We are now in the pre-election period ahead of a UK General Election. This means I am limited in what I can share in my notes, but I believe I’m still allowed to share some reflections on the week, and I’m keen to keep going since I’ve only just re-found my momentum. Watch this space to see if I’m still allowed to write next week 👀
This week I’ve been thinking about…
What do our products actually do?
This week I asked to see our products and what they do. I’ve seen some short video clips but this is not the same as having someone from the team run a walkthrough, as they’ll always add little bits of context of why something is the way it is or which bits they’d like to improve given more time and resources. It also allows the opportunity to ask questions and poke things (‘what does that button do?’ and the like).
I find it difficult to navigate conversations about priorities or needs that may translate into features without having an idea in my mind’s eye of what the product looks like. It helps ground the conversation in reality. To that end, I was delighted that I managed to get a demo of two of our products this week, and we’ve booked a team demo next week to see the other two.
How do we check that our artefacts and working documents are accessible?
I was shown something this week that used a red/green colour scheme, and the colour was conveying meaning that wasn’t represented in any other way (e.g. pattern or labelling). This took me down a Google rabbit hole, as I know very little about colour blindness but I know that red and green in particular can be challenging to distinguish.
I stumbled across this handy tool for checking colour palettes which I shared with the team, and we’ve now tweaked our colour scheme accordingly:
Our colleagues and internal users may have accessibility needs, so as user-centred design people we should be thinking about making our working documents accessible as well as our external or public-facing products and services.
This conversation also reminded me of the colour contrast checker I used to check some slides a few weeks ago:
Quick tools like this are not a substitute for robust accessibility testing, but they are extremely useful to folks like me who have awareness if not expertise in accessibility, so I can check that what I’m creating isn’t wildly off the mark.
How can we use our tools in a smarter way to reuse content or see patterns in our thinking?
We use Mural for a lot of our workshops and team brainstorming. It’s great for visual thinkers like me but it has a few problems when it comes to sharing: it gets big and messy quickly, it’s not very accessible, and it’s tricky to export sprawling diagrams into other formats.
I spent a bit of time between meetings messing about with Mural tags. They’re customisable and easy to add en masse by selecting an area. Using a combination of CTRL-F (find), CTRL-A (select all), CTRL-C (copy) and CTRL-V (paste) keyboard shortcuts I was able to cut through a whole screen of post-its, pick out only the most relevant ones and drag them to the side, ready to be rearranged into something more succinct or be exported as an image file.
I think this could save us a lot of time rather than manually shuffling or transcribing notes into other documents. If used systematically it can also allow us to see our data in a different way: I set up some tags based around products and some around our key objectives, and then could easily see across the board where themes were emerging or where goals cut across our product lines.
Inspired by colleagues who recently shared some work in the form of an audio file/podcast, rather than write lengthy notes I recorded a 3 minute video and sent it around.
What are senior people interested in?
We met our programme SRO (senior responsible officer) this week. I wasn’t presenting so was able to listen intently to the conversations without distraction.
I was particularly interested to hear our SRO’s questions, and how they asked them. Questions reveal how people think: what they’re interested in; what catches their attention out of everything they’re being shown; what concerns them. It was fascinating, and I made a note of all their questions so if I find myself presenting in future I can tailor my content to the things I know they’re likely to be most interested in.
What do I want to work on?
The timing of the General Election has changed some plans in my team, as it will have done for many teams across Government. The work I thought I was coming in to lead is now on pause pending a bunch of organisational decisions about priorities, and for policy colleagues to have time and headspace to engage with us.
This has given me an opportunity to be more proactive, to poke my nose into different areas of the service that catch my attention, and suggest things I’d be interested in working on rather than wait for direction from seniors.
I’m interested in some of our cross-cutting design questions, and have grown increasingly excited about these ‘inbetween problems’ (the bits between the products that make the service tick) as I have had more conversations with product and design colleagues. I’m thinking about how I can describe the things I see and what value I think I can bring to those spaces before I meet with senior colleagues next week.
Talks!
I’ve had some really cool feedback this week about my recent talks. I’ve had a steady stream of LinkedIn notifications since #CampDigital including lots of lovely reviews, and a colleague approached me this week who had heard my ‘working in the open’ community of practice talk to show me their first ever weeknotes.
I want to do more of this. I enjoy the entire process of workshopping, preparing, promoting and delivering talks.
I’m booked to give my ‘working in the open’ talk twice more: once internally and once for a community of practice in another Department. I’d be up for doing it again if anyone’s interested (in short, it’s about why working/speaking about our work in public is important, the barriers to starting and how to overcome them, and a simple plan to get going). If that sounds interesting please feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or Bluesky (yes, Bluesky has DMs now!).
I’ve been noodling on a new talk topic, something about percussion and product — along the lines of ‘expect the unexpected’, all the things that can (and do) go wrong with live music, and how being able to pivot and keep the show rolling also applies to working in agile teams. Heavily inspired by Anna McDougall’s talk on transferable skills from her career as an opera singer:
Yes! Even You Have Transferable Skills | You Got This!
More to come on this, I expect. I seem to have missed the boat for speaker calls for this autumn, but I’ll be paying more attention going forward.
