[Part 8 of my series on language and service design] In 2011 I created a bilingual interactive government website. It used WordPress, although it was a custom approach to WordPress designed to make it scalable for national use and get around some of the performance scale issues that WordPress had at the time. When we created a bilingual approach using WordPress, I checked to see if …
[Part 7 of my series on language and service design] I’ve been involved in some way with Welsh language services produced by central Westminster government departments, British government agencies based in Wales, the devolved Welsh Government, local government in Wales, the voluntary sector in Wales, and arms-length bodies based entirely in England. There are other organisations involved in producing services in the languages of Welsh and …
[Part 6 of my series on language and service design] I had done some guerrilla testing before I joined government but the first time I set up a formal programme of user testing on a new website it ended up being late on in the process on the first government project I’d been involved in. At the time I naively thought that any user testing …
[Part 5 of my series on language and service design] How do you translate something exactly? As someone on Twitter said recently, translated works are basically rewritten. My favourite example of this, and also my favourite Wikipedia page, is how you might translate an expression indicating heavy rain. In Welsh, we say that “it’s raining old ladies and sticks” – mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd …
[Part 2 of my series on language and service design] I need to say up front that this post is not an apologetic for half-hearted, non-committal, or box ticking language adherence. But almost all sites with multilingual content that is not static (i.e. created once and never changed until the site dies) have unequal amounts of content in the different languages involved. If, as I …
It’s 1987 or 1988. I’m in the last year of attending primary school in a small Mid-Wales village. My school has an English language and a Welsh language section. In a school with only five teachers, most activities from the playground to the school play involve all of us, irrespective of language. We’re on a school trip to an army assault course, designed for training …
I’ve heard a few presentations, podcasts and the like recently that have referenced Assisted Digital and Service Design. This hasn’t felt right. And I think the reason for this is that I don’t believe that the two concepts can co-exist. Service Design assumes that you consider the entire service from the outset, regardless of delivery channel (hence the renaming of the Digital Service Standard to …
It’s easy to rush into changing a service to meet the demands of a post-COVID 19 world in lockdown but it’s worth pausing before making changes. Failing to consider users risks wasting resource by providing a service that won’t be used because it’s not accessible. Even worse, it could mean that we unknowingly increase the isolation or exclusion of our most vulnerable users by introducing …
My manager had asked to talk to me. The conversation we had was one of those conversations that you dream about as a product manager. When I say “dream”, I mean wake up early in the morning wondering what on earth you’ve let yourself in for. She started with “you’re not doing much at the moment are you, Matt?” and then swiftly followed up with …
You are part of a successful multi-disciplinary team working in a user centered and iterative way. A stakeholder – not a user – in the service your team manages gets in touch with feedback. What’s your first reaction? It’s probably to tell them to go away. This reaction may be even more vigorously expressed when the feedback betrays a lack of understanding about how your …
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