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Transform 17 Speaker Insights: Ben Holliday

Transform is just a few weeks away (Early Bird registration closes this Friday), so we thought it useful to give you a bit of extra background on our speakers. We’ll start with Ben Holliday, whose talk is titled “Collective small actions. Service Design in Government“.

Ben is currently Head of User Experience (UX) for the largest department in UK Government, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). In this role he has established user centred design in the department as part of agile delivery for digital-by-default services.

He’s built and led the design team over the past two years developing Service Design, Interaction Design, Content Design, and Front-end development “job families”.

Ben has over 16 years experience delivering design and research for digital products and services. He’s previously worked for the Government Digital Service in the UK (GOV.UK) as well as organisations in the arts, not-for-profit, charity, education, and financial sectors.

His main focus is now design leadership for organisations and teams. He writes about design and research on his blog and for GOV.UK. Ben also speaks regularly at design, User Experience and public sector conferences.

Ben’s blog is consistently interesting to read, and probably should be required reading for anyone following the effects of user-centred design on government service delivery.

His entries are often about a specific aspect of design suggested to him by something he’s seen or read, and which causes him to reflect and offer an insight that puts it in a professional context. He does this from the perspective of a working designer and design manager, very much practising what he preaches.

Being both organised and aware that people do read his blog, he’s pulled some of his key posts into a page he calls his Playbook. He’s sorted this into themed sections, the headings of which alone make a compelling list of topics:

* Focusing on the problem
* Collaboration
* Iteration
* User Research
* Data-driven design
* Knowing what good looks like

Ben’s Playbook: http://www.hollidazed.co.uk/playbook/

Ben has nominated as his own favourite blog post of 2016 an entry called Supersized. Making design work in large organisations, from 19 June. Here’s just the opening section:

I’ve spent 20 months growing a design team in the UK government’s largest public sector department. Think of this as a mid-term report and what I’ve already learned working in the education, media, arts, and charity sectors.

In government I believe it’s time to go big on design. The same is true for many other sectors and industries. That needs to start with design leadership.

Design leadership

Does your organisation 
have design leadership?

I want everyone to think about this question. If you want to be taken seriously at doing user-centred design then you need design leadership.

Every organisation needs someone that can drive the change that ultimately delivers better products for people. It’s about taking real responsibility for how well things work.

In my opinion the people that get hold of this will be the organisations that build great products that are part of great services.

Just to be clear. Design-led thinking doesn’t exclude technology. Instead, it uses technology as an accelerator. A way of delivering ideas and information to more people, more of the time.

Read the rest of the post here: http://www.hollidazed.co.uk/2016/06/19/supersized-making-design-work-in-large-organisations/.

Elsewhere, Ben mentions that he worked with Leisa Reichelt, who spoke at last year’s Transform (from blog post 19-12-16):

User research should mean, first of all, that we test ourselves.

We test our own ideas, and the decisions that we’ve been brave enough to make. We find out if we’re right or wrong when it matters. When people use our products and services.

When I worked with Leisa Reichelt at GDS, she explained to our team that:

It’s user research. Not user testing. We don’t test users, we test ourselves”

This means that we test our decisions and designs with people. We test against their needs and expectations after making design decisions.

And it’s not surprising that Ben also references Tom Loosemore, a driving force in the UK Government’s digital transformation, and who gave a rousing closing keynote at Web Directions in 2015 (from blog post 17-03-16):

Let me make it clear. I agree with people like Tom that we haven’t been bold enough in imagining the future of our institutions. That’s real transformation.

But, if I’m not able to do anything else, or get anything else done in government, I’ll take any change we can make to the culture of the Civil Service.

I would start with ‘openness’. Building the trust between colleagues and citizens, which we’ll need as digital and technology shifts more power away from people towards the state.

If automation and better data sharing is the answer then trust and consent needs to be the question.

Ben also devotes a page on his website to books he’s found useful, including those referenced in his talks.

Again, he’s organised the books into sections, the headings of which double as a pretty fair list of topics of interest to him:

* Leadership & creativity
* User-centred design
* Agile & Lean UX
* Research, data & analytics
* Designing better organisations

Wherever possible, individual books are linked by title to ways to buy them. Definitely worth browsing: http://www.hollidazed.co.uk/books/.

Once you’ve delved into Ben Holliday’s blog, you’ll be even keener to sign up to see him at Transform 17. Look forward to seeing you there.

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Going to #wds18 has given me inspiration to attend more conferences. Meeting tech folks like myself and learning from each other is pretty amazing!

Hinesh Patel Ruby and React Developer