Jude’s weeknotes — 18 Nov 2022

Intro

A week with a bit more time to think, I think that’s a good thing.

What did you experiment with?

Thinking about the biggest problems that our service faces, as we get close to an assessment I’ve been thinking about how we frame the service and how it fits together.

Overall problem

• We are not clear what the offer is and how the products fit together.

I’ve had a think about how that manifests as internal and external problems. And how we go about fixing it.

It was fascinating to hear how another service had solved the similar point by splitting out customer experience support from speaking to the experts.

What was hard?

There are some complicated things at home that have been difficult.

It’s been hard to work out where I add the most value in the team. I’m drifting a little bit.

What did you enjoy?

Seeing how we plan to do design histories at DfE and the fact that there will be a shared way to easily write them.

Attending a user research session where the user really didn’t understand what we meant. They are always better when they go wrong, that’s when you learn the most.

Starting assessment prep because it’s nice to reflect on what you’ve achieved. Also we’ve got this really helpful new website to help us think about assessments in the right way.

Getting some time to think about patterns. This week I’ve written up how we identify our users. I think this one will be particularly useful to hook up with other services in the portfolio and also with people looking at identifying users more widely.

The team are in a really good flow of working on good problems and getting good results which is nice to see.

Tweaking a playback deck so that it flowed better for the people watching rather than using our jargon and having too much background.

What did you learn?

The blog post about systems thinking has really got my brain whirring.

Who did you talk to outside of your organisation?

Caught up with Heather who’s an old friend and a service designer in another department.

What would you have liked to do more of?

Getting on with solving the big problems that we’ve got. Getting access to senior people is a bit of a challenge and getting a plan to how we convince them there’s a new way to see the service.

What do you wish you could have changed?

Loads of people have been poorly, I’m sad that mixing again post covid is making people poorly.

What are you looking forward to next week?

Seeing more work flow through the team and get developed.

Starting to plan how to take on the really big challenge at the top of this post.

What are you reading?

https://uxdesign.cc/why-every-designer-should-be-a-systems-thinker-388e4fb7293b