This online service delivery business is more complicated than it looks. The postman came. I was out. He left a card to tell me that there was something which needed to be signed for. That means a trip to the sorting office on Saturday to collect it. Or I can go online to arrange for [...]
Paul Clarke had been on a journey. Well two, actually. The first was to get a bit of routine business done with government, updating the photograph on his driving licence. He has written a blow by blow account of how that didn’t work the way it should have done. Follow the link and read it [...]
The best service is the one which disappears. Alan Mather has written an interesting piece about whether government is still doing too much of its own IT. His interest is not in the possibility of further outsourcing, but in letting third parties incorporate services which also provide value to government. He is on to something [...]
Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make people happy – is to ask them. And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people [...]
As services improve, merge and become virtual, they disappear into the cloud. Which is fine when it’s fine, but sometimes the cloud bursts. We are, we hope, creating better ways of getting things done, but we are also unintentionally and perhaps unavoidably creating new ways for systems and services to fail. Those potential failures need [...]
Interaction design is largely about the meaning that people assign to things and events, and how people try to express meanings. So to learn from any tool, interactive or not, go watch people using it. You’ll hear them talk to the tool. You’ll see them assign all sorts of surprising interpretations to shapes, colors, positioning, [...]
Yesterday, as I was going down the stairs on the bus, it jerked to a halt and I nearly lost my balance. It often happens and, as usual, it wasn’t a sudden and necessary reaction to traffic: we had simply arrived at the bus stop. There are some bus drivers whose driving style is calculated [...]
Good services depends on good systems. But good systems do not guarantee good services. The distinction is all too often overlooked, not least by designers of systems and services. The London congestion charge is a fascinating case study of a superbly engineered system supporting a service which has some important deficiencies. I was told a [...]
Somebody drove into my car last week while it was parked outside my house and carried on without stopping. Somebody else, driving just behind, took the trouble to take the registration number of the car and to leave a note on my windscreen. There is both good and evil in the world. That has been [...]
To the post office this morning. Twice: once to queue up to post some parcels and once to queue up somewhere else to collect one. At the post office, the woman in front of me wanted a form to convert her Portuguese driving licence into a British one. Easily done. And she wanted some advice: [...]