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
Most people, at some point in their lives, will spend a lot of their time looking after someone. Whether it’s a mum or a dad, an aunt or an uncle, or a friend down the road, looking after someone is …
I recently took part in design activity around the Essex website alpha and Futures Academy. This work has made me reflect about how the purposeful introduction of risk within the design process can help create better solutions in a way that established ways of working do not.
We made it to day five! After our final stand up the team shared their experiences from yesterday of prototyping with Essex residents and thought about what they’d want to do next to further test their ideas. We spent the …
We had our biggest turn out at this morning’s stand up. There is a growing interest in what we’re doing and conversations are already starting about how this would work for other teams, which is really exciting. After the stand …
Great to see new faces at this morning’s stand up. The team are looking forward to seeing more members of Corporate Development and the wider organisation at tomorrow’s stand up and Friday’s show and tell. Our first activity was to …
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’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 …