PD Newsletter #4: User research for the whole team, #InclusionNumérique and design sprints at LEGO

Welcome to the Public Digital newsletter. I'm @egawen on Twitter; observations, feedback or news from around the world welcome. Particularly interested in the kinds of places and organisations we wouldn’t usually hear about.

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Revolution not evolution, how LEGO introduced design sprints

(Wait, that sounds familiar.) How LEGO’s internal agency adopted design sprints to break a decade of habit. Good points: it’s a great demonstration of how consistent leadership and commitment supports change. However, design sprints aren’t the answer to everything.

[UX Planet]

Building a product from discovery to launch: MyCareersFuture

A team from Singapore share how they built their team and their product over a year. Their focus on user research for the whole team is great. Joseph describes two huge benefits of this approach: it helps everyone in the engineering team connect to the people and problems they are solving, and solutions which emerge are more likely to be technically feasible.

Singapore also announced last week that they are planning to bring in a new set of digital standards and design principles to help Government services be more "usable, accessible and inclusive”.

French government launches #InclusionNumérique report

Minister Mounir Mahjoubi has released a report and an inclusion toolkit with measures designed to improve digital inclusion. However, this write-up notes that while a fund was announced to give support, there’s no detail on it’s capacity or operation.

[Digital Inclusion report | toolkit, everything fr]

A continuing tale of woe at TSB bank

At a live session of the UK’s Treasury Committee last week TSB admitted over 10k fraud incidents (with 1300 customers confirmed to have suffered a loss), and meanwhile only 1 in 10 people can get through to TSB on the phone.
No surprise, there’s been a spike in phishing attacks related to TSB, compounding the damage.
A leaked report suggests that CEO Paul Pester knew more than he was letting on at the beginning of May. But from his testimony it seems more likely he didn’t and doesn’t understand the scale of the problem.

5 interesting things from around the world 🌏

102m
UK’s GOV.UK notify sent it’s millionth message last week (as of now, up to 102m). 🙌to the team for their persistence and delivery.

Over 1000 years
The age of Arabic script. Web users from the Arabic world have risen from 46m in 2007 to 170m in 2017, and digital typography is evolving in response.

$900 USD
How much it’s going to cost Tanzanian bloggers to publish content online, from today (June 15th). This includes independent blogs and through social media channels like YouTube.

$7.5 billion USD
The cost of Microsoft acquiring GitHub. The news sparked surprise among developers, but if managed well could mark a proper turn of the tide for Microsoft at a time when trust in technology companies is low.

€9.2 billion
The EU is planning to invest €9.2 billion in artificial intelligence (AI), supercomputing, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills and e-government in a dedicated funding programme. 👉This one is for Ben. How the worst thing about all the AI reporting is the awful stock photos.

Thanks to these amazing digital services teams from around the world, who shared advice on scaling up and stories on the challenges they've overcome to get this far.

News from Public Digital

This week Public Digital has been in Cambridge, MA, where we partnered with digital HKS to convene digital services units from around the world.

We'll talk more about that soon, but for now hear from David Eaves and Ben McGuire on what they expected from the convening, and how this might be the end of the beginning for digital service units.

Also, on the PD blog, Tom writes about why we're so impressed by Argentina's digital services team.