I love looking at where we are, working out where we want to be, and creating things to get us there
In early 2019 when I read about a new all-of-government Design System I was very excited. I signed up to participate in the usability testing, joined the Slack group, and started making plans for how I could use the new system in my own work. Since I first saw Tom Loosemore speak at Webstock in […]
Matt Lane
It wasn’t really planning to learn the accordion and to make a music video. In the last year I have been actively trying to spend more time playing music. Because of procrastinating I often ended up listening to as much music as I played. How I fell in love with the accordion Maybe as hangover […]
Matt Lane
Song Artist A tool I cobbled together using datatables.js to help pick a song for the Squeeze and Thanks Online Accordion Competition. It lists songs that were in the “Billboard Hot 100” from 1 January 2018 – 31 July 2021.
Matt Lane
My family moved from Taupō to Wellington when I was 9. Once a fortnight my mum would drive us up State Highway 1 in our van for the weekend while Dad stayed in Wellington to work. On one occasion, just outside of Levin, a rock flicked up from a passing truck and shattered our windscreen. […]
Matt Lane
Almost everybody agrees that diversity is desirable within a team. The idea has always felt intuitively right to me. But while I’ve felt this, I have never understood or considered the mechanics of why. Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas examines how diversity contributes to effective groups. He examines how multiple unique [...]
Matt Lane
The Accessibility Hui is an internal meeting of Wellington City Council staff from different disciplines who all have an interest in accessibility. The Hui was started in December 2019 after the launch of the Accessible Wellington Action Plan 2019. Last week the Wellington City Council Website team hosted the March Accessibility Hui. Due [...]
Matt Lane
I grew up playing video games. Almost anyone who has played video games has thought about making video games. While I enjoyed many different types of game growing up, the one I think about making is a “point-and-click” – you control a character on the screen by pointing and clicking the mouse on places you […]
Matt Lane
“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the […]
Matt Lane
In the last few years there has been a proliferation of organisations using the word “customer”, as they realign their organisations to be more customer-focused, create new teams that prioritise the customer, and generally declare their allegiance to “the customer”. Local government is no exception to this trend. It is important to be [...]
Matt Lane
Every year the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) host a web and digital conference (this year it was deftly merged with the customer experience/service conference). This conference includes several awards across several categories. I was lucky enough to attend ALGIM this year, and wanted to share [...]
Matt Lane
As an employee of the Wellington City Council, I attended a course on leadership in late 2016 and early 2017. As a part of that course, participants presented back to the group. This was my presentation.
Matt Lane
Trialing new tools on the Council's intranet to better understand our users
Matt Lane
After 7 years in the private sector, I joined the Wellington City Council. I thought I’d share a few impressions of what I’ve seen, what I’ve learnt, and where we’re at.
Matt Lane
I recently read David Halpern’s Inside the Nudge Unit. I would recommend it to anyone who’s work touches on policy implementation, service delivery or any kind of behaviour change. Here are some snippets I took from it. The context for Inside the Nudge Unit In 2008, Richard Thaler (a University of Chicago economist) and [...]
Matt Lane
Found on Cognitive bias cheat sheet by Buster Benson. Diagram created by John Manoogian III
Matt Lane
Google Analytics is great, and tracks lots of stuff just with the default set-up. But it can do a lot more with very little additional work. I add Google Analytics tracking code to websites often, so over time have come to standardise the way I complement the default tracking code, and the steps I take […]
Matt Lane
So you’ve heard of Google Analytics, but you don’t really understand what it is, or how it works? This article explains the basic parts of how Google Analytics works.
Matt Lane
Using a few different diagrams I saw in bars, and a few I found online, I created a taxonomy of beer types (people who know more about beer than me told me no-one can actual agree on this, so my taxonomy was as good as any). I converted this data into JSON and using the […]
Matt Lane
When I was at university, I studied some psychology. I vividly remember learning about deindividualisation; losing the sense of individual responsibility for your actions (sometimes through a false sense of anonymity) leading to anti-normative behaviour. One of the lesser-known examples that the lecturer gave, was an [...]
Matt Lane
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