Weeknotes, Friday 29 November

It’s been an interesting week and things feel like they’re progressing. I did accidentally order 5KG of bananas instead of 5 bananas in a shopping order, for the second time in 2 weeks. Thankfully a ‘slice and freeze’ technique saved them from the sorry fate of being wasted.

Here’s what happened in non-banana related work this week.

Testing how people feel about social care checks

Met with fostering colleagues to finalise 2 prototypes: a financial calculator, and a contact form.

They brought up that the current form has a potentially intimidating message about a social care check — they feel this is a lot for people making initial contact, and we agree. To show the service managers how people feel about it, I’ve copied the current text on this into the prototype, to see how users react in testing.

Taking part in codesign of our new digital service

We had the last of a series of ‘codesign’ sessions that have been going on since the start of this year. It precedes changes to the shape of the team, which I probably can’t talk about in detail, and don’t know much about anyway.

The atmosphere was positive, and the conversations on our table were interesting and open. Let’s see how things turn out.

Chats about translation

Met with some folks from DBT (Department of Business and Trade) this week. They’re looking into content for international audiences, and were interested in our experiences, based on this blog from earlier this year: Should you have a button on your website that says ‘translate’? -

I definitely didn’t have all the answers, but we had an interesting chat about how to create content that will need to be accessed in lots of different languages, when you don’t have access to a professional translation. This included talking about the recent Home Office guidance, which is really good: Limited English — Home Office Design System

Distractions

Listening

Night Palace by Mount Eerie (album)

No Obligation by The Linda Lindas (album)

Dreamstate by Kelly Lee Owens (album)

Watching

Cheaters on BBC Iplayer. 10 min episodes, really addictive. Great comedy drama starring Susan Wokoma.

A Man on the Inside on Netflix. Easy going fun with Ted Danson.