I will warn you this is more of an unfiltered stream of consciousness than a well-constructed blog post, but I thought it is important to reflect on my five years at The User Story. I have gone from a clueless graduate to a Senior Experience Strategist at arguably the best product design consultancy in the country (if not the world). How did this even happen when I had no idea what product design was five years ago? Well, it’s been a wild ride, but here is what I’ve learned along the way.
A whole year. Remember when the lockdown was just going to be “2-3 weeks”? Ah, the good ol’ days. Except these are still the good days, whilst some of them are tough, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like everything is good. We’re still doing good things, speaking to good people and seeing good things happening out in the world. (Hello, vaccine?!)
You may have heard the words “website downtime” uttered in hustled corners in your office as the IT department frantically announces all systems go. You’ll undoubtedly recognise the trusty 404 pages that light up your desktop, showcasing that a page “no longer exists”. You’ve probably seen all sorts of error codes like 301, 302 and basically, every three number combination you can think of that tells you something has happened to your website.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) recently stated that we are facing a “tsunami of mental illness” from problems stored up during lockdown. Last week marked Mental Health Awareness week, 18-24th May; but this is one area that should always be taken seriously. Mental health matters - not just for a single week, but every day of every year.
From pigs to pooches, animals always generate a lot of love. Animal aficionados are posting a whole bevy of images and messages about their pets across all social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok during the pandemic. Work based platforms, such as Slack also have their fair share of pet pics.
Website use in the current uneasy climate is altering. People are scared, consumers are spending differently and it’s all changed. Here at The User Story we use psychology as part of our daily process. We analyse, we debate, we test. We decided to take a look at the data.
If you want to reduce development costs, build a new digital product, or just improve the experience for both your customers and your bottom line, we should talk.
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