Weeknotes w/c 04.01.20
TL:DR
- I started at GDS, woop-woop!
- I met the Design System Team, who are very passionate about making the design system better for designers and end users.
- I’m starting to understand how complicated working on the design system is. It really is a massively complex set of challenges.
What happened?
I started my role as the GOV.UK Design System Community Manager this week. I was so excited to be joining a fabulous team and starting this new role. I loved my role at Defra, looking after over 1,500 communities of different types, but I only ever had a short-term impact on any one community. I had to be hands off and think about creating the right conditions for communities to thrive across Defra’s 34 partner organisations. It was a unique challenge and I’ll probably write a blog post soon to wrap up what I learned running the #DefraCommunities project. I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into one community and working with them to improve. I think it’s just the change of pace that I needed.
At GDS, I really wanted to get corporate induction stuff done in the first week, so that I could crack on with getting to know the Design system and its community. I managed to get through some of it, but had inevitable first-week IT teething problems.
I spent some time getting to know the Design System team at GDS. In my enthusiasm to start this exciting role, I hadn’t given significant thought to joining a new team remotely. This definitely didn’t end up being a problem this week, because I seemed to have joined the nicest team in the world — seriously.
But there’s always an awkwardness when you are getting to know new people. I usually get over this by going for lunch with someone or just loitering near their desks (the plan is to get over the awkwardness as quickly as possible), but this couldn’t happen. So I focused part of my efforts in the first week on building relationships with the team. This led to some hilarious meetings, where some colleagues were prepared to impart years worth of knowledge, and just heard:
“No, no.. tell me a little bit about you first please.”
I knew I was going to be asking these colleagues a lot of questions over the coming weeks and I wanted at least our first conversation to be pleasant. I feel like it is much easier to do this, if you have broken down some of the initial formality.
I started reading up on the GOV.UK Design System, so that I could understand what area I would be working within. It was interesting sitting in on meetings as a non-technical digital person. So many things went straight over my head.
There are a a number of tensions that need to be balanced in the work that the team do and I started to become aware of some of them. The design system serves all of the services in central government, which is a seriously wide and varied user base. During this week, we tried to set some priorities for the next year. Do we prioritise things that affect the most services across government, or do we focus on those services that have most end users? Do we support high capability users make contributions more easily, or do we try to widen the base to users with other levels of capability? There are no right answers, every direction is valid. The team tries to find the balance between issues that pull in opposite directions — like the middle of a Venn diagram if you will. It takes a lot of knowledge about current issues and where the design system used to be, to be able to do this. I am in awe.
In other news, I am also keen to look into what’s happening with communities at GDS. I had a few discussions to find out how communities ran internally, and I’m hoping to have some more. I think something really interesting is cooking, and I want to be a part of it.
What I learned this week
1] Building relationships is different virtually. And I’m aware I’m going to have to do this a lot in the community work I am starting. Maintaining current relationships when the pandemic started was one thing, but building new ones (purely online) takes craft. I wonder what I can learn from people who have always been home-based?
2] Communities run differently at every department. Which sounds really obvious, every department is different overall. But when things are so varied, it really is hard to know what good looks like.
3] The design system team has a mammoth task. Designers vs end users, high capability vs low capability users? That’s before you get into the detail of the user research, scoping, accessibility and technical aspects of the components.
4] The GOV.UK ecosystem is complex. That’s because the types of services that run through GOV.UK are numerous, varied and massive in scope. I am going to have to learn a lot more to be able to serve the needs of community members.
5] It isn’t easy to make an instant impact as a non-technical digital person. I will definitely have to upskill myself to work with the design system community. Which made me realise how much a bubble community managers can work within.
