The coalition government has been pushing for greater transparency of Council decisions and spending as part of their Localism Bill. So I wasn’t that surprised to read Nick Booth‘s post about a recent press release from Eric Pickles. Pickles has told Councils that they should be allowing hyerplocal bloggers to record public meetings. I’ve heard anecdotes that some Councils refuse to acknowledge hyperlocal bloggers or allow them the same access and rights as local media. [...]

Just a quick plug for an event happening in Cambridge run by Software East, which is focusing on user experience in software design. The event is on Thursday 3rd March from 6-9 pm at Red Gate Software. I was very flattered to be asked along by the organiser Mark Dalgarno to do a short talk on how we’ve embedded user experience design at the Council. I’m looking forward to the other speakers too, which include [...]

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking recently about a approaches to service design in local government in the light of the government’s localism or Big Society agenda. The way I see it there should be a balance between the following elements: Business strategy Let’s face it, business strategy in local government is primarily about cost cutting right now either through streamlining of business processes, use of cheaper channels, selling / transferring assets and working [...]

Since I started using email back in the early 1990′s there have been countless times when I’ve forgotten to attach a file to an email. I know I’m not the only one who suffers from this very common phenomena known as a post completion error. The crazy thing is that errors like this should be considered in the design of software that supports such common tasks as sending an email. Early ATM machines used to [...]

In advance of this year’s fantastic UKGovCamp (aka #ukgc11) I pitched a session idea on lessons learnt from using an Agile project management method to manage web development. My idea for the session arose after some interest in a blog post I wrote recently and the discussion on the UKGovCamp forum thread. So on the day I came armed with my slides and stood in line to pitch my session. I was joined by Stefan [...]

I’ve talked about my MSc dissertation research before on this blog. In fact I originally set up this blog to explore some topics related to my research. Having had a bit of a break after completing my dissertation in August 2010, I have decided to publish it here, spurred on by the kind words of a fellow academic researcher Catherine Howe. My research question was: How do the attitudes and perceptions of citizens, Council officers, Councillors [...]

This Thursday 13th January between 1-4 pm I will be in the hotseat, quite literally! I’m hosting a online question and answer session in the Local by Social Online Conference about the social media project I have been involved with in Fenland, Cambridgeshire. The project aimed to improve engagement with customer groups who were hard to access in Wisbech. The project has been delivered with funding from the Local Government Delivery Council’s Customer Led Transformation programme. [...]

Do you sometimes feel like you are the only one who thinks it’s important to find out how your customers use your organisation’s website? Have you ever read user experience design books where you think “yep that all sounds great, if you’ve got loads of time and a big budget to boot, but how am I going to get agreement from stakeholders to spend time and money on that?” If you feel like you’re struggling [...]

I’m a fan of personas. In the user experience (UX) field, personas are fictional profiles of your users based on research data. Personas can bring your users to life and help guide the design process. Giving your personas names, pictures, personal profiles and using believable narratives will help everyone involved in a project to empathise with user goals, behaviours and motivations in a very tangible way. Personas have been used in web UX design for [...]

There’s been a flurry of conversation on Twitter in the last few days about the potential for the use of agile methods in the public sector. As a result @pubstrat created the hashtag #pubsecagile and started a thread on the UK GovCamp 2011 site. I wrote a post back in November 2009 about some of the potential barriers to introducing agile methods to manage web development projects in a local government context. In the local [...]