John was Head of user research at the Government Digital Service, and Head of the user research community across government.
His work was to improve user research practices across government, and build the growing community of user researchers in departments and agencies.
He also edited this blog.
How can we include all kinds of users in our research, including those who may be harder to reach or reluctant to take part?
Last year we ran a short workshop with the user researchers who assess government services against the digital by default service standard.
I love walls. I love them so much I once gave a talk about them, using a wall. And I know you love them too.
If I had to guess, I'd say that for government services, 60% of our user research and design effort is about the words we use.
We love a good experience map. When we're doing Discovery for new services, they're a great way to communicate what we learn about our users' current experience.
In agile, we find that user research works best when we do research in every sprint.
The programme to redesign and rebuild 25 exemplar services is now nearly 2 years old. We have 8 services live and 15 services in different stages of beta.
The digital inclusion team at GDS recently published the digital inclusion scale.
Have you heard the story about the chicken and the pig? The chicken is having a meal in a restaurant with her friend, the pig. "We can cook better food than this," she says, "we should open our own restaurant." …
The amazing new GDS research studio at Aviation House has both Windows and Mac computers, allowing our research participants to choose the system they're most familiar with.