Archive — Personal

Nudge in user experience — Website and Communications Blog

Over the summer my user experience team at the University of Edinburgh had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Behavioural Insights (Nudge) Intern. There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

Working with a behavioural science specialist has brought things full circle for me. My first association with the University of Edinburgh was when I studied economics here for my undergraduate degree.

And it really is full circle, because this was my last blog post as an employee of the University of Edinburgh. I’ll publish more about that news shortly.

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From personas to behaviour modes — Website and Communications Blog

Lightbulb

This post on my team’s blog outlines why and how we have moved away from using personas to behavioural archetypes.

Existing personas had served the team well for over 10 years. But with our work to reimagine the future of our web services, and our attention turning to the development of a new Web Publishing Platform, we recognised that these old personas needed to evolve.

Now, our archetypes focus on people’s behaviours — who does what, how they do it, and why.

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UX in universities — UX Soup

UX Soup logo: "Easily listen and subscribe for free in your preferred podcast player"

I have been interviewed for the podcast UX Soup. The host Chris Schreiner was interested in the User Experience Service’s work at the University of Edinburgh. He spoke with me about:

  • how the consultancy model works in a higher education context
  • the history of our service
  • the projects we get involved with
  • the methodologies we follow
  • the specific challenges we face working in higher education

It was good fun being interviewed. Please have a listen if you have the time. Thank you to Chris for the opportunity.

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Note — 2022-01-05

I return to work regularly today for the first time in almost 25 weeks.

This was longer than anticipated. My planned parental leave was forcibly extended due to my ankle injury. It was further complicated by my tricky recovery. I have more to say about all of that another day.

I approach today with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Balancing work with looking after a one-year-old is a whole new normal. For me at least, it makes the changes in working practices due to coronavirus seem small.

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How to avoid common mistakes in user engagement — Website and Communications Blog

Have you ever participated in a user engagement session designed for you to share your views, but felt that you weren’t properly included, or that your views wouldn’t be acted on? Fed up with bad surveys and poorly planned focus groups?

Most of us want to engage with our users and stakeholders. We all want to make sure our users have a voice in projects that will affect them. But the approach you take can have a major effect on the success or failure of your engagement.

There are some basic truths about human behaviour that we know from psychology and other social sciences. But in many projects, these basic truths tend to be ignored.

Read this post on my team’s blog for tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of poorly planned user engagement, and how to make user research effective.

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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.

My presentation will be based on my blog post 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.

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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 in March really keen to try out liberating structures, following an excellent session run by Open Change.

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.

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.

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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.

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Note — 2020-03-20

Me holding a bottle of Corona

Virtual birthday party — 9pm tonight

It’s my birthday today. But I couldn’t really be bothered to organise a physical get-together. Instead, I thought it would be fun to imagine there was some horrific virus that meant we couldn’t really leave the house much, and I had to celebrate it remotely.

Update: This will now take place at 9pm, not 7pm as before.

Join us at 9pm for 40 minutes of free Zoom-based party times.

Bring your own Corona.

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Join our team as a Content Designer — Website and Communications Blog

View of Edinburgh Castle from our office

Come and work with our team!

We are looking for three experienced Content Designers to join the University of Edinburgh’s Website and Communications team as we embark on major projects to launch our new web publishing platform and services.

If you’re passionate about using evidence-based approaches to create great content that meets users’ needs, we want to hear from you.

There are three positions available. Find out more in the blog post. If you have any questions, just get in touch with me.

For my personal view on what it’s like working with the University of Edinburgh, check out my previous blog post: Why I value working in user experience in higher education.

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