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Your round-up of design thinking news and opportunities, to improve your practice.

Welcome to Design Thoughts! I’m Charlotte, a freelance service designer. This newsletter is a round-up of thoughts, news and opportunities.

Designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy

Laura Parker, Rachel Malic and Jane McFadyen have created an online resource called Accessible Numbers. The site tells you how to make things easier to understand for people who have low numeracy skills.

I’m dyslexic, and although I don’t think I have dyscalculia, I do have some number quirks. I can’t really read a long number out loud. I can’t tell whether 12.00 is the middle of the day or the middle of the night. And I don’t watch or listen to the weather forecast because I don’t really understand the numbers within it. I wonder how common those things are?

This site has come at a particularly useful time for me - I’m about to work on form design for food imports. The current forms I’m working on are very heavy on the numbers. And people often make mistakes in the forms which leads to huge delays in the process later on.

The Accessible Numbers provides great advice for people creating anything that includes numbers. They have advice for; displaying times, writing numbers in text. Some of the tips they included in the guide are:

Do

• Write ‘6 million’ rather than ‘£6,000,000’ - words are easier to read than numbers
• Choose a font where people can easily distinguish between o and 0 (on the site they’ve chosen a font with a slash in the middle of the zero)
• Say ‘1 in 2’ rather than ‘50%’ - lots of people struggle with percentages
• Round up numbers to nearest whole number
• Leave space around numbers
• Let people includes spaces when entering numbers
• Conduct user research with people who struggle with numbers
• Allow people to copy and paste numbers in forms

Don’t

• Use decimals unless it’s money
• Expect users to repeat or remember numbers

Events

Designing Sex Education

I'm extremely excited about this - I'm a Service Lab organiser and we're hosting a talk all about sex education. We have:

• Matilda Lawrence-Jubb from Split Banana talking about: ‘Navigating Inclusive Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) for Young People’.
• Sachin Raoul from Blueheart. Blueheart is a relationship happiness app: the leading digital relationship & sex therapy platform designed by experts to help millions of people transforming their relationship health.
• Sarah Drummond, talking about the film she's making 'Don't Say Gay' about a law that banned the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities from 1988 - 2003.

Grab your ticket at this link.​

Design Patterns for Mental Health Community Meetup

An online meetup for people working on the design and delivery of mental health products and services. There'll be short talks (and I'll be delivering one!) and break out rooms after. Tickets are £6 get yours at this link.

In other news

• ❤️ Sex workers imagine a world where their work is decriminalised: “That’s easy. I’d be working in a cooperatively-run brothel with my sex worker friends, outside of London where we could support each other and keep each other safe. We’d also have a cute little tea room on the side.” Source​
• 🪐 People wear the pear ring to indicate they're single after dating-app fatigue. Source​

Tweet of the week - it's the 4-day week!

Tweet of the week goes to BK Baby - who suggests that all these bank holidays we've had recently have basically been a nationwide prototype of the 4-day week. I love the idea that we can use the bank holidays we've just had to evaluate how the 4-day week could be, for people all over the country.