I’ve had the privilege and responsibility of assessing the design of UK government services since 2017. I previously wrote about the history of the Service Standard. In this post I’m writing about being a responsible Service Standard assessor, based on my experience as a design assessor. Service Standard assessors Service Standard assessments happen…

Back in 2021, I was invited to share 200 words about going from the private to public sector as a designer for a GDS blog post. Being something of an overachiever, I wrote 3 different takes on what I’d learned. Only the first one (‘from doing it all to trusting…

I’ve had the privilege and responsibility of assessing the design of UK government services since 2017. In a series of posts (no promises right now about when and how!), I’m going to dig out some of the things I’ve learned. This one is about history. I’ve previously written about the…

Between April and October 2022, most weeks I did a 600 mile same day roundtrip by train between my home in Newcastle and my workplace in London. All of that travel meant that I had to learn how to do it well. …

The value of timelines as maps. — I love maps. I love making maps. And I love that people make many different types of maps. Journey maps, relationship maps. Affinity maps. However, one I don’t see many of are timelines. I’m not sure why. It could be because they involve a lot of desk research to do…

Lessons from the SVA Design Writing and Research summer intensive In June 2021 I spent 2 weeks on Zoom on an intense but rewarding online course. Here are 5 things that I learned. 1. Design criticism is about being bold¹ Have a point of view. Don’t cede your power to an interviewee. Don’t hedge, be bold. All…

When it should be interaction designer and content designer. — This is inspired by Adam Silver’s blog post “Interaction designers: how well do you work with developers and content designers?”. I want to focus on a particular anti-pattern that he talks about, namely where the content person just ‘does the words’. I’ve seen this happen a lot and would describe…

I’ve been involved with a lot of GOV.UK Service Standard assessments. For those that aren’t familiar with these assessments, they are checkpoints to make sure that new digital services in development for UK government meet certain standards across user research, design, technology, and ways of working. …

I’ve been using the GOV.UK prototype kit since 2016. Over that time I’ve done a few large services (the largest at nearly 200 screens) and a few where I had to do it fast. Over this time I’ve cobbled together my own playbook of efficiency techniques. This post is aimed…