Category: UX 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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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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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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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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Card sorting to improve information architecture 

Ahead of our migration of the Scottish Enterprise website to our new design system, the User Experience (UX) team wanted to make some improvements to the information architecture of the site.

First of all, what do we mean by information architecture?

Information architecture, or IA, can mean different things to different people. To some it’s the sitemap, to others it’s the main navigation, to others something more abstract. 

According to the UX experts at Nielsen Norman, information architecture is both a noun and a verb, referring to both:

 “The practice of deciding how to organize and maintain your content, what the relationships are between each piece of content, and how content is visibly displayed on your website’s navigation” 

and also

 “The website’s structure, its organization, and the nomenclature of its navigation elements. The website’s IA refers to how information is organized, structured, and presented on that website.”

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WCAG 2.2

WCAG 2.2 is now a standard.

That means it’s (probably) now the de facto default against which your website or apps will be judged if a case is brought against you.

Although I would guess most jurisdictions will give you 6-12 months to catch up, depending on the scope of your organisation.

Update your accessibility statements, if you need to. Basic standards are still:

  • Perceivable
  • Operable
  • Understandanle
  • Robust

Under the hood, not much has changed. Biggest updates are on :focus styles, and the visibility of focused elements. Oh, and authentication. Not being able to rely on cognitive challenges is going to be a big change for many organisations.

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On twitter

A screenshot of my Twitter account on 6 October 2023

I rarely use twitter (I refuse Musk’s nomenclature) any more. There are more than enough fascists in real life.

But I saw some posts on Mastodon about how the site has removed headlines from links to news sites. So thought I’d have a look.

The #a11y implications are terrible. There is no link text any more, just an aria-label attribute on an <a> element.

But these also have tabindex=”-1″ meaning, for keyboard users, you can’t focus links using the tab key.

Images have empty alt attributes.

Screenreader users can probably still find them by asking their AT for a list of links.

But many people navigate websites primarily with a keyboard for reasons other than blindness or low vision.

Although this was … not unexpected … it’s still just so disappointing. Twitter had a very good and very active accessibility team who did a lot of good work. They were all fired.

Twitter is degrading its #UX –intentionally – to fulfil the whims of an oligarch.

I’ll not be back.

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Reducing carbon emissions from our websites

Why we are measuring our digital carbon emissions

All online activity generates carbon emissions. Every image downloaded, every click, server call and visit to our site. These types of interactions generate Scope 3 emissions. Lowering these emissions helps Scottish Enterprise towards achieving our Net Zero targets. And, for our users, the user experience is improved, along with SEO, because pages load faster and they use less data interacting with our sites.

Screenshot showing a snapshot of the Beacon report.
Beacon calculation of the SDI home page
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The exporting experience: one year on

At the end of March this year, my colleague Katie wrote a post about some work she had been involved with to improve the exporting user journey on scottish-enterprise.com.

She included some analytics data that seemed to indicate some significant improvements. But she only had 3 months’ worth of data, which makes it hard to draw any firm conclusions.

So we thought now, with a year’s worth of data, would be a good time to look back on what’s changed, what worked, and any opportunities for further improvement.

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How we are improving the application process for customers with accessibility requirements

Introduction 

As an organisation we are  committed to do more testing with people with accessibility needs. This will ensure that our services can be easily accessed by everyone and to meet our legal obligations as a public sector organisation. We aim to recruit participants with accessibility needs in every round of research that we do to ensure that accessibility is considered at every stage of the project. 

We tested extensively the prototype for the Green jobs grant which was launched in the summer of 2021. 

Our goals  

We had a number of aims for this research:

  • To test the application journey with users who have a range of accessibility needs and to find what the challenges were for them in our journey  
  • To get clarity on what areas worked well  
  • We wanted to discover if different needs give conflicting priorities  
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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.

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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
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Love the problem and not the solution

I have all sorts of training and qualifications that help me to design and build awesome solutions. It excites me. I love my job. Which means that I have to sit on the impulse to jump straight to solutions and remember to concentrate on the problem every single day.

The moment you start to design a solution, you are heading down a road that is harder to get off  every day that passes. It is human nature. You invest time, effort and your personal awesomeness in a solution and before long you love it. It can be emotionally painful to ditch it even if it is obviously not the right solution.  (I promise not to start talking about any of my ex’s). Even if you don’t like the solution, it is still hard to throw away the time and money invested in it. It is all too easy to roll out a solution that does not really solve the problem any more. 

The Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge is a tourist icon, but that is just a benefit. The problem it was built to solve was to get across the Golden Gate strait, thus saving the hours it would take to drive round the bay.

If an earthquake knocks the bridge down, the new one might be very different. The solution is variable but the problem is the same.

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We need feedback

Yes, we do.

But what do you mean?

We need to understand why those users don't engage further with our content. We need to get in front of them and ask why they think the way they do. Why aren't they engaging with our content?

A feedback loop
A feedback loop

If those users are 6,000 miles away, that's going to be pretty expensive feedback. Sure, it will be valuable, qualitative feedback. 

But it won't be the most valuable feedback we can get.

Because what people say and what they actually do are two completely different things.

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What digital transformation really means

Taking a digital photograph

First, the bad news: it doesn't mean everyone gets an iPad.

Digital transformation isn't about technology, it's about the change the technology enables.

Think about the railways in the 19th century. You didn't have to be Robert Louis Stevenson to understand that being able to get from Edinburgh to London in day, rather than a week, was a game changer. 

You don't have to be able to design the train, or even ride it, to benefit from it.

Let me give you a picture.

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