At Service Design in Government, I discovered that service designers see themselves as Mario. But that is an unrealistic model for what service design should be. Read full article
10 commentsService design and the Mario complex
Archive — Journey mapping
In storytelling and service design, easy is boring — — Enigma
Why it may not always be right to design as smooth a journey as possible.
This idea seems counter-intuitive at first, but makes perfect sense on further reflection.
…people who had an issue with a service that was later resolved gave a better rating to it than people who didn’t have any.
It reminds me of a story (which I now cannot find) about someone who annually camped out for nights on end to get tickets for a particular event. One year, this person’s dedication was rewarded with free tickets. This gift offended the person. They derived their utility from the effort they were putting in (or perhaps in showing that effort to other people). The value was in the struggle.
How I learnt to embrace handwriting, sketching and sticking stuff on walls
Working on walls is an unbeatable way to create ideas as well as communicating them. But I learnt that lesson the hard way. Read full article
1 commentUser experience research for the University of Edinburgh’s API Service
User experience research for the University of Edinburgh’s API Service
I have been leading some user research for a project at the University of Edinburgh to develop API Service. This post on the University Website Programme blog outlines the steps we went through in the first phase of the research. This included interviewing developers, running workshops, and developing personas and journey maps.
This has been a successful and rewarding project. It has been particularly interesting for me to do some UX work that wasn’t necessarily to do with a website. There will be a couple more blog posts about it to come.