Scottish Enterprise Design blog
Transforming public services to businesses in Scotland
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.
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.
Continue reading “How to create inclusive personas, without creating inclusive personas”
Reading Time: 5 minutesOn Friday 6 November the Digital First Service Design team packed up post-its, whiteboards, sharpie pens and blue tac from our Paisley offices and set up shop at the UKTI Explore Export event in Edinburgh.
We’ve been busy over the last few months, developing and launching the new Export Health Check.
In September we launched our first version of the tool on the SE website. Based on results of customer testing on Version 1, we made changes to the design and how the content is displayed on both desktop and mobile versions.
So, it was time to give Version 2 a thorough road test and get real-time feedback from exactly the customers that we built the tool for. The Explore Export event gave us the opportunity to get in front of more than 200 of those customers in one hit.
Getting to know and understand our customers is fundamental to my role as Export Product Owner. It’s my job to represent their voice in all the digital export services we develop.
Reading Time: 3 minutesIn the 1930s, the German physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed a thought experiment.
I’ll spare you the detail, as it was an experiment about quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics is a bit weird. And it involved a cat, in a box, which may, or, may not, have been alive, or dead, or possibly both, or possibly neither.
But the upshot was this: If you have an equal chance of an event happening or not happening, a cat my or may not be alive or dead. And you won’t know which is actually happening until you look, at which point you destroy the possibility of the outcome you did not observe and therefore make the outcome you did observe real.
Schrodinger concluded that, until you actually observe the outcome, the cat is neither dead nor alive, but both.
I told you quantum mechanics was weird.
Continue reading “Personas: fact or fiction? Answer: neither, and both”