Service patterns and why they matter
We’ve just started a new piece of work to identify and explore some of the common service patterns that sit within our services. This is how we're doing it.
Nicholas Ward
I'm lead service designer with the ECC Service Transformation team, working on the design of good services, building capability, service standards and lots of other interesting stuff in #localgov.
You can find me @ncwrd
Empowering Citizens show and talk – Jan 30
We held our first show and talk session on the 30th January to showcase three pieces of service design work, which alongside the Digital Boomers project, form the Empowering Citizens work stream of Essex County Council’s Adults Digital Programme. This was …
Work on something that matters in 2019
Wednesday evening, we and our friends at FutureGov hosted an event to meet with some of the UK's digital service design talent. We told our story and talked about how we're transforming public services in Essex.
Testing design options: Adult Social Care landing page
One of the tools we developed was a ‘Step-by-Step’ guide about adult social care. This had tested really well, so we decided to place a link to it on the top of the landing page for Adult Social Care. But when we tested with users, they struggled to find it. Here's what we learned.
Testing our homepage: navigation
We used website analytics and other research to generate new navigation headings for the ECC website Homepage, and we needed to test how service users responded to these headings and whether they made website content easier to find. Here's what we found.
Show and tell notes: 26 September
This week's show and tell was all about user research. Narelle Ong (formerly of Research and Citizen Insight) joined the team in July as lead user researcher: it's her job to help the team understand what the users need, and …
User testing: creating our own user panel
I’m Narelle Ong and I’m the User Researcher in the Service Design team. It’s my job to help the whole service design team to understand the needs of our users, ensure we have these at the heart of our work, and that everything we build is robustly tested with them. In this post I’ll tell you about developing a pool of testers to support the work of the team.
Show and tell notes: 12th Sept
We had a break from show and tells over the summer and this was the first one of the new ‘term’. Good to see you all! While people have been on their holidays, the service design team have been beavering …
Using GOV.UK Notify to keep you up to date
You can now sign up to receive an email every time we post some new content on this blog - just click the Email link on the right to subscribe. There’s something significant about the way that the subscriptions have …
Rewriting content for people living with dementia
As part of our content redesign work on Living Well Essex, we recently published an updated set of pages about dementia. Dementia is a significant condition. It describes a group of symptoms including memory loss and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving …