Weeknotes S1 E3
Its been a long time since I last week-downloaded, mainly due to two close periods of annual leave and a lot of service delivery being brought forward. There’s a lot to catch up on which will test my memory.
Good things
Joined the first Local Gov Service Design Network meeting. From a digital perspective I already access the very useful and friendly LocalGovDigital Slack community. The Local Gov SD Network is going to be an opportunity to shape the profession, share best practice and promote the use of User-Centered Design in Local Gov.
What am I working on?
Getting my teeth into delivery now and I am continuing to work on some Home to School Transport (HTST) initiatives. This is a grouping of discrete projects seeking to make efficiency and user experience improvements across the HTST processes and teams. I’ve done plenty of journey mapping, service blueprints and wait for it, quantitative data analysis, not my first love. There hasn’t been the opportunity to do quality user research but we’ve delivered the solutions alongside teams and iterated somewhat for feedback so the end product/solution isn’t a flop.
Challenges
Where we have iterated for feedback with stakeholders/users through show and tells with more teams, this has led to an increase in scope. I think there are a two main reasons for this; project briefs influenced by managers with limited input from service delivery staff and not doing a proper discovery to understand requirements.
“What you learn during discovery should help you work out whether you want to move forward to the alpha phase. Running an alpha means you’ve decided that the benefits of looking further into the problem outweigh the cost.”
From the Gov Service Manual
Where the scope has changed but not the delivery date, there has been a small hustle to get the (limited) data together to design and deliver a solution. Often the reason for not undertaking a discovery is time, which can lead to clunky solutions that still don’t solve a whole problem. I’d be interested if there is a format for a ‘Discovery sprint’ to at least lay out some context, evidence base and user needs before proceeding to the next stage (Alpha).
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What did I learn?
Where User-Centered Design practices are not common place or familiar within an organisation or team, it will require a little convincing. Often teams are keen to test and adopt new methods of transformation and improvement but it is important to bring on board the upper echelons to improve visibility of design and research colleagues¹. I’ve noticed colleagues across other Local Authorities have shared in the Slack similar experiences recently.
“Effective user [research] engagement is essential to ensure successful design and take-up of new online services. It also provides evidence to inform the business case for change.”
From LGA User Research & Testing top tips (opens PDF)
I’ve learned that to show the value user research, I will probably need a mini-business/case study, likely a one slider that I can have up my sleeve.
I’ve started picking up my Power Platform skills again 3 months into the role and looking at how I can integrate this with Figma, especially as we get closer to Hi-Fi Wireframe & Prototype work.
What Did I achieve/Do?
Continued to work on the deliverables (more on these next week), aiming to deliver these in the next week or so.
Publishing this again was also a win. The reflective writing helps get stuff out my head and work out how I can improve my practice.
Coming up:
Next week (this week) we have our team away day which will involve team drumming 🥁… apparently it can give you a ‘drummers high’ and good for clearing the mind before decision making (source). Maybe this will inspire senior managers to drum before making a decision… or inspire them to drum something into us 😂.
I’m hoping that delivery will be slightly quieter so I can work on developing UCD capabilities with colleagues , reach out to colleagues in the Children’s Service Participation Network and start planning for the Global Gov Jam in November.
