My reflections on the week Happy December – I am keen to share my reflections each week, so from now on, I will be sharing week notes on the progress of My Best Life. What did I get up to? What have I learnt? This week i have been working behind the scenes to ensure our design sprints are run effectively and our partnership is confirmed. We are currently grappling with what type of legal agreement allows us to have both accountability and the flexibility and shared authority across the collaboration. We started with a memorandum of understanding but felt… Read more “Weeknotes: w/c 16-12-19”

This week I have been doing a lot of thinking about the unintended consequences of UX design and technology. This is something that has come up quite a bit lately. I believe we should think about it when designing anything, but I am particularly geeking out about it around technology. Design and technology can be really helpful to solve a problem facing users or companies, but often we don’t stop to think about the knock on effects of what this could mean in the future or for others in the system. We should look to preempt the impact of our… Read more “The unintended consequences of tech solutions”

Recently I attended the Eleks Product Design Meetup. The meet up was focused on ‘building value through customer-centricity.’ Marion Summerville, Principal Product Designer at Pivotal Software gave a fantastic presentation on ‘Hills.’ This was a completely new concept for me. IBM defines a hill as: ‘statements of intent written as meaningful user outcomes. They tell you where to go, not how to get there, empowering teams to explore breakthrough ideas without losing sight of the goal.’ Hills are used by teams to communicate the intention for the project/product. They focus on the outcomes of fixing a ‘problem,’ rather than on… Read more “Using hills in product design”

Last week I attended an introduction to UX Design workshop by General Assembly. This got me thinking about to apply UX design, not only to our digital product, but how this relates to the process of co-design we will be taking. Most talk about user involvement in designing services, and only think of UX/UI design when thinking about producing digital products. However, UX design can be applied to any interaction a user has with a service or product. There are many ways to define UX design, but they all centre around the idea of designing systems that meet the objectives… Read more “UX design thinking for co-design”

So far, this phase of My Best Life has been funded by a generous grant from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. As this is a collaborative project, we expect a significant proportion of our budget for this project to go to partners delivering the work with us. However, it is difficult to allocate funding to partners when the scope of the work is still being defined. At the same time – we don’t expect partners to work on this without adequate resources to do so! So, we are breaking various parts of the project down into stages. We have started by… Read more “Budgeting an agile, collaborative project”