Anyone who’s worked on iterative design projects – sometimes called ‘agile’ projects, although that term itself often hinders understanding, rather than helping it – will know that reflection is a key part of the journey. We’ve been doing a lot of reflection lately, and it’s prompted me to reflect on what digital transformation is – or perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.
Continue reading “The silver bullet”User experience begins long before someone reaches your website
COVID-19. Collective sigh. If you’re not jaded by it all yet then your reserves of positivity surely know no bounds.
The winds of change that have blown across our world as a result of this surreal event are quite incredible. And many things will never be the same again.
Small town centres, previously peppered with empty shops, are bustling. Employers are embracing remote working like never before. Deserted city centre scenes, previously only featured in apocalyptic movies, have graced the evening news.
But some things haven’t changed.
Many organisations continue to create policy, advice, products and services in complete ignorance of how user behaviour in the modern age will define their effectiveness.
There’s been no more perfect example of this than the four corners of the UK all having different and, in many cases, contradictory rules and advice for citizens to follow during this pandemic.
Continue reading “User experience begins long before someone reaches your website”How many people does it take to design and build a service?
Scottish Enterprise is changing. We are delivering services to customers and stakeholders in new ways, this gives us a fabulous opportunity but also presents some challenges.
As the team leader for the user centered design team at Scottish Enterprise I hear comments such as ‘What do you mean when you say service’, ‘We don’t really know what you do or who you are’ and also ‘But don’t you just build websites? Why do you care about all this other stuff that’s not digital?’
It prompted me to think what was causing this perception and how I felt four years ago when I joined the digital team at Scottish Enterprise. I was struck by how many people are involved and therefore how confusing it can be.
Continue reading “How many people does it take to design and build a service?”How we improved the exporting user journey on the Scottish Enterprise website
We recently redesigned the exports and international markets section of the Scottish Enterprise website.
Our goals
- Raise awareness of our exporting expertise and support – in order to help more businesses, we needed them to be aware of what support they can access through us
- Create content that is relevant and useful to exporters and potential exporters – we wanted to ensure that content on our website was meeting user needs
- Get more enquiries for exporting services and events – we wanted to get more people asking us about the services and events that we offer
- Help users self-serve – we wanted to help people self-serve where possible, or signpost them to other help and support, at the right point in the customer journey
- Get more users taking advantage of market opportunities – we wanted to help businesses understand what opportunities exist in overseas markets and how they can access them
Accessibility – Sharing knowledge between organisations
Heather Hepburn is the Accessibility Lead for Skyscanner and has been running their accessibility programme for just over a year.
Stéphanie Krus works as a Service Designer and is a member of the ‘Disability Positive’ group at Scottish Enterprise.
We ‘met’ virtually in October 2020 after a talk at the UCD Gathering from Heather Hepburn (Skyscanner) and Adi Latif (AbilityNet): “Digital Accessibility – How to get your organisation on the right track”
We realised we had a lot we could share regarding how we address and improve accessibility in our organisations. So we planned a knowledge sharing session which was held online on 27 January 2021 with about 20 people.
Continue reading “Accessibility – Sharing knowledge between organisations”From service designer to user researcher
I started my career at Scottish Enterprise as a content designer. Actually, we were called ‘web content developers’ back then, before we really embraced the idea that there is more to content than just words on a web page. Then I joined the service design team as a service designer, and over the past few months, I’ve been doing a dual role as a service designer and user researcher.
Continue reading “From service designer to user researcher”How capabilities mapping helped us see the bigger picture
The problem
We have a transformation programme underway across Scottish Enterprise. It was getting harder to see what needed to be done to deliver the bigger picture – rather than just bits of the jigsaw. In addition, many people were focusing solely on ‘the bit you need to build’, rather than seeing the whole service – end to end, online and offline.
Continue reading “How capabilities mapping helped us see the bigger picture”How to deliver agile projects to a deadline
You can’t.
Agile projects deliver when they cross a quality threshold.
If you hit a deadline, or met a budget, without crossing that threshold, you weren’t agile.
It’s that simple.
How we made it easier for businesses to find coronavirus funding
The problem
The FindBusinessSupport.gov.scot (FBS) website had to adapt quickly when the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit to ensure that businesses could access up-to-date information about what they needed to do and what support they could get.
Because new funds were constantly being offered, and guidance kept changing as we moved in and out of lockdown, we just added new content when changes were announced by the Scottish Government. We never had time to step back and think about the complete customer journey, and the coronavirus advice page had become very long and complex.
The challenge
The Scottish Government asked us to make it easier for businesses to access information about coronavirus funding and support on the FBS website, and they gave us two weeks to do it.
How to be a designer, teacher and parent at the same time
The title of this post is misleading. It implies that I’m going to provide you with tips on doing all these things well simultaneously. I’m not. It isn’t possible. What I am going to do is share how I have been balancing my job as a service designer with homeschooling my 5-year-old and chasing after my 2-year-old during this most recent lockdown.
Like many parents, I’ve been faced with an almost impossible task – do your job while also giving your children an education. If your working day is seven hours, and a school day is six hours, and a parenting day is around 12 hours, that’s 25 hours of work to fit within 24 hours. And that doesn’t include eating, sleeping, cooking, housework and this ‘self-care’ stuff that everyone is so big on these days.
Continue reading “How to be a designer, teacher and parent at the same time”Working with the Service Design team
Why am I writing this?
I want to highlight the great teamwork I’ve experienced working with the Service Design team, but also to highlight challenges we are trying to overcome.
Continue reading “Working with the Service Design team”Getting an economic development agency to act like a service provider
What does Scottish Enterprise do?
According to our website, “Scottish Enterprise is Scotland’s national economic development agency. We’re committed to growing the Scottish economy for the benefit of all, helping create more quality jobs and a brighter future for every region.”
And how do we do that?
By providing services.
Continue reading “Getting an economic development agency to act like a service provider”Volunteering
In Scottish Enterprise, we can take up to 3 days per year to volunteer. A few of us on the Digital team have use this to contribute to various projects. Others in the team and across Scottish Enterprise are also volunteering on their own time.
Continue reading “Volunteering”How we used the Good Services Scale to evaluate the GlobalScot service
The Good Services Scale is a tool that was developed by Lou Downe, the director of design and transformation for land and housing at the UK government. It allows you to assess the quality of your service using the 15 principles of good service design.
Showing your users’ journeys as a Tube map
Tube maps are a good way to layout a user journey. Draw.io is not the easiest tool for this, but if you want to try, here’s how.
You can explain the various ways a customer can find your service and the different journeys depending on the channels used for example:
What I learned at Service Design in Government 2019
So, I spent yesterday in Edinburgh at Service Design in Government. Here’s what I learned.
Continue reading “What I learned at Service Design in Government 2019”Service Design – How we work
Everybody has a methodology for how teams should work. Some of them are great but most of them are complicated. Here is how Service Design works at Scottish Enterprise.
I am showing three diagrams but the middle one is the one I love best.
Let’s begin:
1. Super simple
We are not a software house. What we do is design and deliver services. We try to be a bit lean & agile and that involves iterating constantly. This means that a traditional discovery, alpha, beta, Live flow is a bit too waterfally for us (I may have just invented a word there).
What we really do in Service Design is:
- Find value
- Develop value
- Deliver value
MyBusinessID – Business Account for Scotland
Simply put, MyBusinessID is the Scottish shared account for accessing public sector business websites.
Continue reading “MyBusinessID – Business Account for Scotland”