Weeknotes, Friday 4 October
People are already referencing Christmas which frankly is disrespectful to daddy Halloween. No worries if it’s not your bag, but I love it and think it’s at least a lot more ‘optional’ than Christmas, which is foisted upon you whether you’re interested or not.
Anyway, here’s what’s been ghosting on (sorry) this week.
Information architecture conundrums
Have been trying to figure out where ‘Support for refugees’ belongs on our website. Currently there’s a temporary ‘Homes for Ukraine’ section that’s been there for a while.
Looking at other councils, it’s mixed but many use a ‘community’ section to house this content. Would love to see some user research on this topic and how useful that grouping is. We don’t have anything like that currently — most likely we’ll need to add ‘support for refugees’ in a less than ideal place in the short term.
The joy of user testing
Usability testing always throws up the unexpected doesn’t it? Lots of fun this week testing out a school governor form. We’ve kind of gone round in circles a little bit with this, but in an interesting way. By trying to make the form more simple, we’ve possibly taken too much out and added burden with the user having to hand over more detail, essentially fill out a second form at a later stage.
Experimenting with adding a question back in for the final couple of sessions. Then we’ll build the real thing and see how it performs in the wild.
Continuing to reflect on SD in Gov
One of our service designers, May led an awesome workshop to help us reflect on what we’d taken away from the Service Design in Gov conference, using the 1, 2, 4 all method. This involves thinking on your own, in pair, in a group and so on. Still so much to think about and try to bring into our practice.
Interesting stuff
10 Things about how AI is changing the content landscape (mailchi.mp)
Ideas for the new ‘Digital Centre Design Panel’ — Digital by Default
Leaving the metaphors behind (public.digital)
Distractions
Listening
Things We Have In Common by Efterklang (album)
POWER by illuminati hotties (album)
Watching
A lot of Married At First Sight Australia. Not proud of it but so addictive. Lots of nasty, toxic patriarchal vibes all over the shop. Can’t look away.
Cobwebs (film). Run of the mill horror. The Babadook if you ordered it from Wish.com
Wendell and Wild (film). Very nightmare before christmas vibes. Impressive to tackle the prison industrial complex in a film aimed at kids.
