Some readers may have noticed that Scottish Enterprise launched a new brand identity recently. Our logo was updated, and our typefaces and colour palettes changed. I’m not a marketer, so that’s not my domain and I have nothing to say about that. But I am a designer. And, when you’re designing communications material, whether it’s a website, an app, a brochure, a poster, a letter … these things matter. They are constraints you have to design within. And yet, you have to produce an experience that’s accessible. ## Helping our content and UX designers Our content and UX designers have to negotiate the intersection of our brand palette and accessibility regulations. So I made a simple thing to see which colour combinations pass accessibility thresholds. It’s just an HTML `<table> `with CSS to set foreground and background colours and text to indicate if it conforms at WCAG2.2. Level AA or AAA. (There’s no Level A conformance for colour contrast, which is a failing IMO.) You can filter the table to isolate which combinations work at level AA or AAA. It’s deliberately and intentionally #inaccessible – first time I’ve done so. The code’s on Github if you’re interested. Luminosity contrast ratios are all based on Gez Lemon’s colour luminosity contrast analyser. David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done * David O'Brien __Should coders design? * David O'Brien __Ain’t no I in AI * David O'Brien __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien __I cycled to work * David O'Brien __The disability myth * David O'Brien __Prototyping in the browser * David O'Brien __Running this website * David O'Brien __Who are we willing to exclude? * David O'Brien __Service Design must die * David O'Brien __What do service designers do? * David O'Brien __Prototyping in html * David O'Brien __Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment * David O'Brien __Aphantasia rocks * David O'Brien __In search of broken combs * David O'Brien __Making our account managers appy * David O'Brien __Applying WCAG principles to service design more generally * David O'Brien __Show your stripes * David O'Brien __Making prototypes in the browser * David O'Brien __Telling a story ## Possibly related * Accessibility - Sharing knowledge between organisations * How to create accessible Word documents * Volunteering * Invisible Disabilities * How many people does it take to design and build a service? * How our UX team is building a new design system

Ahead of our migration of the Scottish Enterprise website to our new design system, the User Experience (UX) team wanted to make some improvements to the information architecture of the site. ## **First of all, what do we mean by information architecture?** Information architecture, or IA, can mean different things to different people. To some it’s the sitemap, to others it’s the main navigation, to others something more abstract. According to the UX experts at Nielsen Norman, information architecture is both a noun and a verb, referring to both: > “The practice of deciding how to organize and maintain your content, what the relationships are between each piece of content, and how content is visibly displayed on your website’s navigation” and also > “The website’s structure, its organization, and the nomenclature of its navigation elements. The website’s IA refers to how information is organized, structured, and presented on that website.” ## Why we wanted to look at our information architecture Over time, the site had grown as more and more content had been added, meaning that: * Some sections had become cluttered, with a large secondary nav and an overwhelming landing page. * Some sections were sparse, with a whole section of the main nav dedicated to just one service or topic * There was no clear place for some of the new content, such as green energy opportunities, hydrogen support and the new missions pages. This content focuses on supporting whole industries rather than specific business problems, so didn’t fit well with our other content * Some sections contained one clear type of content (for example, the events section only contains event listings). But other sections contain mixed types of content (for example, ‘support for businesses’ contains some service description pages, some information pages, some online tools, and links to external support). We didn’t know if this was working for users or not Our new design system allows for a more flexible navigation, including both the main navigation and a new secondary navigation. We took the opportunity to do some research and make some improvements to coincide with the new migrated site. ## How we approached the research We chose to focus on the ‘Support for businesses’ section of the site. This is the area that sees the most traffic, and it’s where most of our service pages sit. For each of our card sorts, we used our user testing platform, Userlytics, and targeted people in the UK who are business owners or senior decision makers. We felt this would give them enough contextual knowledge of business terms to complete the test and give reliable results. ### Part 1 – the open card sort We designed our first card test to be fairly open and exploratory, to give us an idea of: * which pages users think should be grouped together * what sort of headings users give their groups * how users approach categories. Do they put all the funds together, and all events together, or do they sort these into ‘topics’ alongside the support pages? To answer these questions, we created a card for each of the main pages in our ‘support for business’ section. We asked test participants to sort these into 3-7 groups that made sense to them, while avoiding creating groups with only 1 or 2 cards. ### Part 2 – the similarity matrix Using the results from the card sort, we created a similarity matrix. This shows how many times two cards appeared in the same group, with darker colours showing the cards that were most commonly grouped together. Using a gradient colour across the cells made it easy to pick out potential groups. Here’s a screenshot of our similarity matrix, with some potential groupings highlighted: ### Part 3 – defining groups In a Miro board, we started to pull together the cards into sensible groups. As well as the data from the similarity matrix, we used our own contextual knowledge of the content of the pages, user journeys and tasks across our site, and business needs. We gave each group a heading that summarised the type of content within. ### Part 4 – the closed card sort We then ran a follow up card sort, this time using a closed card sort. This means that we defined the group headings, and asked participants to sort the same cards into the groups we provided. This helped us test our hypothesis, and see if participants placed the same cards in each group that we did. For each group, we recorded: * which cards were placed there by the majority of participants * the cards that were split mostly evenly amongst two groups, * cards which appeared mostly in one group, but significantly enough in another group to suggest some cross linking was needed. ### Part 5 – creating a new structure and sharing our research report Using all the data we gained from our tests, we created an updated sitemap for this section of the site. We split the content into 5 sections: * Funding and grants. We kept this section the same, since this content is clearly defined and users mostly sorted it into the same group. We also know from analytics and user research that the majority of people coming to our site are looking for funding * Exports and international markets. We kept this section the same as well. We recently redesigned and optimised this section, so we knew it was already meeting user needs * Innovation, digital and data. This covers all the innovation and ‘tech’ type stuff – developing innovative new products, digital transformation, data driven innovation, and developing products for new markets like the green transition * Grow your business. All our content related to growing, developing and expanding a business – like finding new customers and markets, adopting new business models, planning for succession, getting support as an entrepreneur, and scaling advice * Improve business operations. All our content related to ways of doing business – reducing the costs of doing business, improving sustainability, building resilience, developing people and the workplace, updating manufacturing practises, and improving productivity In some cases we removed secondary navigation pages to move content pages up a level, and in some cases we created new navigation pages to group together similar pages more clearly. You can see the new structure live on the Scottish Enterprise website now. We created a research report documenting the test we ran, how we analysed the data and what decisions we made. We shared this report with key stakeholders and other teams involved in the migration project. ## **Next steps** Information architecture is about so much more than making changes to the structure/navigation of an individual section of the site. This was an interim piece of work aimed at making enough improvements to the IA to help users navigate more easily and to accommodate new content that we know is on the horizon, without making so many changes that it slows down migration due to the need to do extensive research and design work, as well as get additional approval from wider stakeholders. In the next phase of this project, we’ll look at some more fundamental changes to the site. This might involve removing pages, adding new sections, and making more radical changes to the IA, user journeys and strategy. We’ll build on the research and findings from this phase of improvements to drive our decisions about how best to improve the site further for our users. Katie Chambers + postsBio UX Writer/Content Designer in Scottish Enterprise's Analysis & Design team. I help make products and services easier to use by carefully planning, crafting and testing the words they use. This includes content for end-to-end journeys, from UI text like buttons and headings, to messages like validation text or prompts, to longer form articles, guidance and information. * Katie Chambers __Card sorting to improve information architecture * Katie Chambers __Writing for people, not businesses ## Possibly related * How our UX team is building a new design system * How to create accessible Word documents * Accessibility - Sharing knowledge between organisations * 10 things that businesses consistently tell us * A user manual for Lindsay * Let’s green the web

Hidde de Vries explains how to test components for accessibility, from keyboard support to screen readers and zoom.

Photo by Vyshnavi Bisani on Unsplash Historically, we’ve used Google Analytics to measure usage of this website. GA has some advantages: it’s free, for a start, and it’s also the default industry standard. Even gov.uk uses it. But it also has some, in my opinion, fairly major drawbacks. * It may be free for site owners, but there is a cost to users in terms of their privacy * It’s a data source for Google’s big advertising empire * It requires cookies out of the box, which means we need to ask for consent, which we (probably) mostly don’t get, which in turn means * It’s unreliable, and you can’t even know _how_ unreliable * I comes with a big dose of javascript, which has a performance impact So I’ve been thinking for some time that it would be good to be able to find an alternative that addresses at least some of the issues. At the start of October, I uninstalled Google Analytics and replaced it with an alternative package that: * Integrates with our CMS * Runs entirely on our server, not in your browser * Records no personally identifiable information * Stores all data on our server, with no third parties involved * Does not require cookies or any other kind of local storage in clients * Uses no javascript Additionaly, I set the ‘salts’ (long strings of random letters and numbers that represent a unique visitor) to be refreshed every 24 hours as an additional layer of privacy. As there are no cookies, we do not need to ask for consent, so I was also able to disable our cookie consent banner. Another win. ## The results Screenshot of the analytics interface So far, the results seem pretty good. It’s basic and simple, but that’s fine; we don’t need anything more detailed than page views and visitors. We only want to know what content people find most interesting. We don’t want to track people around the site or over the web, we don’t have any campaigns, we don’t need to know about your every interaction. It’s just nice to know that the work that goes in to maintaining and writing for this blog is appreciated. ### Performance benefits As a side benefit, removing the kilobytes of javascript that come with GA has definitely improved this site’s performance. * See monthly analytics data for this site David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done * David O'Brien __Should coders design? * David O'Brien __Ain’t no I in AI * David O'Brien __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien __I cycled to work * David O'Brien __The disability myth * David O'Brien __Prototyping in the browser * David O'Brien __Running this website * David O'Brien __Who are we willing to exclude? * David O'Brien __Service Design must die * David O'Brien __What do service designers do? * David O'Brien __Prototyping in html * David O'Brien __Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment * David O'Brien __Aphantasia rocks * David O'Brien __In search of broken combs * David O'Brien __Making our account managers appy * David O'Brien __Applying WCAG principles to service design more generally * David O'Brien __Show your stripes * David O'Brien __Making prototypes in the browser * David O'Brien __Telling a story ## Possibly related * Accessibility - Sharing knowledge between organisations * Invisible Disabilities * How to create accessible Word documents * We are all one big team, right? * The exporting experience: one year on * Volunteering

Ever wondered what secrets lie in a map? Join us for the Map Festival, a day dedicated to all things cartographic in Edinburgh.

I noticed a comment in a chat today at work, along the lines of: > We used an LLM to categorise the sticky notes from a workshop. It did a really good job, and even colour-coded the notes and aligned them. To which I shrugged, thought “good on you” and went on with my day. Later, another colleague tagged me and asked if it was something we could learn from. I replied, rather gnomically: > The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done. It was a somewhat throwaway comment at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it all day. So I’m trying to round my thoughts up here. ## Why do we do workshops and ideation sessions? The people we recruit to take part in Service Design workshops must, for the most part, find them incredibly tedious. But we do them because they get thoughts, ideas and experiences out of people’s heads and onto paper or digital facsimiles so that everyone else can see them. The people who are actual experts in this specialism. We do that so we can: * Challenge each others’ point of view * Bring everyone’s lived experience to the table * Understand where we agree, and disagree Most importantly, we do this to _make people talk about these things._ I can’t emphasise this enough. The entire point of these sessions is to get people talking to each other. People who have never talked to each other before. Who have never understood, or even been aware of, others’ point of view. ## The doing is the work Sure, you can ask copilot or whatever to sort your ideas. Colour code them. Manoeuvre them into neat columns. But here’s what you’re missing out on: * The nuance you get from those “Oh, I wrote that one …” conversations * The “Is this related to these, or more like this cluster over here?” discussions that drive you deep into the subtleties of what those 5 or 6 words mean * An appreciation of the human frustrations, pains and needs behind every sticky note * The experience of _actually having done this exercise_ And it’s the last point that’s key. Outsourcing this to an LLM (or anything else, for that matter) is a bit like sending them on your holiday instead of going yourself. Sure, you’ll get a nice report, not terrifically well written, maybe even some entirely fabricated photos. But you will not have had the experience. You will not have felt that warm sunshine, tasted that chilled rosé, felt that gentle breeze. When we finish these exercises, we typically create some kind of report or slide deck with key findings. Maybe also some photographic record of the finished board. We play it back, file it away, and in all likelihood no-one – except perhaps an assessor – will ever look at it again. But that’s OK. Because the point in doing the exercise is to do the exercise, not to produce a report. The exercise is the work. The report is a byproduct. It’s just a record that the exercise was done. The real learning is embedded in you, and everyone else collectively who took part. The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done. David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done * David O'Brien __Should coders design? * David O'Brien __Ain’t no I in AI * David O'Brien __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien __I cycled to work * David O'Brien __The disability myth * David O'Brien __Prototyping in the browser * David O'Brien __Running this website * David O'Brien __Who are we willing to exclude? * David O'Brien __Service Design must die * David O'Brien __What do service designers do? * David O'Brien __Prototyping in html * David O'Brien __Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment * David O'Brien __Aphantasia rocks * David O'Brien __In search of broken combs * David O'Brien __Making our account managers appy * David O'Brien __Applying WCAG principles to service design more generally * David O'Brien __Show your stripes * David O'Brien __Making prototypes in the browser * David O'Brien __Telling a story ## Possibly related * It's good to talk * A new life in the unknown * The places and people we remember * A user manual for Lindsay * How we used the Good Services Scale to evaluate the… * Design content first ... who would have thought of that?

Transforming public services to businesses in Scotland

Transforming public services to businesses in Scotland

I noticed a comment in a chat today at work, along the lines of: > We used an LLM to categorise the sticky notes from a workshop. It did a really good job, and even colour-coded the notes and aligned them. To which I shrugged, thought “good on you” and went on with my day. Later, another colleague tagged me and asked if it was something we could learn from. I replied, rather gnomically: > The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done. It was a somewhat throwaway comment at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it all day. So I’m trying to round my thoughts up here. ## Why do we do workshops and ideation sessions? The people we recruit to take part in Service Design workshops must, for the most part, find them incredibly tedious. But we do them because they get thoughts, ideas and experiences out of people’s heads and onto paper or digital facsimiles so that everyone else can see them. The people who are actual experts in this specialism. We do that so we can: * Challenge each others’ point of view * Bring everyone’s lived experience to the table * Understand where we agree, and disagree Most importantly, we do this to _make people talk about these things._ I can’t emphasise this enough. The entire point of these sessions is to get people talking to each other. People who have never talked to each other before. Who have never understood, or even been aware of, others’ point of view. ## The doing is the work Sure, you can ask copilot or whatever to sort your ideas. Colour code them. Manoeuvre them into neat columns. But here’s what you’re missing out on: * The nuance you get from those “Oh, I wrote that one …” conversations * The “Is this related to these, or more like this cluster over here?” discussions that drive you deep into the subtleties of what those 5 or 6 words mean * An appreciation of the human frustrations, pains and needs behind every sticky note * The experience of _actually having done this exercise_ And it’s the last point that’s key. Outsourcing this to an LLM (or anything else, for that matter) is a bit like sending them on your holiday instead of going yourself. Sure, you’ll get a nice report, not terrifically well written, maybe even some entirely fabricated photos. But you will not have had the experience. You will not have felt that warm sunshine, tasted that chilled rosé, felt that gentle breeze. When we finish these exercises, we typically create some kind of report or slide deck with key findings. Maybe also some photographic record of the finished board. We play it back, file it away, and in all likelihood no-one – except perhaps an assessor – will ever look at it again. But that’s OK. Because the point in doing the exercise is to do the exercise, not to produce a report. The exercise is the work. The report is a byproduct. It’s just a record that the exercise was done. The real learning is embedded in you, and everyone else collectively who took part. The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done. David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __The point of the doing is the doing, not what gets done * David O'Brien __Should coders design? * David O'Brien __Ain’t no I in AI * David O'Brien __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien __I cycled to work * David O'Brien __The disability myth * David O'Brien __Prototyping in the browser * David O'Brien __Running this website * David O'Brien __Who are we willing to exclude? * David O'Brien __Service Design must die * David O'Brien __What do service designers do? * David O'Brien __Prototyping in html * David O'Brien __Good Services Scale: an interactive assessment * David O'Brien __Aphantasia rocks * David O'Brien __In search of broken combs * David O'Brien __Making our account managers appy * David O'Brien __Applying WCAG principles to service design more generally * David O'Brien __Show your stripes * David O'Brien __Making prototypes in the browser * David O'Brien __Telling a story ## Possibly related * It's good to talk * A new life in the unknown * The places and people we remember * A user manual for Lindsay * How we used the Good Services Scale to evaluate the… * Design content first ... who would have thought of that?

Writing alternate text for non-text can be hard. This widget can help you decide which approach to take. Alt text decide-o-matic This application requires javascript. Please make sure javascript is enabled in your browser’s settings. About this This decision tree will help you understand how best to include text alternatives for image-based content. It is based on the W3C’s alt text decision tree. All errors are mine. Give feedback, tell me what’s broken, by leaving a comment here, or via Mastodon. Start now Does the image contain text? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the text also present as real text nearby? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the text only shown for visual effects? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Does the text have a specific function, for example as an icon? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the text in the image not present otherwise? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the image used in a link or a button, and would it be hard or impossible to understand what the link or the button does, if the image wasn’t there? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Does the image contribute meaning to the current page or context? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the image a simple graphic or photograph? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the image a a graph or complex piece of information? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Does the image show content that is redundant to real text nearby? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next Is the image purely decorative or not intended for the user? Yes No Next Please select either Yes or No, then click Next ## Use alt=”” Use an empty alt attribute. See Decorative Images. Start over ## Communicate the function Use the alt attribute to communicate the function of the image. See Functional Images. Start over ## Include the text Use the alt attribute to include the text of the image. See Images of Text. Start over ## Communicate the destination of the link Use the alt attribute to communicate the destination of the link or action taken. See Functional Images. Start over ## Briefly describe the image Use a brief description of the image in a way that conveys that meaning in the alt attribute. See Informative Images. Start over ## Include the information elsewhere Include the information contained in the image elsewhere on the page. See Complex Images. Start over ## Use alt=”” Use an empty alt attribute. See (redundant) Functional Images. Start over David O'Brien Website | + postsBio I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years. * David O'Brien __Should coders design? * David O'Brien __Ain’t no I in AI * David O'Brien __No more cookies for you * David O'Brien __I cycled to work ## Possibly related * Providing text alternatives for non-text content * How to create accessible Word documents * Showing your users' journeys as a Tube map * How many people does it take to design and build a service? * 10 things that businesses consistently tell us * Writing for people, not businesses

Making sure everyone who needs your service can use it as easily as possible.