@martinjordan.com
Making services work better for all people—Head of Design & User Research at the German govt’s Digital Service, previously Head of #ServiceDesign at the UK’s Government Digital Service, int’l #GovDesign community co-lead, 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 ally martinjordan.com
Tell @benaldo.bsky.social to update the Service Standard and rewrite the Service Manual.
For real.
It’s the longest gap between updates ever, anyway.
To start with: A short section on dual track development with some posts on the ‘Services in Government’ blog to collect and share current practice
“
#Accessibility practitioners see the effectiveness of automated tools as significantly more limited, estimating that only 20 to 40% of potential barriers can be technically detected. Several experts […] report from extensive field tests that automated checks detect only 4 to 10% of actual problems
Diagram of the dual-track process: Two parallel tracks, discovery (analysis & design) and delivery (implementation & testing), are connected by feedback loops.
How have you parallelised discovery and delivery?
My colleagues Charlotte and Franziska just blogged about how we follow a dual track approach at @digitalservice.bund.de.
Cause no handovers, you know!
👇🏻
digitalservice.bund.de/blog/vom-pro...
A very long widescreen ad for the district office of Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg with its logo, showing a youngish man with curly hair and round glasses in front of green trees and bushes, big letters in different colours say: “Work as you are.”
Very simple and little context, but I somehow like the job ads for Berlin’s borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg’s district office.
Language
Did you actually read the article, as it offers examples of circumstances in which the wording is indeed only offensive?
Close-up of five stacked honey coloured birch stools, some with cute detail illustrations of Forest ghosts
Top-down view on a honey coloured stool with etched hand-drawn illustrations of Moomin characters
Full view of a honey coloured stool displayed on a white background — it has detailed hand-drawn illustrations on its sitting area and 3 legs
Detail of a 3 legged honey coloured stool with various cartoon characters etched into its wood
I’m a little obsessed with #AlvarAalto ‘s #stool60 – to the slight annoyance of my partner.
So far, I’ve bought 6 special editions over the past decade. I don’t think that’s too many at all.
Its Moomin edition is an absolute must. It’s like the cutest illustrations tattooed on honey coloured birch
Misuse of personal data and bad #contentDesign
– as others put it on LinkedIn
@theguardian.com on @monzo.com’s language in its year-end reviews
As a public servant, I write weekly notes to let people see what I do.
I attended various kick-offs, including for new guidance, new websites, a support hotline, a blog post, and a white paper.
I participated in another #ServiceStandard intro workshop and attended events on AI and digitalisation.
Name a TV show you feel like no one remembers but you:
Dark Skies
From a civil servant, hesitant to do #userResearch and follow the #ServiceStandard:
“We are all human beings, after all, and we try to examine whether someone, who is not a civil servant, could also manage to do it.”
Partial screenshot of a website displaying 3 open design positions: • Content design role in Berlin • User research ops working student in Berlin • UI/UX specialist in Wiesbaden
Weekly #design job klaxon 🔔
The German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation is seeking a user interface and user experience specialist in Wiesbaden.
The @digitalservice.bund.de is still looking for a #contentDesign er and a student-level #userResearch er.
⬇️
verwaltungsgestaltung.de#positionen
A group of 5 panelists — 4 men and 1 woman — and a female moderator on a small stage at the Google AI Center Berlin in a AI Forum debate on “The future of science in the age of AI”, with an audience sitting and watching them
“You still need to cut
— and be able to cut.”
@alenabuyx.bsky.social is finding a good analogy for the skills we still need in the age of #AI from the revolution in non-invasive surgery in medical innovation.
Such a great idea!
An educational thread:
When costs are rising, but budgets aren’t, government needs to find efficiency gains to maintain social protection levels.
Small and large projects are underway to make benefits services more fair and easier to navigate, and to make the state overall more equitable.
Join our meetup to hear more:
Among other things, we’ll discuss this:
agoradigital.de/wp-content/u...
— and overall, how we see people-centricity unfolding in pockets.
This won’t be a doom-and-gloom meetup.
Feels veeery Severance
A bright graphic poster on dark background, it shows a big orange shield on top of a purple heart; the overlaid headline reads ‘Remaking the welfare state’; in smaller type, it says: ‘Public design – Shaping public sector’s future’ with the address of CityLAB Berlin
New meetup — new #poster
Our Berlin public sector meetup returns for its 12th edition this month.
We’ll discuss ‘Remaking the welfare state’ with guest speakers from @agoradigital.bsky.social, @digitalservice.bund.de and @tsbberlin.bsky.social.
I felt like going bold with shapes and colours.
Names of government services or titles of guidance should not be fixed.
When we learn through qualitative and quantitative data sources that a name isn’t well understood, we should reconsider it.
Then we need to iterate on names and titles based on those learnings.
As a public servant, I write weekly notes to let people see what I do.
Last week, week 199 at Digital Service, I participated in a full-day citizen workshop on service quality criteria.
I also saw some great improvements to servicestandard.gov.de go live.
[👋🏻 @weeknotes-bot.bsky.social]
A blog post soon in the making:
In March, @beliebig.eu and I will be writing about open roadmaps and route maps, why they matter, and how to do them.
We might also touch on design patterns for publishing such maps.
We will be building on some work from @rossferg.bsky.social, of course.
Congrats, Lizzie!
May many public services benefit from your expertise and experience.
As a public servant, I write weekly notes to let people see what I do.
Celebrating 200 weeks at Digital Service, I advertised a new permanent content designer role.
I also handled the paperwork for bringing in a #contentDesign freelancer and worked on our family of user-centred design disciplines.
💡
It’s a not-so-hidden gem. Through family, my partner and I are there regularly, and we really like it.
We’ll be back there for more rainbows in mid-March …
It’s also the neighbourhood of quite a few other (ex-)GDS folks.
“If the characters you love are climate change deniers, anti-trans, hate socialists and are low-key racists the unconscious sifts that into acceptable mainstream views.”
Greetings to Crouch End! 👋🏻
Why are designers choosing a certain typeface for a project?
Why a sans-serif font and not a Fraktur font?
Design researcher Sven Fuchs wants to help. He started digitising the important texts of the 1920s and 1930s that laid the foundation of today’s cannon.
typography-debate.org
We are looking for a working student #userResearcher to help us with operational tasks.
The role is in the fast-moving ‘Start a business’ service team with a growing number of great UX and service designers and user researchers.
15–20 hours per week, Berlin and hybrid, C1 level English and German