This is a story of joined up government. This is a story of not very joined up government. It is quite a long story: there are well over a thousand words here, describing a bit of activity which took no more than a few minutes to do. There are no heroes in this story, but [...]
I went to two events yesterday. The first was the launch of the Government Digital Service, or rather a housewarming party for their shiny new offices. In fine agile tradition, they put on a slick show and tell with short sharp presentations about their work and achievements topped and tailed by Francis Maude, Mike Bracken [...]
We can never be a normal user of our own services. We can temper that by being self-conscious in reflecting on our experiences as users of other people’s. But even that tacitly assumes that we are like normal users, other than in our expertise as providers of a particular service. But that assumption may be [...]
We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer. Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to [...]
In the continuing fight for the greater availability of public information, it may seem churlish to observe that sometimes what’s wanted is not more information, but less. The picture above shows a typical display on a Countdown sign at a London bus stop. This particular stop has buses from two routes. At a quick glance, [...]
My dishwasher has a bit of whatever the white goods equivalent is of bling. It has a display panel on the front conveying mostly irrelevant information fairly inefficiently. I assume it is intended to communicate whizzy modernity; it certainly doesn’t communicate much useful information. It cycles through three screens in, only one of which tells [...]
A new e-petitions site for government was launched yesterday. It is clean, simple and elegant, with clear government branding consistent with other cross-government sites. So far so good. But managing a cross government service is a tricky business, for reasons I have explored before. Government is a veneer that sits above departments, and like any [...]
Many years ago, I used to work with somebody who in a previous life had been a restaurant manager. One of the lessons she had taken from that experience was how to say goodbye. At the beginning of a restaurant meal, people are where they want to be. They are there for an experience, and [...]
There has been a lot of work in recent years on ways of improving the process of public consultation. It’s not something about which I have any great expertise or direct involvement, but I am conscious of great efforts to produce consultation material in forms which are not just useful and accessible themselves, but which [...]
I went a couple of weeks ago to a fascinating discussion about the nature of service design, organised around a book published last year called This is Service Design Thinking. The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference [...]