Public Strategist

It looks like a simple and clever solution. But in UI design, very often familiar beats clever. Stefano Attardi, commenting on Leah Culver’s post, Log in or sign up? (via @marxculture)

Designing user interfaces is almost always harder than it looks. Designing the user interface of government is an enormous challenge, but getting it right can yield enormous benefits. Ed Felten

I don’t often write posts recommending specific sites.  In fact I don’t think I have ever written a post just to recommend a specific site, but I have been meaning to write something about Lauren Currie’s Red Jotter for a while. Lauren is a designer – but she is a designer of services, somebody who [...]

The idea of user-centred design is now so prevalent that it scarcely needs any introduction.  In this modern world of customer focus, who could be against it?  I am in no position to knock it –  this blog has a set of posts labelled user-led design.  There is a risk, though, that it all gets [...]

The Design Council asked some managers of public services and some designers to think of the last time a public service made them smile – and then got a cartoonist to capture the thoughts.  There’s a selection of them here – together with links to the public service design project of which it is a [...]

A couple of days before Christmas, I went to buy some cheese.  So did a lot of other people.  The queue was out of the door and well down the street.  Inside, the initial impression was of utter chaos:  there were twelve people serving in a space which could comfortably accommodate about four.  Lindsey Schechter [...]

At best — when derived with care — the requirements might reflect what users want. More commonly, however, they reflect the desires of user “representatives” who are too far removed from the coalface to know the details of the real work. In any case, what users want and what users need are two different things, [...]

User-testing does not result in brilliant design. That requires brilliant designers. User testing guarantees that whatever level of design a company has been able to achieve will actually work. Bruce Tognazzini – comparing the iphone and the kindle.  And he goes on to say that: There are no trade-offs here. Human/machine interaction is a subset [...]

I suspect that the airline congratulates itself on its customer insight and, for all I know, acts on it to improve the service. But while they clearly have a lot of customer research, they have deprived themselves of the opportunity to get insight.

Tom Steinberg offers six tips on how to set up organisations like his own mySociety.  I find the last two the most immediately appealing: 5. If you aren’t pissing off at least some people all the time, you’ve probably been captured by the establishment. 6. Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% [...]