We ran a design sprint over five consecutive days in February 2025. We’ll share the outcomes from the sprint in another blog. Here we’ll be exploring running the sprint itself, what went well and what we’d do differently next time. …
Today was all about user research. We started the morning with a ‘stand up’ with the team and senior managers from corporate development. This 15 minute conversation is one of the daily tools of agile working, the idea being that …
Today we started the one-week design sprint. We learnt about framing problems, mapping services from a user perspective and identifying pain points and opportunities. It's been a great first day. We also shared the brief that the team are going …
If we want to create public services fit for the 21st century, we have to give our staff the tools to make it happen. That’s why we’re trialling an initiative called the Futures Academy, a learning experience that gives staff …
This week’s show and tell focussed on things we’re doing to better understand our users. Nic Ward and Helen West presented the User testing lab workshops they, and other members of ECC, have been doing and James Pallister & Sheila …
This week, we're in the user testing lab, in an effort to better understand why our users act the way they do. This involves watching how people actually behave when using our websites
This week’s show and tell included sessions on website accessibility and the Futures Academy project, as well as some discussions around work already published by the service design team. We were also trying out a new, slightly roomier venue in …
Over the past few weeks, the content designers on the Service Design team have been rewriting parts of the Essex County Council websites. It’s about trying to understand what people are looking for, and working out how best to communicate that, in the most economical way possible.
In early March we started the process of reviewing and testing the content of a chunk of the information advice and guidance on the Essex.gov.uk and Living Well websites. Last week we published the first batch of pages that went through that process.
At this week’s show and tell we heard about 2 pieces of work that showcased the ‘test, learn and improve’ approach that we try to take to all of our work.
It feels like an exciting time in the service design team. We’re coming to the end of our first significant piece of work. We’ve had time - and produced sufficient work - to meaningfully reflect on what we’ve learnt so far, and these observations are feeding into our preparation for the next phase of work.