Category: Service design

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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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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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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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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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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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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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Operating in the open

I’m not actively involved with the findbusinesssupport.gov.scot team any more. But it’s still a service close to my heart.

I was part of the team that designed and built it in the midst of a global pandemic. And which suddenly learned, unwarned, that we would be the primary vehicle for the Scottish Government’s response to the emergency for businesses.

We were still in Beta in March 2020, so we were just routinely publishing all the data we had about usage. But, as we – de facto, if not officially – became a production service due to necessity, we just continued to do so.

Screenshot of search and filter data from findbusinesssupport.gov.scot from Sep-Oct 2023.
Screenshot of search and filter data from findbusinesssupport.gov.scot from Sep-Oct 2023
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Joining the Federation

The Federation logo from the original Star Trek. It resembles a distorted arrowhead with an elongated star in it.

I’ve updated this blog to use the ActivityPub protocol.

ActivityPub is the decentralized networking protocol that powers social networks including Mastodon, NextCloud and PixelFed.

If you are a user on any of these platforms, you can follow this blog at @blog@design.scotentblog.co.uk

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The Pitch

Polish your elevator pitch because it is more needed today than ever before.

How often do you talk to peers who just can’t tell you what their project exists to do. They can only tell you what they do on the project.

A friend of mine took on a new role at a finance company. When he started there were 40,000 defects in Jira.

When he left 2 years later….there were 40,000 defects in Jira..

He couldn’t tell what his project actually did.

So what was their team actually meant to do?

If you don’t know the Pitch then why is your company funding your project?

A good pitch is a way of telling your story that rolls together:

  • Problem statements
  • Solution Statements
  • A Hypothesis
  • Future state/vision

It does this in a No-Nonsense, Plain English manner.

So how do I create this magical Pitch you speak of

There are lots of ways to create a Pitch, but one that has never failed me in workshops is the Pixar Pitch. This is the structure that ALL Pixar movies use and to date they have raked in over 15 BILLION DOLLARS. So obviously not a bad approach to story telling.

The key elements are:

  • Once upon a time (This is the context)
  • Every Day (This is the problem)
  • One Day (This is the solution)
  • Because of that (This is the outcome)
  • Until Finally (This is the future state)

I use a fun Pitch Canvas that looks like this:

Pitch Canvas
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Running an asynchronous retrospective

The good, the bad, and the ugly

I seem to have been running a lot of retrospectives lately. And yes, I just used an Oxford comma. Get over it.

A simple, childlike image of a sailing boat on a choppy sea. The boat is held by an anchor hooked on rocks beneath the waves. There are wind puffs behind it and rocks in front of it. To the right of the images an island with a palm tree, with the sun overhead.
In the sailboat retrospective format, the boat represents the project or work we are doing; the wind is what is pushing us forward, the anchor what is holding us back. The rocks are dangers/risks we face, and the island is the goal or destination. I created this template in Miro.

In case you don’t know what that means, a retrospective (or a ‘retro’ for short) is a meeting-come-workshop where you look back on work you’ve done, as a team, and try to identify ways you could be better in future.

In agile methodologies, you can hold retros pretty regularly. With Scrum, you’d hold one at the end of every sprint – typically every 2 weeks – so you can get feedback quickly and adjust course immediately.

Think guiding a canoe through rapids; if you can’t change course quickly, you are going to hit a rock (a fairly common metaphor for retros uses a sailboat, as above) pretty soon, and pretty fatally.

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The Scottish Enterprise recruitment experience – from recruiting manager to applicant

The SE recruitment experience

Applying for a job seems simple enough, right? Set out your own expectations on a job and employer, find something that meets your expectation and apply! However, in the 6 months I have spent with the service design team at Scottish Enterprise (pretty new right!) I have learned that very few things are as simple as we say or think.

Following several queries and concerns relating to our Current vacancies page on Scottish-enterprise.com, the team kicked off a project to research, understand and act on the needs of our customers (potential applicants) and colleagues (those involved in recruitment).

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Service landscape maps: seeing the bigger picture

This is a service landscape map.

A service landscape map -click the link for full-size version.
Service landscape maps depict the different stages users go through when accessing a service as connected blobs, with the activities they do as circles within those blobs. It also captures who the external users are – the end users of the service and those who act in their support – the things users do to achieve their goals, the teams of people who deliver the service and are granted some power or authority within the system, and supporting organisations that also have a role to play in meeting user needs.

Services rarely, if ever, exist in a void. They exist within a context. A landscape.

Service landscape maps capture and illustrate that wider context and allow us to see the complexity at play, and to develop a better understanding of the user’s whole experience.

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10 things that staff consistently tell us

  • When we do user research with businesses about our Services, we also talk to our staff that are delivering them.
  • Just like customers, we often hear the same things from staff, over and over again, regardless of which design, platform or web page we’re testing.
  • These issues are not aimed upwards at management, but represent the lived reality of everyone in the organisation, and are there for all of us to fix
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The places and people we remember

What do we take from those we have worked for, and with? What do we take from each role we do into the next?

I’ve blogged before about my career journey. The best of times has been when I’ve worked for someone who has understood me as a whole person and believed in me. Here’s some thoughts about my journey over 35 years

An image of my tricolour border collie called Angus lying in some bluebells
My whole me now includes Angus. Here he is in the bluebells
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