Starting the fun stuff: Weeknotes s02e05
6 Aug 18–10 Aug 18
Sorry, late again.
But I had a pretty good week all in all. Really felt like I made some good progress on two projects I’m working on.
Highlights of the week
Beginning to turn research into the fun stuff
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday voluntarily locked in a room (albeit with some fine people) to finalise our discovery on decision making in Home Office Policing.
By now we’ve interviewed nine people who are involved at various levels of decision making and this session was for us to sharing the insights with everyone in the team and agree on a set of findings.
As part of the interviews, the team had already helpfully logged key insights on a spreadsheet (with references that pointed to the original raw data) so we read through these excerpts, made notes on post-its and put them on the wall. We then began sorting and grouping, which helped us see patterns that we didn’t previously know of.
After we’d done that we started with the fun stuff — coming up with some actual ideas.
We began by reviewing the discovery goals and our assumptions and discussed which ones we had proved or disproved. It was clear that some of the assumptions were only going to be tested by actually building something.
Without worrying about a particular structure, we then individually reviewed the pain points on the walls and our map of the decision making process and noted ideas on post-its.
I found it helpful to write some ‘how might we’ questions to prompt ideas — in retrospect I probably should have started with these as it really helped direct my thinking but by the end we’d generate lots of ideas.
We’re going to run a dedicated workshop session next week to further develop these ideas, critique them and come up with some new ones. I’m glad we’re spending some time on this as I think it can be really easy to rush this step. I think that some of the way we talk about research makes it seem that alpha ideas can sometimes emerge as these inevitable, obvious things that research has directed you towards.
We used Will Myddletons excellent articles to help us frame and plan our discovery. One of the things I liked was having a list of definitions of done for the discovery, which have been really useful in keeping us on track. This has really helped as we’ve been doing research as a team, sometimes without a dedicated user researcher.
Getting people on board with a new design
On another non-public facing project I’m working on, we have iterated on the previous visual design and layout to make the service simpler and clearer. I’ve spent a bit of time removing visual elements that users reported as confusing and taking away things that cluttered up the page (and trialing some new visual design standards we’re developing in the Home Office).
But as the previous design had been in place for several months I knew I needed to proactively talk with some of the senior stakeholders to explain the rationale behind the changes. I didn’t really know them particularly well and wanted to make sure that they felt involved in the thinking behind the changes we wanted to introduce.
Luckily, it went great. Talking about the feedback from previous rounds of user testing helped motivate their elephant. It helped that the product manager and some of our developers were also on hand to support the changes and reassure about the technical impact— it’s so important to have your team on board before trying to engage with the wider programme (also social proof helps).
Other stuff
I missed Deadpool 2 at the cinema so was looking forward to watching it on home release. I thought it was ok, not as good as the original. For me it was trying a bit too hard to out-joke the first one.
I spent a lot of the weekend painting doors and fixing things around the house which gave me a warm sense of achievement but left me pretty tired. Looking forward to a camping trip in Wales in a couple of weeks.
More next week!
