Teachings from user research sessions

We are always thankful to the time people give up to help us in user research sessions. In the sessions we like it when people speak aloud what they are thinking. We are always thankful for their thoughts in these sessions. We’re thankful for their bravery. It’s not

Forefront, Leeds, 25 November 2015

It was a privilege to be asked to speak at Forefront Leeds last night – almost a year on from when I last talked at the event.  It's never a problem to support the work Russ Poulter and Chris Kemm put into pulling the event together

stickers

'Designing stickers – or: Getting out a bit more'

1 Working on creating HMRC's digital services there's great benefits using GDS's work as a platform (blogged about previously here). It's informed. It's easy to access to crib from. It helps us get up and running. It helps us get

Why the Bronx Burned, a cautionary tale on bad data usage

Earlier this week I suggested if you read one thing this week, make it Katy Arnold's recent piece on designing within Home Office Digital. If you listen to one thing this week, make it the recent episode of the FiveThirtyEight podcast, What's The Point. FiveThirtyEight has

Lisa Hanawalt at XOXO 2015

"You want the things you make be so good and better than all the stuff you made before and good enough to live up to you up to your crazy expectations of what makes your things good. And I'm an idiot." Great talk from Lisa Hanawalt,

Openly talking across government, about design

0 There are many great reasons to work in government designing and creating services. One of them is the way – and ways – of working. If not uniformity, there's certainly consistency. Another is the belief, the confidence in the way of working. This tends to mean that across government

The World of Ray and Charles Eames

Half term, time for a proper little holiday for the first time in a long time. Time away from the current gig, time with the family, time to reflect on a few things, time to do some other stuff. Also, my 40th birthday was in there.  I

Talking about the design work we do in HMRC Digital

You may have noticed during my current gig at HMRC Digital I am trying to share – through blog posts and tweets – what is going on "under the hood".  Why am I doing this? In part because the GDS team work openly, sharing their work. The

Doing research with users to understand gifts

1 At HMRC Digital we look to put user needs first, designing and creating digital services that are shaped around what works for users of the services. 2 Three weeks into my time at HMRC Digital I wrote about working in a team in government, which you can read here,

Tom Loosemore on new foundations for government

Great talk from Tom Loosemore at this year's Code for America Summit earlier this month. Loosemore reflects back on his time working on GDS, and lessons learned. TL;DR: We need to look at creating new institutions to take advantage of digital, not build on top of what

Contracting problems

1 It’s a couple of weeks back. It’s a weekday morning, about half seven. I’ve been staying over in a hotel, and sat eating breakfast at a table on my own. 2 Times like this I am usually lost in Feedly on my phone, catching up on

Mis-shapes

0 I was saying earlier (using the work of GDS as an example) having a platform to do work off is important, defining how we work is important. 1 Places of work like to talk about the way they work as a Really Important Thing. Example. Process is such an

A quick note on *asterisks* and [square brackets]

Hi. I've been seeing how some of you use asterisks. In emails. In your tweets. In your Skype messages. Sometimes in your SMS texts. Y'know asterisks, yeah? This: . And another one: . An asterisk and another asterisk. Together – ** – asterisks. So, yeah, I've been seeing how

Reading list

Here's a list of books that I recommend to people interesting in design, copywriting, advertising, creating good ideas, and all that stuff. When possible I'll add some short notes about why they're good reads. --- The Design of Everyday Things Don Norman User Story

The lost art of copywriting

A week or so back Rishi Dastidar shared a great copy led ad for the Southbank Centre on Twitter. !Southbank Centre ad About the same time an excellent piece on the state of copywriting by Paul Burke popped up on Campaign's website. Take five minutes out and read

GDS as a platform

1. I’ve lost count of how long I’ve been working for HMRC on creating their digital services. It’s not that big a number. It's early double digits of weeks. Maybe eleven. I don’t know exactly how long. Since I wrote my three weeks up

Plain speaking

A great post by Leisa Reichelt – the recently departed head of user reasearch at GDS – for the weekend (and beyond once you've read it) on Stop your team using technical terms and jargon. A great post and one that will strike a chord with a lot of people.

September 2015 Bradford CoderDojo

The monthly Bradford CoderDojo returned today after taking August off for the school holiday.  Held, as usual, at the city's Curriculum Innovation Centre, there was a really healthy turnout from children and their parents. Thank you to all that came along - if you didn&

Some short notes about show and tells at HMRC Digital

After lunch every Monday we have a "community show and tell" in Newcastle. Each of us being buried away in our agile teams it's often difficult to breakaway from the day-to-day, hour-to-hour hurly-burly. These weekly hour-long sessions are great opportunities for designers to get together, share

The planets – to scale

A great video this, that starts with something that reminds me of how I was taught the size and proximity of planets back in school: All the planets are massive and really close together, without making the point "this is for illustration purposes only". These guys set out

Design is teamwork

A phrase that I used to hear a lot in agency world. > We’ll get a designer on that. It’s a phrase that simultaneously gratifies and grates for me. While positively acknowledging the power of “design”, it usually makes an assumption - and presents that assumption - that

Beverly Hills Cop intro credits

I caught a little of Beverly Hills Cop on Netflix last night. Not seen it for a while, was talking to people about Richard Pryor the other week, led to talk about Eddie Murphy.  I pop the film on while I've a spare five minutes.

Saul Bass pitching to Bell

There's been a really great Saul Bass pitch doing the rounds on the digital socials at the mo. (Even though it was posted in late 2011.) A reminder that Bass didn't just do cool title sequences for Alfred Hitchcock and quad posters. And a reminder even

A happy ending

I'm staying in Jesmond in Newcastle.  Earlier this week I passed the poster above. You've probably seen this sort of DIY lost cat/dog/other pet animal posters at some time. This one was stuck to one of those metal cabinets you sometimes

Thunk.

A few years ago, at the place I worked at back then, there were several doors into the office. I usually went through the “front door”, the door we expected visitors to use. As I went in, the front door had a handle on the side facing me. More often