Learning from life on NICU
“Domm, I think my waters have broken” Five weeks early, in the middle of the night, when we were due to have a bunch of work done on the house in the next week If I’d been more awake, a swear word might have crept into my head instead I felt like I was about to pass...
The ambiguity of being a designer
One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past year is that being a ‘designer’ is hugely ambiguous and can be very confusing for people. UX designer, interaction designer, product designer, service designer. It’s not exactly obvious what these involve is it?...
Moving into a post MVP world
The term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has been a staple of software development for the past 20 years. The premise of an MVP helps us to build in small parts while reducing wasted effort and helping us to fail fast. In theory, it is the perfect way of enabling teams...
Designing internal systems
Designing internal facing systems, that have been procured from external third parties, can be a lonely experience in an organisation and wider community that is so focussed on providing quality services for citizens. A massive issue can arise when trying to...
Staying alert is a key skill
Being a designer can be hard. The subjective nature of design means that everyone is a critic. This can be a great benefit, as feedback from others is a powerful way of improving your design work and methods. The downside is that there are times where you can feel a...
We need to talk about accessibility
When we first started to design the Stockport Council website, we did so with the idea of trying to make it suitable for as many people as we possibly could.
‘We don’t know what we want, but we want it tomorrow’
For the best part of the past 12 months, I’ve been leading the User Experience (UX) design team at Stockport Council. We’re a fledgling group of designers with visions of making the council the figurehead of digital transformation in local government and beyond.
Placing users at the heart of the Council’s design process
User testing, however, forms part of a wider design process – known as user centred design (UCD). In its most basic form, UCD is as simple as the experiences it aims to deliver. It revolves around the idea of four steps – research, concept, design and evaluate.
‘Guerrilla testing’ the new citizen dashboard
As a User Experience (UX) Designer, I am focussed on making sure that the user remains at the core of everything that we create and make available to the public. We hope that by concentrating on user needs from the earliest opportunity, the idea will become intrinsically part of the Council’s online services in the future.