Weeknotes — June 14th — 18th

Stay out of this, cowboys

I continued to iron out content for Technology Enabled Care. It consists of information pages for people with care needs, advising them on what could help them and whether the council can help pay for it.

Feedback from stakeholders and team members was useful . In the end we decided that for the user, there is not a huge distinction between more techy gadgets and apps, and physical items like hand rails. Their focus is likely anything that can help with their specific needs.

A quick ‘guerrilla user interview’ with a 91 year old user of this tech confirmed this . They in fact saw no big distinction between getting their boiler fixed and installing this kind of tech. Their process is the same — ask the reliable person at Church who they recommend, as they fear hiring “cowboys who will try to rip off a vulnerable person”.

A whole new world

This week saw the addition of another new Content Designer to the team, from design agency Scroll. It’s been useful for me having an experienced person from outside of the organisation.

We’ve run some crit sessions already which have been helpful and energising . I love the process of pulling paragraphs apart and completely rethinking the structure of a piece of content.

Next week sees the arrival of a new Lead Content Designer. This opens up the scope of what we can take on as a team. Exciting times!

Ding Dong

We’ve been updating wedding related pages — which is apt as I’m getting married myself soon! This helps me understand where the user is coming from.

I’ve been updating our lists of approved venues. Other team members have been making all important updates to Covid rules and ‘how to give notice’.

Critty McCritinson

The crit sessions with the new designer got me thinking. I’d been having chats with the Lead User Researcher about running workshops to help with content design.

I think a big part of it is the confidence to ask for feedback. I’ve had the idea of nicking GDS framework for feedback sessions. This has useful rules like ‘give the context of the project and what feedback you are looking for’ and ‘feedback on the content, not the person’.

I want to run a session where they feedback on my work. My hope is that attendees get into this style of feedback and are keen in future to present their work for feedback in a crit.

That’s it for next week. I feel like I’m finding my feet, and am looking forward to getting stuck into more projects.