A weeknote, starting 20 November 2023
Last week I did spend a bit of the weekend mocking up some content screens, which did I think take its toll this week when I felt a bit on edge and grumpy. I do normally try to completely switch off in the weekends for this reason, so this was a reminder as to why.
Calendar ebbs and flows
Monday was the start of our UX team ramping up on meetings with the consultants for the policy project we’re working on. A lot of meetings kept moving around. I often talk about reviewing my calendar like just seeing waves go past as I often am triple or quadruple booked at various points in the week, and have never been reminded of that more than this week. Luckily all were remote or hybrid meetings so it didn’t particularly affect my day.
I was glad to get some important but tedious admin (making sure the project billing for my 4 UX line directs matches up with their holiday) done on Monday before the meetings started to shift. It was fine, but required focus.
#oneteamgov (with a Stephen, two Janes, and people from every department that I’ve previously worked at)
On Monday I also had a video coffee with my former GDS colleague Jane Martin. Afterwards she mentioned that she needed to talk with her delivery manager about how to get UCD work into JIRA and the like and asked if I had anything written up about it. I hadn’t, though had been trying to write something for years. That was the incentive to dash out ‘getting UCD work into Agile workflows’ that evening. There has been good commentary on it, such as how it fits with some product manager’s prioritisation buckets, how user researchers should use the board to show the effort the work takes and that not pointing can mean it doesn’t affect team burndown charts —though I think it should count. As an aside, with the fleeing from Twitter it’s weird to post things in different places and see how much discussion there is…
On Tuesday we had a team crit, where it transpired that some of our services have some intense terms and conditions pages. I knew that Stephen Gill of GDS had some good material relating to content strategy and services for situations like this. However, after messaging him on cross-gov slack about this it turned out that he had a great blog post explicitly about terms and conditions—yay for #oneteamgov!
On Wednesday I took a lunch break to talk to a different Jane, this one was Jane Reid of Ministry of Defence. Her service team was is doing a beta assessment for ‘Apply for an HM Armed Forces Veteran Card’ and just wanted a bit of advice about presenting at a service assessment. My main point to them was to think about it as a chance to show what they’ve learned in a live controlled environment and get credit for it, so as to show to the assurance panel that they are ready to open the service up to everyone without controls. They have some great stories of technology changes and their users’ situations stress testing the boundaries of GOV.UK One Login, so no matter what the result of the day, I hope that they get to end the session feeling that they’ve done their work justice.
Straight after chatting with Jane was the second Ofqual show and tell, where they showed the results from their card sort and also designs for a caseworking system. I was hoping to show it to my team in the UX team meeting, only to realise that the recording wasn’t instant and so I’d have to wait! Instead, we used the UX team meeting to do a watch party of the 2023 Service Design in Gov videos, namely Jessica Hughes’ Make mapping great again. I liked how she emphasised both that maps should be living things if a bit scrappy, but also that there’s a spectrum of map-things, going from storyboards to service blueprints and we need to use the right tool at the right time.
On Wednesday I also attended the first Design Service assessors meetup online. It was a reunion of sorts for me with people attending from the 3 other departments I’ve worked in, and we talked about things such as what service designers look at in a service assessment (thoughts included the full end to end journey, front to back; and also how to design and prototype non-digital things). There should be more happening soon.
Work maintenance
On Thursday some of Customer Experience looked at a backlog of not-yet-funded ideas for improvements. It’s early days but getting this (and other backlogs) into one place (Planner) has helped with starting to at least create a shared document of visibility.
On Friday I had a lot of 1–2–1s. My line directs have had eventful years — having kids, buying houses and so on!
There have been a few projects where having access to a wireflow tool (Adobe XD) is proving helpful—mainly some for Student Finance Wales. It’s meant adapting the GOV.UK templates that we have, but this is something that is a pain to start but then a lot easier later on.
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Some of my team is gearing up to do some ‘customer panel’ sessions next week—this is a form of talking session with a group of students (past and present) that we talk to quarterly for a year about topics that we’d like their advice on. It’s a different vibe to have repeat people in a group.
I’m finally continuing to make my way through all of the complexities of our policy to understand what it means. For example: what is undergraduate student finance? I currently call it a package of loans, grants and allowances (tuition fee loan; maintenance loan—or special support loan if over 60 grants for parents or carers—childcare grant, parents learning allowance, and adult dependents’ grant; and disabled students allowance) with some rules about eligibility and limits based on previous study, length of study and in some cases, previous years of loans. And so on. I think about Kate Tarling’s The Service Organisation about looking outside in, and Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America about it making sense to a user. In this respect Laura NH’s blog post on Policy design, service design, systems thinking is timely.
Links
- As mentioned earlier: my own on getting user-centred design work into agile planning increments. (Hey this is my excuse for being fairly light on links this week, I’m going to use it!)
- I’m really enjoying what’s happening with the Ministry of Defence Service Manual. I particularly like the new content section which reminds content designers to write less and work with user research to add.
- I enjoyed UKEduCamp in the summer and they’ve announced the next Educamp is Friday 12 January in Edinburgh
Other things
- I’ve been relisting to one of my favourite books—Sarah Bakewell’s history of existentialism and phenomenology At the Existentialist Cafe. I love it for its focus on not just the theory but the messy contradictory humans around it. And that includes the author, who has a messy relationship with philosophy herself. So I was delighted to find out that Bakewell has a followup on this very topic (humanism)—Humanly Possible, relased earlier this year—which I am starting on now. (I’m also revisiting Bakewell’s first book How to Live on the world’s first essayist Michel de Montaigne, so I’m doing something of a Bakewell philosophy trifecta!)
- I’ve become that middle-class person and bought a slow cooker… and it’s great. I look forward to making a lot of stews and soups over the winter.
