Weeknotes — June 19th — 23rd

James Green
2 min readJul 23, 2021

Yes, I missed a week. It was a good pal’s wedding alright. Cut me some slack!

From what I remember it was all hands on deck for Ways of Working content, all hands on deck, hitting those deadlines kind of stuff. With the added heat it’s all becoming a bit of a blur! Anyway, onto this week:

Check it out

Had a lovely check in with our lead user researcher. Really positive, energising and happy to feel part of the team despite it being relatively early days at ECC.

Critters

A highlight of the week for me was running a content crit with our user research team. I put a bit of my content on the block for review. Using a GDS format, it went quite smoothly as they set out guidelines such as ‘critique the work not the person’. Hopefully people got something out of it in terms of how to give feedback. I certainly got a lot out of it!

At first I thought people would find it hard to jump in and feel pressured, but once the ball got rolling people got comfortable talking through their thoughts and ideas to improve the work. I’d love to run one of these again — need to think of ways to improve the session. Perhaps a ‘warm up’ so when we get to the actual feedback, people are already rolling?

DDaT, what’s that?

I was really excited to get involved in some learning content this week. Based on the DDaT framework. I learned about work our service designers have been doing around teaching people around ECC about ‘Digital’ (yes I know it’s a broad term) and techniques people can use.

It’s been really fun and tricky in places. The service designers have already done a lot of groundwork, I’ve just been doing my content thing and generally making things shorter and whacking bullet points in. The section on Agile has been tough, as it’s hard to come up with a simple definition that will not scare people off. We’re getting some help from an ace deliver manager next week to make sure we’re being accurate!

That’ll do for this week. It’s too hot to write more! Next week will be a short one, as after Wednesday I’ll be on leave as I’m getting married! The weddings will never cease!

A photograph of a bride and groom on a mountain, holding hands and looking into the distance
A photograph of a bride and groom on a mountain, holding hands and looking into the distance. Photo by Foto Pettine on Unsplash

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James Green

I am a Content Designer at Essex County Council, with a background in the music industry.