Sophie Bradshaw

Debly was built after seeing how difficult it can be for shift workers in the UK to understand what they’ll actually earn at the end of the month. Unlike salaried roles, income from shifts can change every week, which makes financial planning harder than it should be. Debly helps shift workers track their shifts and estimate their real take-home pay using UK tax rules and year-to-date PAYE modelling. If you're a shift worker looking for more clarity on your earnings, feel free to download the app and share it with friends, family, or colleagues who might it useful. Feedbacks are highly appreciated. Designed with care. Built for clarity 💙

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I think we found our tribe ❤️ Last week David Bishop and I talked to the wonderful LocalGov Drupal community about Council Insight, our AI-powered user journey analysis tool and current labour of love! Thanks so much to the LocalGov Drupal team for hosting and helping us spread the word - we were staggered that over 150 people registered to join us! Using real council examples and user journey feedback from the AI, we shared key content optimisation tips gleamed from simulating over 4000 council website user journeys. For those of you who missed the webinar, don't worry, link is in the comments. Key takeaways? 💪 Keep the focus tight: one page, one task 🔍 If you're using books or guides to organise content, check how that content is being surfaced and whether it supports a task-focused approach 👀 Think about the whole user journey, which begins before residents even touch your website. Are you making it easy for them to find the right guidance? If you are a content owner for a local authority, or are just interested in how AI can help in the UX space, take a look at your council's reports now. (Link to our website in the comments.) Over the coming months, we will be working on the 100 journey report and an on-demand service so that you can use this tool as part of your daily work. What should you do next? 1. Find your council 2. Check your report - there are 12 free reports for each local authority 3. Tell us how to make it better Thanks again to everyone that came along - we really, really appreciate your support and feedback.

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Income volatility is a reality for millions of shift workers in the UK, and we've just pushed a new Debly update to the AppStore. We’ve implemented cumulative year-to-date PAYE modelling aligned with UK tax rules to give shift workers more accurate take-home projections. Most financial tools assume income is stable. Shift work isn’t. Debly is built specifically for people "nurses, support workers, carers, hospitality staff, agency workers, and anyone on zero-hour or flexible contracts" with variable income, bringing clarity, structure, and control to how they understand their pay. Backed by research references from Office for National Statistics (ONS), Resolution Foundation and the Money and Pensions Service on the financial impact of income volatility. Variable income shouldn’t mean variable clarity. Designed with care. Built for clarity 💙

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Proud to share that the latest Annual Report for UK Data Service has just been published. This marks the third consecutive year I’ve designed their annual report, across both print and digital formats. Designing this report was about more than layout; it was about communicating impact. The challenge was to present complex datasets, research outcomes, and strategic achievements in a way that is both visually compelling and easy to navigate. Strong editorial structure, clear hierarchy, and purposeful data visualisation were central to the approach. Long-term collaborations like this are always especially rewarding and I'm grateful to have worked on a publication that supports research, transparency, and public knowledge. You can view the report here: https://lnkd.in/eY9RmCRe #AnnualReport #EditorialDesign #DataVisualisation #PrintDesign #DigitalDesign #GraphicDesign #ResearchImpact

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I love leading a BA team, and today was the best kind of day - our business took the time out of their day to send unsolicited (glowing!) feedback for two members of the team. Feedback from anywhere is fantastic, but feedback from other business groups that your working with? When the business is telling me that BAs are "calm under pressure", "consistently went above and beyond to ensure delivery", and "can fill any BA activity thrown at them", it's the kind of feedback that makes people sit up and take notice. Always take the opportunity to celebrate individual and team successes; always try to use feedback to hone your skills, and watch yourself become a better leader and more active member in your communities. 😊

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Excellent session delivered by Jayvik Patel 🧠 & Sean O'Connell around Luton Borough Council's delivery of a Beta LocalGov Drupal site in under 90 days brings the #localgovdigital Open Source week (3.5 days in reality) to a close. Some excellent sessions around LocalGovDrupal, Open Source Income Management Systems (IMS), Open Source Adult Social Care and Open Source Revenues and Benefits. Videos and slides online soon

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Reposting this from Mike Rose 👇 February’s session was a strong one. Plenty of useful challenge, plenty of useful questions and no shortage of opinions (exactly as it should be). A big focus for me right now is making the specs easier to interrogate and challenge, not just publish. That’s why I’ve started work on the specification explorer (very early stages) Mike links to above: to help people trace a clear thread from need -> implementation -> justification and challenge us where needed. It’s also becoming clear that the “decision-stage” label is now causing more confusion than clarity. We’re looking at more than final outputs. The in-between process (validation, consultation, amendments, timeline events) is where a lot of the real value is created. Onward to the 31 March session

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R&D Just Levelled Up 🚀 HMRC’s bi-annual Research & Development Communication Forum dropped some big updates earlier this month, and the message is clear: credible advice matters, and the R&D landscape is finally heading into a period of real stability. Here’s what stood out 👇 ✨ Fewer scattergun enquiries, more named caseworkers. HMRC is shifting away from volume-based reviews, with WMBC set to take on all enquiries from 2026. A win for clarity and consistency. 🛠️ Advanced Assurance pilot launching in May. A new route for SMEs to gain reassurance around the R&D definition, overseas spend, contracted-out rules and the PAYE/NIC cap exemption. More certainty. Less stress. 📈 Trend towards larger, more complex claims. Total R&D expenditure has jumped from £7.7bn to £8.2bn between 23/24 and 24/25, showing the growing importance of innovation across UK business. 🔒 Stability is the name of the game. HMRC has reiterated that government is committed to maintaining a steady, reliable R&D regime moving forwards. If you want the full run-down from RDCF or need support navigating the ever evolving world of R&D, the Cooper Parry R&D Incentives team is here to help. #HMRC #ResearchAndDevelopment #RandDIncentives #RDCF #CooperParry

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"In a world where people are digitally literate without being technical, the software that succeeds will be the software that feels as though it already knows what you came to do." I wrote about this for today's Yorkshire Post For 20 years, business software has been built on the assumption that users need to be taught how to use it. Sidebars, burger menus, dashboards showing everything at once. I think that assumption is dead. Non-technical professionals use AI daily, navigate complex tools instinctively, and don't need a sidebar to find settings. The muscle memory has shifted from clicking through structure to expressing intent. But most enterprise software hasn't caught up. And here's what I think most people are missing. The next generation of users won't always be human. AI agents acting on behalf of people need the same thing: context in, outcome out. No navigation to learn. No hierarchy to click through. Software built around intent is agent-ready by default. Software built around sidebars isn't. That's what we're building at AUDITSU. No sidebar. No traditional navigation. No dashboards overloaded with metrics nobody asked for. One ambient surface that compresses interface complexity into contextual intelligence... "Ambient Intelligence". You focus the system. It responds. Whether you're a compliance officer or an agent working on their behalf. When a system understands context and adapts in real time, users stop navigating toward what they need. It just appears. Full article linked in the comments.

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**Beyond post-its** Service Design is a practical, measurable and results driven discipline that is becoming increasingly relevant by the day. The skills we teach students include ethnographic research, synthesis, applied research, prototyping and more. Our programme provides students with real world briefs that address important topics of the day like accessibility, healthcare and sustainability. The flavour of Service Design we teach isn't solely concerned with client side service delivery. We go deep into the invisible layers of operations — process and procedure, internal communications, staff support / training etc. — everything that ensures a product / brand can fulfil its promise. If you want to compete in a rapidly changing economy (yes AI and some) then you need these skills. TL;DR: It's not only about post-its and chats : )

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Sharing this because Derek’s awesome and you should hire him; but also because this is a great example of a power post that will get you hired. Sum up your experience, your credentials and your unique selling point, with a catchy graphic. 👌🏻

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Most agencies talk about ideas. Very few actually build things. Yesterday, I took a concept and turned it into a live page using Vercel. Not a mockup. Not a wireframe. A working asset. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eUfJZ6jr What’s interesting is… I’m not a developer. But using tools like Node.js, Git, and modern frameworks, you can now build and ship things faster than ever. This is how we approach projects at Futura Digital: • Build • Test in real conditions • Improve based on behaviour Because in most businesses, the problem isn’t lack of ideas. It’s lack of execution. AI doesn’t fix that. Better systems do.

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It feels like everybody has lost their way. Estonia got it I think. The point of digital identity is that you own your identity. You can digitally sign things. You can authorize monetary transactions or other significant transactions, because you own your digital identity. Not the issuer. You. You own your digital identity. In the current, popular mode, you have to leverage 'the digital signing by the holder of your identity information' in order to assert your identity. The use of an official private key shows that official entity has done some process to determine who you are. But that doesn't mean they own your identity. That doesn't mean they own YOU. That doesn't mean they have the right to know anything about how you use that identity. It's just a service they provide. [Now, we confuse the heck out of things in the US when who is providing the digital identity also manages privileges. In particular, the driving privilege.] [We end up with huge confusion about checking in... how do we handle it when somebody's license is suspended? How do we handle it now? Only ones who really need to know if your license is suspended is law-enforcement (car rentals?) and they could just look it up. Your identity doesn't stop existing because your driving privileges were suspended. So your digital ID still works for that. But what about complete revocation? Like if the license was obtained through fraud? That's actually a great question because it clues us into the fact that people don't understand the use of fake identities. If a digital ID was obtained through fraud, it isn't enough to revoke the credential. The solution will be to put that face into a fraud lookout system. The person has provided evidence of their bad intentions: their face is linked to fake information. In the short term, there can just be revocation lists, maybe executed as zero knowledge proofs.] [This post just keeps getting longer! I think suspension can be done via a list also. But the information probably doesn't need to be protected since suspension of driving privileges is typically public information.]

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MunroMap.co.uk has a new feature - an idea I've had for many years. Users can now invite and connect to friends, and view their friends maps. Premium users can also combine multiple friends maps - ideal for planning a trip to find peaks that no one in the group has yet climbed. This feature required a handful of new database tables and end points to handle invites and friend connections. It need a new UI - friends list, invite forms, the new map. 95% created using prompts to the Cursor AI agent.

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We've just put out an RFI for design research tooling at the BBC and I wanted to share it here in case it's relevant to you or someone you know. https://lnkd.in/eM3wphTs We're looking to consolidate our research tooling, bringing moderated and unmoderated methods into one place, with better support for insight storage and reuse as we move towards continuous discovery. We're particularly interested in platforms that support: - Mixed methods research - Quality participant recruitment - Responsible self-serve for teams This is tooling only, not an agency or service model. We want something we can genuinely grow with as our ways of working evolve. If that sounds like your platform, we'd love to hear from you. 🚀

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A really crucial point in this new digital ID consultation: Before last week, the digital ID inclusion problem was a policy problem. All the ways you were allowed to verify your identity depended on having good ID already, and 11 million Brits don't. Now, there's new guidance in the latest trust framework on how to use a vouch from a trusted referee to get verified. It's the same way people get their first passport, but open sourced for anyone to implement rather than hidden in a Home Office manual. That means it's now purely a matter of resources: staking enough money on problem to give the digitally excluded millions some strong in-person fallbacks. But, given the state of our politics, I fully expect companies like Vouchsafe will need to step in before we're through.

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Really proud of the team’s cross-platform thinking. Workiva gives us a strong foundation, but we’re also looking at how AI-assisted layout tools, version control tech and enhanced component libraries can supercharge delivery. Seamless collaboration and smarter workflows are the name of the game.

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Why do so many recipe websites still feel stuck in the early days of blogging? Despite years of user research, advances in web design and millions of experiments run, this category seems to have missed the memo on what good looks like. BBC Good Food delivers excellent recipes, but the site itself can be hugely frustrating to use. Large empty spaces waiting for content to load, intrusive calls to action, paywalls, and irrelevant ads all get in the way of actually finding and cooking a recipe. Don't get me started on the "Jump to Recipe" buttons of other sites. If you need this it's a clear sign that the page layout isn’t working for users. If these sites want to stay relevant in the age of AI and how simple content scraping now is, they need to start offering an experience that gives a good reason for customers actually use the site. If they don't surely this any ad revenue that is coming in will just start to plummet?

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