Weeknotes, Friday 11 October

Been a bit under the weather this week, but back to full strength just in time for the weekend. Here’s what’s been happening.

Let’s Disco

It’s time to kick off a Discovery looking at the fostering recruitment journey. I was loosely involved in some work around this when the new website was launched, but kind of on the edges. Mainly supporting marketing colleagues to use a new CMS.

Due to lots of classic local gov delays the launch happened a long time after it was supposed to which caused issues. So feels good to have some time boxed work with a dedicated team including user research, a delivery manager and product management. This week we’ve been trying to define the scope and make sure the service are in agreement on what our goals are for this work.

Please don’t hide the phone number

Some chats with Adult Social Care colleagues this week about phone numbers on web pages. As you’d expect there is a high volume of calls. We did find that in a lot of cases, it’s unclear exactly why you would call the number. And, in many cases it seems like the only option available.

It felt like a really constructive chat, with general agreement that this isn’t about hiding the phone number, but making it clear what options are available if you need to access a service, whether that’s online or over the phone.

Moving forward with forms

After some final feedback from some school governors, we’re getting an application form built. Even after user testing, we’re not sure how well the free text part of the application will perform. But once it’s live, we’ll be able to monitor it, both from the service side and if users seem to have issues.

Distractions

Listening

Below a Massive Dark Land by Naima Bock (album).

Real Deal by Honeyglaze (album)

Watching

It’s What’s Inside (film) twisty freaky sci fi horror type thing. Think I enjoyed it.