Hello, I’m Ben Holliday. This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 15 years. You will find posts here about design, services, product and leadership. You can also follow my regular updates on Twitter.
Option 1 is always ‘do nothing’. It’s a very popular policy or strategy.
Make no mistake, doing nothing is a choice, even when you default to doing nothing.
Doing nothing by default is not pursuing the alternatives to a set …
I’ve written before about the importance of mission statements. Something I see regularly is confusion between ‘vision’ and ‘mission’ statements.
My definitions:
…Vision: What we want to achieve. Setting out an ideal future state eg. what will the
This article caught my attention last summer: one in five high street estate agents risk going bust.
We’re already seeing this play out with startups like Purple Bricks and HouseSimple establishing themselves.
There’s a lack of digital innovation from …
Earlier this year I wrote about sticks in the ground. My belief that design has to be bold. It has to start with an idea.
It’s arrogant to think you can change the world. But it’s also necessary
I …
Last week I wrote about the opportunity of designing for connection.
I‘d been inspired to think about this more recently after watching a TED talk by Tristan Harris: The manipulative tricks tech companies use to keep your attention.…
…“…it’s surprising how frequently policymakers can be found solving the wrong problem — a superficial one, a symptom rather than a cause — or a problem perceived in one way by the outside world but
For a series of recent talks I’ve given, I’ve been thinking about the changing expectations that people have for services that are ‘digital’.
Services are a familiar part of …
It’s important to start with user needs, but I’ve found it’s not always clear what we mean by ‘user needs’.
I’ve seen teams getting stuck with what I …
At the end of May, I ran an afternoon workshop with Kate Tarling at UX London 2017.
We called the workshop Leading …
I was part of a round table forum this afternoon for Digital Leaders week: North West Salon: Citizen Experience.
I was invited as one of the keynote speakers along with Stephen Morris, Director of Programmes at UKCloud.
The event …
I get asked this question a lot. My thoughts:
In my experience, most of the best ‘experience’ practitioners or agencies think about the full end to end experience of a product or service.
Whether they get to design the full …
It’s okay for government to have needs. I always work with this presumption in mind:
Understanding user needs and understanding the needs of government isn’t a choice. You need to do both.
We start with user needs. Services designed to …
I’ve been doing some more thinking about vision and mission statements, or setting long term goals for products and services.
When we’re thinking about the products and services we work on in government, many of our long term goals revert …
This is my prediction for what I’ll be thinking about and focussing on more in 2017.
We complicate things and we do so most of the time. All progress depends on finding ways to side step the …
Mission: An important assignment given to a person or group of people…
The words we start with are important. I’ve been thinking about mission statements as something most organisations, …
Success looks like a product or service that solves a real problem for people.
By solving a problem for people, a product or service creates a sustainable business model. It can then be operated, scaled and improved.
Outside the public …