Weeknotes, Friday 17 April

It’s been a short week, full of energy and momentum.

Interesting workshops and insights, punctuated by live music — Norwegian Black Metal at the weekend with Behemoth and Satyricon, then some much needed lighter fare with FEZ at the Shacklewell Arms providing psychedelic delights more in tune with the sunny weather.

Tree test tasks

I put together some tree test tasks, to test a new information architecture (IA) for a website aimed at adult social care providers. Meeting with our user researcher to discuss, and need to check in with the site owners to make sure they’re accurate and realistic tasks.

Schools perspective on safeguarding referrals

Currently working on a Discovery looking at referrals to our children and families hub. Another piece of work is happening looking specifically at schools’ perspective on this process, and they kindly shared their survey data with us.

We had a great session going through comments and drawing out themes. Some interesting points around lack of communication after you’ve made a referral, and the way this can strain a teacher’s relationship with a family.

Emails and letters

I had a look at the confirmation email, and letters that people receive when they’ve made a referral to the children and families hub.

I’ve got some suggestions for small tweaks that could help people understand what they need to do next — the current versions may be encouraging unnecessary calls.

Changes to letters might be limited as there’s now some Robotic Process Automation (RPA) happening, but we’ll deliver some recommendations and let people make decisions on if it’s worth making changes.

To be honest we don’t think these tweaks would solve the bigger issues in this process.

Radical approaches to social care front door

Service designer Dani has been speaking to lots of other councils about their children and families front door process. We had a really interesting chat with some folks from Public Digital who have done some really bold work in this space.

They use an approach from Professor David Thorpe which, to oversimplify massively involves removing all the triage steps, encouraging phone over a form and having your most experienced social workers on the phone lines.

LocalGov Drupal components

The LocalGov Drupal (LGD) team held a session with content designers looking at components (or ‘paragraphs’ to use Drupal developer lingo). Which ones people are using, what they’re doing with them, room for improvement.

It was interesting — at times a little difficult to find consensus across councils, but I suppose that’s part of the nature of the much needed collaborative style of LGD.

I found myself torn between having full flexibility to use components however we see fit, and not opening the floodgates to overcomplicated, inaccessible layouts.

Planning local gov content meetups

Had a brilliant chat with Eleanor from Greenwich and Alice from Croydon about future local gov content meet ups, how we can track ideas and work together between sessions. We’re considering using GovGroups, as we know some councils can’t access Slack.

Interesting blogs

We made a content design system in 4 weeks — Digital

Transforming services to better meet the needs of children in Nottinghamshire — Public Digital

Distractions

Listening

Never Enough by Turnstile (single)

That’s the Price of Loving Me by Dean Wareham (album)

Forever Howlong by Black Country New Road (album)

Death Hilarious by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (album)

Hex Key by Mamalarky (album)

Watching

Grand Theft Hamlet on Mubi — a touching reminder of how people connected with each other during lockdown. In this case by organising a production of Hamlet within the game Grand Theft Auto.