29 Oct 2017, by Calum Shepherd
I popped along to a conference for product people in Birmingham last week. Canvas Conference was brimming with great stories from people working in the product space. It included speakers from companies such as Thriva, Microsoft Research, Starling Bank and Monzo this year.
However, I’m not sure I was prepared for one of the presentations - nor were quite a few others whom attended.
Emotionally, it was a bit of a rollercoaster.
Haiyan Zhang is an Innovation Director at Microsoft Research. Haiyan works with people to identify where technology could improve or enrich their daily lives, where medical conditions put them at a disadvantage.
Haiyan talked about quite a few things, including a new platform for participants, and the need for making solutions financially viable further down the line.
Parkinsons is a disease affecting 10 million people worldwide, and leads to a loss of motor control.
There is no cure.
I know first hand the effects that this disease has on a human being. It’s been close to me since I was a young boy. It has the ability to strip back all the things you cherish.
So, it was getting into Project Emma that was the most striking for me. It’s ambition was to help Emma, a women diagnosed with early on-set Parkinsons, write and draw again - giving her back a little of what had been taken away.
Haiyan and her team spent vital time sitting with Emma to better understand the importance drawing plays in her life, and more widely how Parkinsons has affected her daily life. Haiyan and her team worked day and night for months to better understand the problem and explore a solution to help Emma.
Remarkable, right?
It’s helped remind me that we all have a role to play. I guess most of us shape solutions for the majority of people, however people and their needs are heterogeneous - with all the complexity that brings.
We have a responsibility to those who have different levels of ability, or who need support to see the benefits that the things we build bring to people.
It’s why research, analytics and how we build things are so important to do right by our users - whoever they are.
C
17 Jul 2017, by Calum Shepherd
It’s time to break the blogging drought with a hands on post.
When producing an information architecture for a recent website our team decided use mind mapping techniques, as opposed to opting for a more conventional site-tree.
“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable” - IA Institute
We decided to use software to help us achieve this. It would have been ideal for us to use a physical space to collaborate. However, one wasn’t available - so we thought this the next best solution.
MindNode2 is a nice little application available from the Mac App Store. It became a our primary method to visualise our early thoughts both within the team, with stakeholders and with users.
You can add nodes as and when new information or topics become available through user research, search demand, conversations with stakeholders and insights from subject matter experts.
Diagram Tips
- Line Colours - separate different topics, or to highlight different audiences
- Line Weightings - suggest the volume or the complexity of the information
- Arrows - highlight related nodes, or vital cross-linking
- Node Types - suggest the type of content (e.g. video, image etc)
- Notes - explain where it came from e.g. user research
You can then create a couple of additional main nodes to act as a legend.
It’s all vague enough that people won’t mistake it for a final piece of work. It’s also flexible enough that if you move things around all the nodes will dynamically move and resize.
You can read more about information architecture on Web Designer Depot
So, have a go and let me know how you get on.
28 Dec 2015, by Calum Shepherd
I love the definition of data provided by Google - data, in philosophy is “things known or assumed as facts, making the basis of reasoning or calculation”.
There is something beautiful about this definition. It creates a relationship between things assumed as facts and their usage as a source for reasoning - ultimately helping us to make educated decisions.
Reasoning is “the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way”.
We know data is fundamental to what we consider to be good user centred design. However using the wrong data is sometimes worse than having no data at all, as it can support questionable decisions and go unnoticed for quite some time. When we use the wrong data to create solutions, we can get stuck in a loop of uneducated change - the opposite of what we are attempting to achieve through true iteration.
change is “an act or process through which something becomes different”
whereas;
iteration is “the repetition of a process or utterance as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to achieve a solution”
So to really improve things we need to iterate - which can only happen if we use the right data at the right time. Our methods should be providing us with data that fuels reasoning and educates decision making - not having us bark up the wrong tree.
Understanding and proposing likely user behaviour can be tough at the best of times. Understanding the available methods, what they will provide and how to converge data seems vital.
For example, pulling some numbers out of Google Analytics is meaningless without context, which may or may not come from other sources. Context could be whether or not a filter is applied to the data. Or, it could be to find out why people are doing something, not just what they are doing.
It is also important to strike the right cadence with any research. Stages like ’research’ and ’measure’ aren’t optional, although can sometimes be seen as such - we just need to dial up or down the intensity to make it practical on a regular basis.
Thus, it feels more important than ever to ensure we get the basics right; collecting the right data, at the right time, with the right people involved to present back a series of assumed facts that help us make more educated decisions.
I have a feeling my phrase of 2016 will be ‘assumed facts’.
Have a great New Year!
05 Oct 2015, by Calum Shepherd
Thursday saw the annual occurrence of Marketing Society Scotland’s Digital Day take place at Glasgow Drygate.
Arriving slightly late and a little flustered after morning meetings, I hadn’t quite had the chance to fully digest the agenda.
What I found was a great line up of speakers with carefully chosen talks to cover a spread of topics. I would suspect that there was something for everyone who has an interest in digital, marketing or business.
Missed the event? Alan Barr, Digital Director of The Big Partnership kindly made available his highlights over on their blog (thanks for the mention Alan!).
I was pleased to be asked to join the afternoon session to listen to the experiences of others and to share my own. Thanks for being so open. Here are my soundbites:
- digital hides a modern business strategy, it’s the convergence of things like marketing, communications, change and technology - don’t expect chief digital officers to be around in 10 years
- we have to accept we won’t always be able to directly shape the experience for users. Content is being taken out of context and presented back to users through search engines and personal assistants. So, focus on structured data and help shape this
- there is a huge agenda for further digital participation, so hopefully we will see further prominence from older people in the digital space
- people in digital marketing teams have often arrived directly into the digital space. So, it’s important for them to remember that numbers represent people, so get out from behind the desk!
I was thankful to be able to catch some fantastic afternoon talks as well. Tom Ollerton from We Are Social with his pitch for social thinking, not social media and Tiffany St James both showing why they are industry figures.
See you all next year.
16 Jun 2015, by Calum Shepherd
I was delighted to speak about our learnings so far building something from nothing through empowerment, agile and responsive methods, whilst on our journey towards better public services.
With information spread across 160+ organisations, 480+ websites and over 6 million content items - the scale is staggering.
With 6 million content items, we actually have more content items than people
Think about putting yourself in the shoes of a user. What does this landscape looks like to traverse? It will likely start at Google and get muddy from there on.
Our work towards a central point of access is shaped upon user research and performance analysis, but it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.
So, what are our learnings so far?
- Understand the benefit of multigenerational organisations, explore tensions and build bridges
- Adapt and tailor principles that are a good fit for your team and environment
- Get together regularly - in person. It will increase visibility, reduce tensions, create connections and deliver better solutions
- Empowerment ≠ direction. Remove blockers, empower teams to make decisions and be clear on the direction of travel
- Mind the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) - it might just be you
- It’s amazing how much free feedback you get online, from very clever people. Increase transparency and overcome your fear of criticism
I was keen to make the point that we truely are on the brink of something special in the public sector. We have the opportunity to transform our enviroments and the way deliver services.
In regards to the books I mentioned:
The slides are available on Speakerdeck - ‘We are moving the cheese’.