David O'Brien

I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.
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Why people use subtitles and captioning

I’ve been attending a series of events for Digital Accessibility Week 2026, a cross-government online event taking place from Monday 18 May ending on Thursday 21 May which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).

One of the events was Designing with autistic people – Inclusive design that benefits everyone, organised by HMRC’s digital accessibility team.

Delivered by Irina Rusakova, an Inclusive design and research consultant, it was a fascinating and powerful insight into how autistic and neurodivergent people are frequently let down by design that fails to meet their needs. I encourage you to read Irina’s published research including her 7 principles of designing for autistic people.

However, powerful as the session was, I want to focus on one small part, not strictly related to autism and neurodiversity.

Inclusion fuels innovation

As with many accessibility talks, we touched on the fallacy that inclusive design stifles innovation.

Irina demonstrated several examples showing how in fact the reverse is true, including electric toothbrushes, flexible straws and captions/subtitles – all technologies that were designed to include people with disabilities but which were then widely adopted by non-disabled people because they are just incredibly useful.

A slide titled Inclusion fuels innovation with a grid of 9 technologies illustrated with line drawings
The technologies illustrated were: electric toothbrush, audio book, voice control, email, subtitles and captioning, drop kerbs, flexible straws, and text messaging.

Irina asked those watching the webinar if they had used any of these technologies and invited comments in the meeting chat. There were over 200 people watching, and this elicited 65 replies.

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How to create a user story map with a Miro table

Thanks to some truly inspirational collaboration with my colleagues Martin and David recently, we’ve figured out a way to create a user story map from a Miro table.

Best of all, the story map and the table are synced. So if you update one, the other updates at the same time. No need to maintain two artefacts, or copy/paste anything. Two views. One underlying reality.

Here’s how.

Start with user needs

As you do your research, compile a table of the user needs you discover. You can add as many columns, of whatever type, as you need.

Record which persona/user(s), and which stage in the journey it occurs.

You’ll end up with a table something like this.

A Miro table with 5 columns and 25 rows
A table of user needs documented in Miro. It includes Stage and Release columns, which we’ll need later, but everything else is completely up to you – add, remove or change columns as you need.
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Would you hire Sam?

Sam is looking for a job. They’ll do pretty much anything.

An image of a face who, we can pretend for this exercise, is Sam
An emoji of me.

Sam’s CV looks pretty good, so you take them on a 3 month trial.

At first, things go well. Sam works 24/7, never gets sick, never needs to go to the bathroom. Never gets ill. Never takes a holiday.

Sam doesn’t have kids or elderly parents who need to be cared for. Doesn’t even seem to understand why that might be a thing.

You’re thinking, “Sam would be a great employee. Let’s make them permanent.”

Every time you ask Sam to do something, they just do it. They write a report, draft a document, summarise an article.

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404 not found

Let us offer you a way to find it

(Or, a small UX improvement on this website)

I came across Joe Allen’s Smaply blog post, Journey mapping beyond the happy path: designing for edge cases, breakdowns, and recovery earlier today. It’s an excellent post, and you should read it.

Screenshot of a 404 page not found response on this website showing that the URL path has been turned into a search query.
Here, a request for the mangled path /the%20point%20of%20the/doing-is/the%20doing/not%20what-gets/done has been transformed into a search for the point of the doing is the doing not what gets done.

Coincidentally, I’ve been drafting a post here, provisionally titled “Look for the workarounds”. It covers the same topics; if you want to fix a service, you first need to figure out where it’s broken, cracked, creaking , leaking, or blocked.

Face it. You’re a plumber.

I was thinking mostly of internal, back-office users. Joe’s article focuses more on how to identify problems-to-solve on the front end.

The tells are different … if, during research, an internal user says “Excel”, prick your ears up. Every workaround involves Excel. I’ll try to publish that in the next week or so.

Joe’s post goes into great and useful detail on the frontend side of things, so go read that instead if you’re more interested in that side of things.

Instead, I offer you an anecdote.

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Standard accessibility acceptance criteria 

This is based on a document I wrote several years ago, a proposal to standardise test acceptance criteria for our quality assurance process.

Scottish Enterprise's device testing lab has a variety of different devices, from desktop to mobile and everything in between, all displaying the same content simultaneously.
Our test lab, from a few years ago

I deliberately avoided any reference to WCAG guidelines or success criteria – instead, I chose to keep the focus on the user experience, what they should be able to perceive, understand, and do, in that scenario.

It didn’t really get anywhere, but I came across it the other day and thought I may as well publish it; perhaps someone can make use of it.

It’s written in gherkin format, because that was what we were using at the time. But it could be adapted to any format you need

This is far from perfect. I welcome contributions from others more knowledgeable than me. Especially people with lived experience.

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The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done

Scores of brigtly coloured sticky notes on a long whiteboard, arranged under hand-written headings

I noticed a comment in a chat today at work, along the lines of:

We used an LLM to categorise the sticky notes from a workshop. It did a really good job, and even colour-coded the notes and aligned them.

To which I shrugged, thought “good on you” and went on with my day.

Later, another colleague tagged me and asked if it was something we could learn from. I replied, rather gnomically:

The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done.

It was a somewhat throwaway comment at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it all day. So I’m trying to round my thoughts up here.

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No more cookies for you

A cookie - the kind you eat
Photo by Vyshnavi Bisani on Unsplash

Historically, we’ve used Google Analytics to measure usage of this website.

GA has some advantages: it’s free, for a start, and it’s also the default industry standard. Even gov.uk uses it.

But it also has some, in my opinion, fairly major drawbacks.

  • It may be free for site owners, but there is a cost to users in terms of their privacy
  • It’s a data source for Google’s big advertising empire
  • It requires cookies out of the box, which means we need to ask for consent, which we (probably) mostly don’t get, which in turn means
  • It’s unreliable, and you can’t even know how unreliable
  • I comes with a big dose of javascript, which has a performance impact

So I’ve been thinking for some time that it would be good to be able to find an alternative that addresses at least some of the issues.

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I cycled to work

A man on a bike, wearing jeans and a dark grey sweater. cycling over a bridge over a river. Trees along the riverbank are in full leaf, and the scene is sunny.
Me, on a bike, crossing a new bridge over the River Clyde in Glasgow

I did something amazing today.

I cycled to the office. And back home again.

I know, billions of people ride a bike every day. I used to, too.

But more than 25 years ago, I slipped a disc and was told to stop cycling, because of the load on my lower spine. Since then, I’ve been diagnosed with #ataxia, which affects my balance and co-ordination.

Those are both pretty indispensable when riding a bike.

So I thought my cycling days were pretty much over, much like my mountaineering, football and running days.

But I recently inherited an #ebike that’s been sitting in a shed or garage for several years.

So I thought, why not?

I’ve been building up to this trip. It’s about 3.5 miles/5km to the office from where I live. Not far – I used to regularly walk to and from it when the weather was clement, until I couldn’t.

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The disability myth

Saying “No-one using our service has accessibility needs” is a bit like saying “We don’t need a ramp, no-one in a wheelchair has ever come up the stairs”.

An access ramp in a modern structure with large sloping glass windows admitting plenty of light on a sunny day.
An accessible ramp at Glasgow Queen Street train station. The long, low rake helps wheelchair users but also people pushing prams, or a bike, or – as in this case – a heavy suitcase. Basically, it makes life easier for everyone.
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Who are we willing to exclude?

A screenshot of a whiteboard with posit notes all clustered in the leftmost column

This is an exercise I like to run at the start of any project.

It’s based on a tweet a long time ago by Jamie Knight (and Lion, of course) which I can’t/won’t link to because, well, twitter. You can read Jamie’s bio on their site or LinkedIn profile.

The exercise is simple. At the start of any digital project, get the whole team – devs, testers, writers, designers, stakeholders, literally anyone you can round up – together, in-person or virtually, and ask the question:

Who are we willing to exclude?

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What do service designers do?

Tricky.

Not in the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing when I do what I do. I just do what needs done.

Tricky in the ‘it depends’ sense.

One thing we don’t do, in any conventional sense, is design services. We don’t take a brief, don our turtlenecks, retire to a darkened room and then, a week or two later, step blinking into the light with a ‘ta-da’ and a definitive plan.

A group of people, standing by a wall, sticking post-its onto a whiteboard. This is my job, this is what I do.
The purpose of the sticky notes is to get thoughts, knowledge and information out of people’s heads and onto a wall where we can all see it – and then, critically, talk about it, and reach a collective decision.
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Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment

A screenshot showing a sample result from the interactive Good Service scale application

Ask any service designer to list their top 5 or 10 people in the industry who have influenced them, and it’s a fair bet that most of them will mention Lou Downe.

Lou literally wrote the book about service design in the public sector in the UK. And pretty much introduced the concept into UK Government.

Alongside This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing by Marc Stickdorn, Adam Lawrence et al, it’s a slim volume that has genuinely become canon.

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Making our account managers appy

The title of this post is an obvious reference to a famous GDS blog post by Tom Loosemore back in 2014.

Tl;dr – native apps are bad, web apps are good.

Which I wholeheartedly agree with, on the whole. The web is open and free. Native OS apps are neither. Given a choice, for a general audience, I’d always favour the web.

But there’s always a but

Storyboard described in the caption
A storyboard depicting an account manager meeting a client, then dictating a meeting note into his phone which is then shared with both their client and colleagues working on the account.
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Show your stripes

A warming stripe chart for Scotland showing temperature change from 1885-2023 as a series of coloured vertical lines. On the left the stripes are mostly blue with the occasional white or peach. Moving to the right more and more reds appear, becoming increasingly intense at the extreme right edge.

Today is day.

I’ve updated the header on this site for one day to mark it.

The chart above shows how temperatures have varied from the average across the whole of Scotland from 1884-2023. It’s fairly apparent what’s happening.

You can create your own stripes for where you are thanks to the University of Reading.

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Telling a story

In my experience, service design is mostly about telling – and selling – stories.

Telling the stories of people we’ve met through user research. Understanding what makes life difficult for them, and adjusting our approach to accommodate what they need.

Telling these stories helps us make sure our UX designers and developers and content designers can update our services in ways that accommodate those needs. And mostly, that works out fine.

But sometimes, we have to sell a story.

Selling a story

When we sell stories, we’re talking about the future. Where we want to be in 6-12-18 months. A possible future.

That’s where storyboards are useful.

Storyboards

A storyboard looks like this.

A 3x2 storyboard illustrating the steps set out below. The frames mix real photographic backgrounds with illustrated simple figures overlaid on top.
Storyboards illustrate a story and bring it to life for stakeholders.
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How to create inclusive personas, without creating inclusive personas

I watched a webinar earlier today about creating inclusive personas to encourage accessible, human-centred design. The instructors talked about the disabilities people have, the assistive technologies they use, and how to create inclusive personas that describe those needs.

A young man with brown skin and dark, cropped hair. He is wearing glasses, and a navy blue jacket over a grey t-shirt. His hands are held in front of his body in a pose that suggest he is in the middle of explaining something.
A portrait we used in one of our personas. This is a real person, who we’ve supported. No AI, no stock images.

And that’s all great, and laudable. But, with all my experience, I am not convinced it’s always the right approach.

Let me explain.

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Go with the flow

I’ve been working on a project lately with a small team and a similarly select group of Scottish Enterprise account managers to create a slicker way of bringing businesses into their portfolio.

It’s a bit of a pathfinder project, to figure out how we might use Microsoft Power Platform technologies to deliver new services at scale and at speed.

So we settled on this one aspect of our High Growth account managers’ service to start with: getting new clients onto their portfolio.

The solution we’ve developed involves Power Pages (client-facing) and Power Apps (backend) developments, both reading from and writing to the same database, and all of this data is ultimately available in our CRM system.

All of which is fine. But, as a Service Designer, I instinctively want to be open and transparent about the data we gather. And the Digital Service Standard kinda demands that we are.

I struggled with this for a while. I wrestled in the swamps of the Dataverse against PowerBI, and the best I could come up with was this:

Power BI dashboard with a mix of graphs and tables - click to open full size.
Figure 1: screenshot of a Power Bi dashboard taken on 4 April 2024

(Actual people’s actual names have been scrubbed out in this screenshot because they’re actual people. But all the data is real, and right now.)

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On colours

Some readers may have noticed that Scottish Enterprise launched a new brand identity recently.

A screenshot of the colour contrast analysis tool. It is a table of circular cells with different foreground and background colours

Our logo was updated, and our typefaces and colour palettes changed.

I’m not a marketer, so that’s not my domain and I have nothing to say about that.

But I am a designer. And, when you’re designing communications material, whether it’s a website, an app, a brochure, a poster, a letter … these things matter. They are constraints you have to design within.

And yet, you have to produce an experience that’s accessible.

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Joining the dots from intent to outcome

An intent to outcome diagram for the findbusinesssupport.gov.scot

As a service designer, a large part of my job is making sure everyone on the project sees and understands the same picture.

We all need to have a shared understanding of:

  • why we’re here
  • what we’re trying to do
  • the outcomes (changes in the real world) we want to see

That sounds easy, but in reality it’s not. Everyone has their own perspective: designers, developers, content designers, architects, security people, product owners … everybody comes at the problem with their own priorities and experiences, their own preferences, language, biases and assumptions.

We can have hours of discussions and endless workshops to thrash these conflicting worldviews and languages out. Thousands of unmourned post-its may be lost in the process.

So one day, back in 2019, when I was working on the very early days of findbusinesssupport.gov.scot I decided we needed an authoritative way to describe and demonstrate our purpose.

In my experience at that time, it really helps to have a big reminder of “this is why you’re here” every time you enter the workplace. (It was ‘real’ then, it’s (mostly) virtual now.)

So I came up with this:

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