My Best Life

Image

Support solutions for young people by hosting us!

Kathryn Dingle

Support new digital solutions for young people by hosting our design sprints. We are working to increase young people’s ability to access youth services. To do this, we need your help. We are on the hunt for someone to host our upcoming design sprints, throughout March and April 2020 What is the project? My Best Life is an open digital project that aims to: help young people so they are better able to identify and navigate services available to them. help the charity sector to improve services or access to services for young people. help the charity sector to make… Read more “Support solutions for young people by hosting us!”

Weeknotes: w/c 16-12-19

Kathryn Dingle

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”
4

The unintended consequences of tech solutions

Kathryn Dingle

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”

Evaluating user involvement (part 2)

Kathryn Dingle

Today I am thinking about evaluating the project again. Our thinking has moved on from my last post, to think about how we evaluate the whole project. Yesterday, we met with Matt Kepple from Makerble (a consultancy focused on improving your impact through technology), to find out more about their products and if/how My Best Life and Makerble could work together. Their platforms have the functionality to have shared dashboards across a partnership, with the ability to live update your progress towards your goals and share your learning for each of the goals as you go. We are excited about… Read more “Evaluating user involvement (part 2)”

Using hills in product design

Kathryn Dingle

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”

Getting rid of the research phase: moving from thinking to doing with My Best Life

Alex Green

On Friday I had a call with Helen O’Connor from the Prince’s Trust and Maddie Dinwoodie from UK Youth to discuss the My Best Life programme. It started me thinking about how we fit together good quality user research with a codesign process that delivers workable prototypes within the budget—in the words of Stanford d.school’s Bernie Roth: keeping both a bias toward action and empathy toward who you’re designing for. It also made me reflect on some of the challenges I’ve faced when doing upfront scoping research in the past. I think the answer is about rethinking what we had… Read more “Getting rid of the research phase: moving from thinking to doing with My Best Life”
2

UX design thinking for co-design

Kathryn Dingle

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”
1

Should we build an app?

Charlotte Lamb

Today, I’ve been at ‘Ignites’, NPC’s annual conference. Our Digital Lead, Alex Green ran a session called ‘Should you build an app?’. He said that there are over four million apps out there – which sounds like a lot to me! He also made the point that apps don’t just cost money to develop, but they cost a lot of money to run, promote, and upgrade. So building an app isn’t always the answer! And there might be another digital solution to a problem. Alex took us through several tools used in the UX world to think about tackling user… Read more “Should we build an app?”