of one of Britain’s most iconic businesses.

Being on the shop floor while a British institution collapsed around me taught me a bit about business. But it taught me *a lot* about people. Enjoy this look back.

(These used to be linked to each other using a WordPress plugin, but these were lost during a migration — so here they all are.)

1. [Woolworths: The curiously British US-based company](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/06/woolworths-the-curiously-british-us-based-company/)
2. [Woolworths as it was known and loved, and neglected](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/07/woolworths-as-it-was-known-and-loved-and-neglected/)
3. [Woolworths: Childhood memories and adult gripes](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/08/woolworths-childhood-memories-and-adult-gripes/)
4. [It wasn’t just the credit crunch](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/10/it-wasnt-just-the-credit-crunch/)
5. [The blunder of Woolworths](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/11/the-blunder-of-woolworths/)
6. [Identity crisis](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/12/identity-crisis/)
7. [The beginning of the end](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/13/the-beginning-of-the-end/)
8. [The nasty side of human nature](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/14/the-nasty-side-of-human-nature/)
9. [Woolworths: Final thoughts and wrapping up](https://doctorvee.co.uk/2009/01/17/woolworths-final-thoughts-and-wrapping-up/)

For more on Woolworths 10 years on from its collapse, [check out Graham Soult’s excellent report](https://www.cannyinsights.com/2018/12/31/nine-out-of-ten-ex-woolworths-sites-remain-in-active-retail-use-a-decade-after-closure/).

Linknote — — 175 words

Business — Personal — User experience

UX your life: Applying the user-centered process to your life (and stuff) — JD Jordan, Smashing Magazine

I’m always in two minds about whether people should use work-based techniques on personal problems. I have heard of people using Trello boards at home to organise tasks, which sounds as nightmarish as it sounds sensible. I’ve even heard of people running scrum-style weekly planning meetings with their family, which definitely sounds overboard to me.

But I do like the look of some of the ideas here. For instance, I’m keen to map out out my life in weeks.

And I already know that affinity mapping can work great at home and for other stuff.

[When we did the MoRun in November](https://duncanstephen.net/this-time-last-week-i-ran-the-edinburgh-morun-5k/), Lauren and I made an affinity map to decide which of two runs to enter. My gut feeling told me another run would be better. But writing down all the pros and cons of each race, and grouping them, made it clear that my gut feeling was actually wide of the mark.