Linknote — — 62 words

Information architecture — User experience — User research

Work:

First click tests — building up the elements of user experience for Learn Foundations — Website and Communications Blog

First click heatmap

> We had developed an information architecture and tree tests as part of our programme of user research for Learn Foundations. The next step was to use first click tests to pit the new template against existing courses.

The latest post in my series for the Website and Communications blog about our user research work around the University of Edinburgh’s virtual learning environment.

Linknote — — 178 words

Human-centred approaches

The double diamond, 15 years on… — Cat Drew — Design Council

It’s 15 years since the Design Council came up with the double diamond, a model of the design process.

I find it useful as a general guide, although it does seem to confuse many people who assume it to be a strictly linear process. Recent conversations I’ve had at both the Service Design Academy and work have shown me that it remains a challenge to truly convey the complexity of a design process, and that the double diamond may in fact hinder this.

As always, it’s about having the right approach and mindset, rather than expecting an off-the-shelf tool or model to fix all your problems. Cat Drew’s article points this out:

But following a toolkit does not equal designing a good solution to the right problem. It is as much about the mindsets as the tools (e.g. being humble and open to ideas coming from everywhere and changing as a result of feedback, curious about what’s really going on and how things are working or not and working as teams rather than as a lone genius).

Article — — 52 words

Service design — User experience — User research

Work:

Slides from my Edinburgh UX meetup talk on Monday 2 September 2019, about the user research we have been conducting around the needs of students and staff working with course materials digitally at the University of Edinburgh. See the more detailed blog posts about this project over at the Website and Communications team blog.

Note — — 96 words

Technology — User experience — User research

Work:

I’m doing a couple of talks this week. They are both about [the user research we’ve been doing for the Learn Foundations project](https://duncanstephen.net/tag/learn-foundations/).

This evening I will be presenting at the [Edinburgh UX monthly meetup](https://www.meetup.com/Edinburgh-User-Experience-Meetup/events/ghvkllyzlbjc/). It’s a friendly meetup and it’s free, so do come along if you’re interested.

Then on Wednesday I’ll be [presenting](https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/sessions/a-105/) with my colleagues Karen Howie and Paul Smyth at the [Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Annual Conference](https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/).

Linknote — — 106 words

User experience — User research

Author of Practical Empathy Indi Young on going deeper than insights — Carrie Neill — dscout

Indi Young illustration

It’s always great to see advice from Indi Young. Here are tips on how to better identify and synthesise patterns in qualitative data.

…when you’re looking at data, don’t group things together by noun. Group them together by verb. I’ve done a lot of work with the healthcare industry, and one thing I often see research teams do is bring together insights that are all about a noun — here is all of the data that we got about how people feel about the doctors. But when you do that the intent behind what people are really saying ends up all over the place.

Linknote — — 197 words

Digital — Human-centred approaches

The birth of Inter — Carmel DeAmicis — Figma

Inter typeface detail

I’ve been using the Inter typeface on this blog (and other things) for 1½ years now.* I love it.

Rasmus [Andersson, the designer of Inter] did some research and experimentation and eventually realized there was no free, high-quality text typefaces for computer UIs. That felt backwards to him given how type heavy many UIs are. So he set to work creating one and released the first set of glyphs in August 2017. He’s been iterating on it continuously ever since.

What I really admire about Inter is the way it looks brilliant at both small sizes and large sizes. There really are not many typefaces you can say that about.

It also feels like it has genuinely been designed for our time, while seeming familiar like Helvetica or Univers. While those classics fall down somewhat as digital typefaces (no surprise given how old they are), Inter manages to improve on other digital-first typefaces like Roboto.

Incredibly, while Roboto has the might of Google behind it, Inter is one person’s side project. I have a lot of admiration for this project.

Now, if only it was available on Google Fonts…

* Yes, that was just an excuse to use the ½ glyph.