Linknote — — 43 words

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.

Linknote — — 117 words

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.

Linknote — — 118 words

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).

Linknote — — 196 words

Accessibility — Content design — User experience — Web

Access for all — my final plea for human-centred design — Lizzie Cass-Maran — Website and Communications Blog

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 impact and quality of the work she has delivered in often challenging circumstances. She is a key reason why Website and Communications has such a strong user-centred culture.

Moreover, her impact stretched far beyond our own team. She influenced human-centred approaches across the entire university. She has played a genuinely leading role in our communities of practice. The effective digital content training that she has designed ensures that our content editors will continue to create well-written content that meets users’ needs.

Most recently, she did most of the heavy lifting in a project to revolutionise the university’s editorial style guide. The outcome of this is that, for the first time, we have a unified style guide that is designed for use across all content, print and digital, being managed across organisational silos.

Our team genuinely will not be the same without her.

Linknote — — 81 words

Politics — User experience

Vote by mail: Mistakes are too easy — Kara Pernice — Nielsen Norman Group

Postal voting materials

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 design. It’s about the small decisions that are made by everyone involved in a process, that if made badly can prevent people getting fundamental stuff done.

Linknote — — 106 words

User experience

Work:

Meeting the challenges of collaborating remotely — Website and Communications Blog

A Miro boards with digital sticky notes on it

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 activities done remotely. This post also highlights some of the work my colleagues have been doing to continue our user experience work despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus outbreak.

This was a follow-up to an earlier blog post, [Meeting the challenges of conducting user research remotely](https://duncanstephen.net/meeting-the-challenges-of-conducting-user-research-remotely-website-and-communications-blog/).