Article — — 1,082 words

Content design — Information architecture — Service design

Illustration - a white square with a teal triangle attached to its right edge, with the point of the triangle to the right

Information architecture normally focuses on the objects that need to be represented in a system. Some human-centred practitioners focus instead on the tasks users need to do. These approaches are sometimes framed in opposition. But combining these techniques can make services and systems easier to use as well as more efficient to manage.

Linknote — — 134 words

Service design

Practitioner Stories — A self-initiated research project exploring service design practice

Practitioner stories — Illustration of a group of people holding jigsaw pieces in front of a map of Scotland

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 service design has come in Scotland over a few short years. But it also outlines a series of challenges the discipline faces for the future.

I recommend you read the blog posts to get a sense of the depth of the findings. They are a must-read for anyone interested in human-centred approaches, and making positive change within organisations and society.

To the team behind Practitioner Stories, thank you for your hard work on this. 🙏

Linknote — — 86 words

Content design — Service design — User experience — User research

Ask us anything — UX Glasgow

Illustration of people with question marks above their heads

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.

Register now on Eventbrite

To help us prepare, please if you have the time take two minutes to fill in our short questionnaire where you can submit your questions in advance.

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Service design — User experience

Work:

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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Content design — Service design — Technology — User experience

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 other cognitive considerations
  • Improving readability of content

The post also mentions my own session at the conference, about our user research into the needs of staff and students working with course materials online. The Learn Foundations project has proved fortuitous in that it has helped schools move their teaching online and prepare for hybrid teaching in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

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Service design — User experience

Work:

Service design special — UX Glasgow

Service design illustrations

I will be speaking at next week’s UX Glasgow meetup. This month it is a service design special, coinciding with [Services Week](https://services.blog.gov.uk/2021/01/29/get-involved-in-services-week-2021/).

My presentation will be based on my blog post [Service design and the Mario complex](https://duncanstephen.net/service-design-and-the-mario-complex/), exploring the similarities and differences between user experience and service design.

It’s part of a bumper line-up of speakers, including sessions about the Scottish Approach to Service Design, some excellent research into the service design community in Scotland, and a student project imagining the future of Glasgow.

It’s a ticketed virtual event, so [sign up to be part of what should be a brilliant session](https://uxglasgow.co.uk/events/service-design-special).

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Business — Service design

Work:

From 40 sets of ideas to one in 20 minutes — A collaboration experiment with the Web Publishing Community — Website and Communications Blog

Liberating Structures leaflet designed by Open Change

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 period of working from home.

[I’d come away from the Service Design in Government conference](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/three-highlights-from-service-design-in-government-2020/) in March really keen to try out [liberating structures](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/), following an excellent [session run by Open Change](https://www.openchangeacademy.co.uk/liberating-structures).

Liberating structures is a set of workshop tools designed to include everyone and generate innovative ideas. These are ideally carried out with people who are physically together, so it was a little awkward when I wanted to try them out just at the moment everyone was required to be physically apart.

But some liberating structures are possible to run remotely, so I decided to introduce a large number of colleagues to a foundational liberating structure — [1-2-4-all](http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/).

Through this session, we collaboratively sifted through ideas generated by over 40 participants, before coming to a consensus on the one strongest idea.

[Read the blog post for the full details of how it worked — and what went wrong](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/from-40-sets-of-ideas-to-one-in-20-minutes-a-collaboration-experiment-with-the-web-publishing-community/).