Weeknotes, Friday 24 January

Social hangover from UK GovCamp this week, but it’s been another interesting one. Inspiring to hear about other people’s work.

Keeping things inclusive

We sent out our email to folks interested in an upcoming design sprint. Rather than ask ‘do you need any adjustments’, we’re trialling putting a few suggestions up front, and asking people if they can think of anything else that they can think of. Will see how this goes for people and monitor.

Blog interviews

Catherine, one of our delivery managers had an interesting idea around interviewing some content editors about their experience of moving to a new CMS. I’ve done a couple of these interview this week, surprising how much comes out of a short 10 minute chat! Will be pulling out quotes and compiling into a blog.

Flapping about nothing

I did have a bit of a flap this week — I got pressured by a service to put something live very quickly. I was busy that day, panicked and flapped around a bit. By the end of the day, I’d realised it was all over nothing and I just needed to have a 5 minute chat with a delivery manager who was all over it, rather than flap about like a salmon on my own.

Inspiring show and tell

Really great show and tell from colleagues who are doing in depth user research with young people. Don’t want to share much as might be sensitive information, but great work and seems like people’s voices are being heard.

Lift and shift?

Starting a new project, which is supposed to be a bit of a lift and shift job — a website that we can’t access and update anymore, onto LocalGov Drupal.

To be fair, it probably is mostly similar content needed, but it’s hard not to spot some areas where we could try to improve things for user. I won’t be a blocker to getting something working an live, as the current site is causing issues. But I will keep banging on about potential to make things easier for users, whether we do it now or schedule in some research for the near future.

Distractions

Listening

You Are The Morning, jasmine.4.t (album)

Humanhood, The Weather Station (album)

Slowly, It Dawns, Victoria Canal (album)

In Love Again, Ex-Vöid (album)

Héritage, Songhoy Blues (album)

Watching

The Traitors, looking forward to the final tonight!