Simon Wilson

A simpler, clearer, better bradford.gov.uk

Yesterday it was my pleasure to spend time with the team at Bradford council who are working on their digital platform. It was especially a privilege as yesterday saw the latest version of their digital platform being available for the public. It was the mark of a very radical shift.

Always be in beta posters

In yesterday's post on some new stickers, I included an image of some posters we've got up in the Newcastle HMRC office.  For the people who have asked off the back of that post and others who have asked before, I've

stickers

Some new stickers

Hello there. Amongst everything else, I've been working on a service patch idea/design this week. If a government (digital) service passes an assessment, it tends to get a patch. Tends to as HMRC isn't very good at this. (Wanna know more on the patches? More

Start at the core

A couple of days back on Medium, _Atom is just “UX-ing” banking. Mondo is re-imagining it_: > Disrupting finance shouldn’t be that difficult. All it takes is a ruthless focus on solving customers problems rather than selling them a product. 29 January 2016. Over on the a16z podcast _When

Sunday design stuff in New York

Lovely day in New York. Some fun design finds as well.  This lovely little thing at the top of the bill we got, there to help whoever serves you. Quite commonplace on bills in the States. Once you notice it the first time you can't

Visit to Cooper Hewitt in New York

Met Tom Harrop for a trip to the Cooper Hewitt, an excellent museum of contemporary design. Despite  having fun looking for UX/UI memes, the museum is excellent. The screens and pens provided some excellent engaging interactions. (More info here.)  Monument Valley – or stills from it – were

Getting stuff done (in gov)

I bumped into a pal on the train last week. She, like me, “made the leap” to work for (a part) government.  She’s got a bloody good track record, someone who has been there and worked hard to make some really good stuff. She’s smart,

Invisible Chinatown

99% Invisible is a consistently brilliant podcast. The recent episode Pagodas and Dragon Gates is particularly recommended, a look at the history and relationship between Chinese immigrants and San Francisco, focused around the city’s Chinatown. Following on from the Great Fire, the city looked at how it could make

Codegirl at the Co-op

A couple of days back I hot-footed across the country from Newcastle to Manchester, via Idle, to take the daughter to a showing of Codegirl at the Co-op’s HQ in Manchester. Codegirl is a documentary film centring on the all-girl teams taking part in the Technovation Challenge. Here’s

Digital transformation is change management

Preface: This originally started life a month back as my “six months in” post. Over the past month it’s languished in the background of my Macbook’s screen. I’ve never been able to give it shape, but I am sat on the train re-reading it. I am just

'Rail travel: A user experience in buying access to a network'

Since last July I have been working all over the country, but predominantly Newcastle. Rarely I drive up. Mostly I get the train. I like trains: the chauffeur experience, the chance to stare out of the window, the chance to read and write, the “Will I get a seat?” gamble.

What... what seems to be the problem?

There’s a sequel to Blade Runner on the way.  The first Blade Runner is one of those films I can pretty much remember the first time I saw it. It was some point October 1987 to June 1988. I was in my first year at secondary

Never be the same

One of the more/most interesting reads in digital transformation is the NHS.UK Alpha blog. Some genuinely smashing work being done by the team there, driven by a spot-on lean approach: starting with research (to find user needs), rapid exploration of ideas through design and prototypes, and then analysis

Collaborating across government design communities

We have a strong design community at HMRC’s Newcastle’s base, a great team. When we talk about “making things that matter”, HMRC – like it or not – collects the money (it’s called “revenue” within HMRC, but I like to explain things like you’d want them explained to

Good times for a change

Last week right along the top of a whiteboard I wrote something. > THIS IS A PROGRAMME OF CHANGE. Like that. In capital letters. And with added underline for extra emphasis. Underneath was a summary of my colleagues’ work, their thinking, a rough road map to get us from A

Design is the process, and when designing works

Hello. It’s been a while since I publicly published something on the work I am involved with at HMRC. I am currently leading the design on the tax credits digital service. “Leading” makes it sound grander than it is. A lot of the hard work was already on with.

Us versus them

“This is going to be a fight.” “It’s us versus them.” “We’ve a battle on our hands.” A fight. Us versus them. A battle. Sounds like a damn monster movie. People always want to do better. When you spend the majority of your week at work you want

Motivations

Last week, I was having a chat with someone. (Hello, Zuz.) We were talking about agile/Agile and service design/Service Design. More on that bit another time. The chat ended up circling – yes, like vultures in the desert, I guess – around some case studies in the book This is

Lowering your shields

Yesterday morning I was starting to feel a slight case of “head back to work tomorrow” glum. I've had the best part of two weeks off from work with the fam, doing fun stuff. Back to going away from home for the whole week, to the proverbial grind.

Coffee and toast

A week or so back I was in a pal’s “backyard”. My friend works at a place doing that digital products/services thing. Some bloody good ones at that. It’d have been rude not to have a nosy round his workplace and catch up. It hits lunchtime, it’

Be more start-up

#1 A month or so back during my talk at Forefront I mentioned I owe a lot due to my time in agencies. To be more precise I owe a lot due to my time at one agency: Brahm. You can view the slides here, 38 onwards. One thing my

It looks like a frozen sausage

Bradford council are updating their website. They've blogged about it. Interesting, because I pay my council taxes to Bradford. (Idle is actually a place, not just a state of mind). Interesting, because there was a point in my life where I accessed the Bradford website through a proxy

Blood simple

Digital transformation isn’t about making websites. It isn’t just about “putting the forms online”. It isn’t just about “putting the forms online” and leaving the rest of the user journey, the service untouched. It isn’t about accepting, about allowing an oligopoly of a service to excuse

Get Git

The short version. With some of my colleagues I am running a short series of lessons that teach the students the basics of Git, a piece of software that allows us to create, store, and recall versions. The lessons are unapologetically entry level. You can read why in the long

Show all the options, AirBnB style

I've started looking at using AirBnB a bit more for my travels. This week I've only really had a good poke around their website. Previously I'd spent my time browsing AirBnB through their mobile apps. There's a lot of neat – and read