Moving

The last 4 weeks have been some of the most gruelling ones yet. It can be infuriating to know that the world stops for nobody, even when life brings you to a standstill. In Cantonese, we have a saying that describes someone bullish as the ‘one who thinks the world spins around them’. I’m no bullish but this reminder felt necessary — the world did keep going, to-do list growing, and life didn’t wait around. So we move.

Monthly recap

• Finalised all 8 customer journeys over validation sessions

• Started mapping out the frontstage interactions across 4 journeys of 8, and validating these with individual product owners

• Considering the most informatically legible and coherent way to present an end-to-end solution (without losing to the chaos of 100+ types of systems)

• Research/school wise, I pulled together 10 interviews with people looking at thoughts on death and personalisation. Thank you to everyone that volunteered time!

• 6 beautiful, dreamy days in Porto

• Lots of reformer pilates

On service design

It’s been annoying to dip in and out of work between school time off and holidays but as we enter the last month of this phase, we’re now shifting focus to the deeper, more strategic end of the detail. There’s a lot of dependencies from other workstreams (i.e. solution architecture) but also on us, to interpret this work and take it to blueprint language. We’re exploring being less exhaustive, adopting more information-friendly practices (i.e. data and design) and having many conversations with lots of process owners across the customer journey.

On research

I was able to run some preliminary research interviews for feedback on what people really think of death (or dying well). There’s such a rich variety in levels of death literacy and not a lot of interest in mortality engagement in general. A lot of this talking about death also circles back to life, and influences between lived experience on personal beliefs. I’m starting to see how my tendency to ‘framework’ everything is limiting my research rigour on something as existential of death. It feels like trying numerous keys on a lock, rather than fashioning one myself.

Bookmarks

User-facing services vs enabling platforms, Kuba Bartwicki

Generative AI exists because of the transformer, Madhumita Murgia

Research basics every designer should know, Lirra Hill

Sketches of future digital services in government, Steve Messer

Time to notice and think more, Steve Messer

System theories, Graham Berrisford

Planning

I’m trying out a new weeknote flow to include space for reflecting on my personal life and goals (i.e. fitness). Last week actually proved that doing something in hindsight helped make this week better, so let’s do this again more intentionally.

Day by day

• Mon - theory of innovation lectures (types i.e. radical vs incremental)

• Tues - guest lectures from real-world start ups/ventures (i.e. lean innovation)

• Wed - design futures (i.e. Jim Dator’s 4 futures)

• Thurs - lots of group work, thinking about the future of fertility through ✨contraception ✨

• Fri - group presentations walking through preferable futures, concept development and prototype

• Sat - boxing, bit of life admin and seeing my first live fight 😱

• Sun - prepping ahead for next week’s module on behavioural change

On work

I’ve been off work but sometimes I catch myself thinking about how that blueprint is doing. I’m proud of myself for not checking my emails too much but lately I’ve been having dreams of work (not good I know), thinking about last week’s feedback, and trying to action them at school this week.

On research

We covered a module on healthcare innovation which was interesting, but also felt like an extension of previous content. The week started with a history of innovation in healthcare — from Ancient Egypt to the early 20th century — and how each type buckets into the 4 categories of radical, routine, disruptive and architectural. I liked that no type fared better than the other, but I would’ve liked to hear more about the need for specific types in the context of healthcare (particularly on a systems level).

The rest of the week covered lots of design futures stuff, which thankfully wasn’t too foreign for my brain, but it was fun to collate these concepts into our group’s chosen ‘challenge area’ on fertility. By Friday we presented our concepts of a preferred future in 2100, and proposed a ‘build your custom contraceptive’ prototype as a service, in a world where there would be no more side effects, is accessible, and tailored to a new normal of not having children (aka forever contraception). It’s always nice to be experimental and lighthearted when it comes to the a school project (designing for fun over servitude).

The feedback we got was interesting: would apps still exist in 2100? (we showed a screen prototype). Is a future where contraception still exists, the kind we prefer? (We arguably only improved the state of contraception, rather than thinking more disruptively).

Fitness bits

• Monday upper day. I can’t really remember how this session went except trying to squeeze this in my morning before a week of class and upended routine.

• Tried reformer pilates for the first time and to no surprise, loved it. It’s so challenging under time/tension and being supported with a machine really helped with mitigating the pain from my recent injuries and soreness.

• Did a boxing class at Kensington for the first time in a while — I haven’t done bag work in so long, it felt weirdly boring. It’d also been a minute since I’ve been pushed to the limit by a trainer…

• Usual Saturday morning 1-1 boxing. Really broke a sweat here, lots of pads, footwork and working around the ring which was veryyyy fun.

Looking ahead > planning my week ahead worked wonders for getting my rest days in (very important). I’m excited to incorporate more low-impact pilates next week + cardio sessions as I prepare to do a little 3-week cut.

Reads

This post from Erika Hall

Embracing ensembles, Thea Snow

The (il)logic of legibility: why governments should stop simplifying complex systems, Thea Snow

It’s just a spreadsheet, but it’s still data infrastructure, Leigh Dodds

Affirmations

This week I tried to experiment with affirmation-setting and it’s been a nice metric to measure my day. I used to look at this from the productivity perspective (at my therapist’s dismay), which as life goes, is usually hit/miss. Now, I’m trying out a design futurist approach on my life (envisioning what is preferable to inform the present).

Anyways, an extra reflective week for me, lots of 1-1s at work and wrapping up some bits before I head back to my Masters for two weeks!

What happened

• Some fun: tried golf for the first time, explored Hampstead Heath, sunny day in East just eating away

• Kicked off our first customer journey development session with the client UX/R team

• Refined the Retail Discovery journeys from the feedback received

• Drafted the Retail Replenishment journeys, ahead of the session (week after next)

• Mapped a view of all detailed journeys by product

• Show and tell — 15 mins to present a service design/blueprint 101 to one of our executive sponsors

• Mid-project feedback convos (here’s your reminder to collect regular feedback, it’s good for you)

• Tying up loose knits and knots as it’s my last week before I head back to class for 2 weeks!

• Getting used to markdown formatting (once-and-for-all)…

Our first customer journey development session

Last week I tried to push the remaining customer journeys as far as possible, before my 2-week return to my Masters. We’re only on session 1 of 4, where we walked through the journeys so far — Discovery is looking in shape in terms of detail and complexity, which is great. We only had one strategic hour to lay context and walk through the journeys to the UX/R team, so most of this was spent on the actual walkthrough and getting on the same page. These sessions have been a milestone as it marks our first point of collaboration with UX (first, of many).

The feedback we got helped to fill some gaps and refine our knowledge of the channels, particularly notifications (which aren’t being delivered in-app today). Since Discovery is all about search and personalisation, a lot of this thinking has been around surfacing relevant promotions, getting help (manual/self-serve) and enhanced filtration (auto/manual) — think product comparisons, data > preference, appointment consultations. We’ve been trying to exhaust the product epics (particularly the essential features) into all the macro-journeys, ensuring that no key epic gets missed. It might not be the most realistic path, but it’s exhaustive and does justice to the service complexity.

On feedback

It’s the mid-point of the project which calls for feedback discussions. I’m still tailoring my approach but I find that 1) on giving feedback, it’s much easier to take sporadic notes throughout the project for people rather than think back when the time comes, 2) on requesting feedback, it’s much more helpful to share your goals, so other people can better support your development (and you, them). This transparency has worked really well this week, and the key things I heard back were:

1. Communication: misalignment between quality of communication + quality of work. As a small team, we all represent a very different skillset, making us all experts in our own regard. I’ve conscious that I can let my expertise speak beyond empathy, which doesn’t always bode well in disagreement. Going forward, my priority is to work on skillful empathy —this looks like dedicating more of my time to embedding into an inclusive team culture, extend opportunities to junior designers and being more responsive in times of tension.

2. Style of leadership: segways nicely to my second point about the type of leader I want to be known for. I received a variation of this feedback in the past but it feels a lot more relevant now that I’m more senior. I haven’t spent enough time thinking about this, but its something along the lines of becoming a compassionate coach/educator rather than someone more hands-off, like a facilitator or decision-maker.

3. Building beyond advocacy: I’m a designer, now so what? There’s a role in upselling this a a value (one of which is my core goals), but also a responsibility in translating this into tangible outcomes. As a service designer, it can sometimes feel like so much of the job is about convincing others rather than the actual work. My future thoughts for development will look like letting the outcomes speak for themselves, rather than getting bogged down on communicating to stakeholders.

Reads

Building the next generation of digital public services, Richard Pope

Information Architecture First Principles, Jorge Arango

Capability Building in Government: What are the lessons from Blair’s Capability Reviews?, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Platformland and thoughts about trust and legibility, Vicky Teinaki

B2C vs B2B Design, Canvas Editorial

GOV.UK Design System Day 2, Vicky Teinaki

Community and Competition in the World of Co-Design, Local Peoples

Part III: One Year On, Where To Next? – Justice Digital, Gina Gill

Are we lost?, Gina Gill

Scaling Service Design in government - A new approach to service design in large organisations, Lou Downe

Competency Model for Service Designers, Marzia Aricò

Community and Competition in the World of Co-Design, Dr Emma Blomkamp, Jethro Sercombe, Jade Tang-Taylor and George Aye

Scaling the design of good services, Kate Tarling

Lovely commentary on blogging, Linkedin post by Thea Snow

Sustained peace

Testing out a new weeknote structure, because working is hard, but open is harder. It’s not always a clear balance between my life at work and school, and so here are 3 of my top-line themes of the week.

Things of note

• Building out 2 of the 8 core customer journey steps

• Informal validation with the UX discovery team + ongoing product workshops, to really tinker and cement these steps to reflect the learnings of both

• Planning a series of customer journey validation sessions with UX/R to be kicked off next week (to co-develop, workshop style)

• Some delayed scoping considerations on the risks of keeping health in line with retail (more of a technical implication > design)

• Lots of reading, referencing and synthesising literature on all things end-of-life (existing design interventions)

Validations and assumptions

We had all week to pin down half of the customer journeys to be put forward to the client next week. The personas from discovery helped us get as far as core needs, but these journeys now include the granularity of 50+ portfolio epics, lessons from UX discovery and ongoing research work in retail product pages, etc.

It’s strange revisiting a way of developing service blueprints as previously, doing this with government readied me for mass complexity (and as a service designer, the ask of making this legible). The nuances of those services made it highly internal, SME-led and architecture dependent.

As a customer of this own client, I have the luxury of self-researching the service experience without having to ask. This is usually convenient, but bias is always a risk worth noting (as I reflected in my previous role). When you don’t ask, you don’t really know. That is why we are calling these journey validation sessions rather than workshops — knowing our assumptions help us frame better questions.

Lessons from designing for end of life

I have 1 week before I go back to half a month of classes (!) and to ready myself, I’ve been shortlisting key texts to look at for my research themes (end-of-life, mortality engagement, a ‘good’ death). To do this (and because I’m a visual planner), I’ve been mapping this out according to sub-theme, reference, and knowledge gaps. These gaps will then inform the direction of my research activity.

Part Uno involves looking at lessons from designing for end-of-life and thanatosensitivity. Designers engaging with death have been a slow and going challenge, and research has demanded for the integration of siloed disciplines (i.e. medicine, behaviour and design) and systemic thinking to recognise dying as a relational experience (beyond the individual). A lot of these insights have been living in the back of my brain for months but it feels a lot better now to see this in one neat matrix.

A brain and a body

I don’t always like reflecting on my personal life with work but more recently, I’ve been floating the idea of living more openly too (for accountability rather than feedback). Like everyone else, I sometimes compromise my health at the will of work, and like every other time, this never really bodes well. I have this strange inclination to constantly put my body at work to keep pace with my brain. This means training hard and often, rejecting ‘doing nothing’ days and taking it out on others/myself when anything feels physically impossible.

I had a few of these ‘impossible’ moments this week simply due to life and nature, yet it felt more like a mental challenge than physical setback. I’m conscious that there’s an undeniable connection between the mind and body, and sometimes I can’t always have both. As the days are already getting colder and darker, I’m going to prioritise more outdoor time, and plan my activities as much as rest time.

Reading

44. Assembling, Vicky Teinaki

Silver bullets, Amy Hupe

Design job seekers often fail to talk about impact, Christopher K Wong

Four principles for successful cross-team collaboration, Courtney Maya George

Working in the open is good for you, Kuba Bartwicki

How GOV.UK is supporting new ideas and helping the next generation of service designers, Laura Yarrow

Hola

This summer has felt strangely long yet here we are. I haven’t had a lot of time to slow down until my holiday, and sometimes I forget how much peace and stillness I get from just watching the sunset, looking at the sea and listening to the waves clap.

Post-holiday week

• Spent an extended bank-holiday weekend in San Sebastián and Biarritz — non-stop pintxos and dranks

• Finished The Silent Patient (probably my first fiction book in a long time)

• Finally completed alignment of the service blueprint template

• Planning for upcoming blueprint validation and development sessions with UX/R, architecture and business

• Finalised all 8 customer journeys across retail and health

• Our first show-and-tell opportunity with the client

Part 1

I haven’t had a 72 hour week in a while, yet this one felt a little longer than the usual. We’re now week 5 into the project and into the development of the service blueprints, of which there are 4 end-to-end experiences mapped (2 journeys each). This means 8 customer journeys, thinking about:

• Type of journey: are they looking to buy something, or discover something?

• Journey steps: what is happening? (i.e. “I make an account…”)

• Decision points: which step triggers the start of another journey (i.e. “Books appointment”)

• Critical moments: which steps could ‘make or break’ a service (i.e. “Find product on offer”)

• Channel: where this step takes place (i.e. in-store, website, app)

From next week, we start to sync with UX and start filling out the blueprint, journey first. We’re starting to see these journeys play a vital role in supporting other workstreams through workshops and comms, which has slightly expedited the need for us to get them done.

Part 2

I go back to 2 weeks of class in 3 weeks (!) for the final few modules before completing my degree. I’ve yet to attend some death cafes for experience and exposure but there are some virtual sessions hopefully going in the diary ASAP. Sometimes it feels like I’m stuck in a loop when working on my dissertation, but the current plan is to get started on literature reviews, find some common themes and start building out the structure of my dissertation.

Reads

Why Do All Websites Look the Same?, Boris Müller

Representing non-linear journeys, Lisa Koeman

Where all the (hidden) design jobs are, Edward Liu

Better Usability Through Information Architecture, Jorge Arango

To be a designer is to be a facilitator, Marielle Sam-Wall

Designing for velocity, Ed Orozco

Peace

Since my last weeknote, I have been gracefully challenged at work, reinforced new skills, celebrated an academic milestone, had a generous share of quality time with old and new people, and found home in a person and my dog Nara. Peaceful.

This week

• Template development: building the blueprint and splitting this out by 4 types of ‘service’

• Service design taxonomy: thinking about how we see a service, journey, stages, needs and activities

• Defining the purpose of the service blueprint, and ensuring effective internal communication with leadership, peer reviews and across different teams within

• Salesforce training (preparing for the Associate exam)

• Attended UR interviews with existing app users and experience

• Liaising with business, functional and technical architecture to translate their work to blueprint language

• Started a Career Management Document (CMD) aka hype doc, as a place to regularly update my progress at work, notable moments, inform feedback praise etc…

Co-developing a template

We’re week 3 of 16 into the project and the service blueprint is around 85% template-ready. Hopefully we can get this signed off next week, and with the remaining 12 weeks or so, start filling this out with other key workstreams like product, business, functional and tech. Last week I got some valuable, non-biased feedback from our experience design lead on the importance of stakeholder selection, and how to get the right people to inform a service blueprint.

This looks something like wearing a ‘research’ hat: aka going to different disciplines, evangelising service design, and advocating for the blueprint without it resulting as a duplicate of other process maps and outputs.

Having these conversations have really been reinforcing my own understanding of the blueprint and the why in what we do. We spent a week establishing a project-specific taxonomy for what we mean by service, journey, phases, and stages. Whilst the external (customer) journey is less controversial, it’s now up to us to interpret other outputs like process maps and solution blueprints, and translate this into the ‘common service language’ to enable a holistic organisational understanding.

This means anyone should be able to read this blueprint and understand the impact of their decisions, identify dependencies and uncover some pain points along the way. It’s very easy to fall into silos in a system (as we’ve seen in this service already), and sometimes a visual source of truth can help remedy that.

Research roads ahead

On a super positive note, I had my ethics application approved in record time (6 days)!

This means I have an official green light to start recruitment. In true research fashion, I’m filling in the shoes of a participant by attending a few death cafe sessions myself (some virtual, and one in person). I hate to dilute my experience with a research motive, but I’m hoping that that this experience can funnel some empathy as a facilitator of my own ‘research cafe’ in the next few months. Priority for the week is to document, think further about recruitment and outline a detailed research guide.

Bookmarks

When it comes to stigmergy the starlings have us beat, Roger Swannell

Agile or not, it’s all about your worldview, Roger Swannell

Seven kinds of system (and 20 related articles), Graham Berrisford

Why we need service literacy, Lou Downe

Rethinking The Role Of Your UX Teams And Move Beyond Firefighting, Smashing Magazine

Accelerating growth and impact as a designer, Elvis Hsiao

Designing whole services part 4, Cathy Dutton

Designing to navigate

Happy August people, it’s a wonderful time to be alive. We finally kicked off the project (this is not a drill), met our lovely clients, made some research progress, moved our body, and the world has been very kind. I sometimes forget that beneath the layers of work, school and productivity, is just a tiny human, small voice, big dreams, trying to find life, one week at a time.

What you missed

• Building on the micro-journeys across retail and health, identified from discovery

• Identified potential target states for each stage on a dimension of similar > enhanced > bonus

• Started a template for the working service blueprints to be delivered at the end of 16 weeks

• Portfolio epic working sessions, to ensure alignment between service, UX and product

• Intros with our new client

• Continued iteration of workshop cards for consumer health (great tool for provocations at an c-suite level)

• Ran through service design 101s to coach and upskill new designers from scratch

Dissecting the blueprint

I had the joy of running through Service Design 101 a few times this week: a hot (personal) take of what design is, what services mean, how services can be designed, and what it means to be a service designer (in a consultant setting). Although service design sits across one of the many workstreams of my new project, the upselling of this is still very much neccessary for our client, described as ‘low to mid’ design maturity-wise.

The idea that services can be designed is always fascinating to people, yet many of us are designers of services. It’s only week one (officially) and we’ve made so much progress on a blueprint template to co-create towards the next 15 weeks.

Blueprints sometimes get a reputation of being dead artefacts (expensive, yet never used again). A map is only as good as its purpose, and blueprints are no different. Like GPS, it puts you on track when you get lost. A customer journey map tells a story, but a blueprint breaks this story down to digestible building blocks (activities, tasks, evidence, touchpoints). This is where you can find conditions, dependencies, and the right metrics for that service to thrive. Thriving means getting from stage 1-10, and doing this quickly, easily and seamlessly.

Service blueprints are a high-level reference you use when a customer gets stuck on one stage for too long, or when you need to make a decision that can have ramifications for the rest of your service. It’s important this gets treated as a living document, and that everyone is held accountable (not just service designers, sorry!).

Designing for private

The move from designing for public services to private has been a strange transition for me. Government services are usually valued by utility (speed, convenience, accessibility), and the work I now do in retail is priced by experience (personalisation, brand, and loyalty). The constraints look different, and the users too. There’s a lot more room for blue-sky thinking and co-creation through workshops. I find myself asking more ‘what if’s than ‘what about’s.

Researching death

This week is my personal deadline for submitting my ethics application, where I will be proposing a death cafe-like activity on death personalisation, facilitating the right conditions and attitudes to mortality. Besides from the distressing morbidity, getting approval for researching with people is something to tread gently on. In the meantime, lots of online training modules to complete, a research plan to pull together, and application to finally submit.

On a reflective note, I’ve written over 25 weeknotes this year. There have been more weeks to note, as there are left in life, and I’ve never felt so much peace in taking things one at a time. There have been good weeks and terrible weeks but always another week to come.

I don’t know who needs reminding today, but there’s always another week to be excited about. This week is very exciting because it’s my favourite person’s birthday (I know he is reading this so happy birthday you 🎈).

Reads

Alternatives to the Double Diamond, Dan Ramsden

When You Want to Give Someone “Feedback”, Do This Instead, Daniel Stillman

Designing for the World: An Introduction to Localization, Spotify

The 4-Step Framework to Solve Almost Any Problem Like Top Strategy Consultants, Alex Miguel Meyer

User-centred design, Agile, and government, Vicky Teinaki

A Proliferation of Terms, Luke Wroblewski

Designing for forgiveness: How to create error-tolerant interfaces, Tetiana Sydorenko

A common language to understand services, Kate Tarling

How to keep a journey map useful long after you make it, Lina Nilsson

Defining Services, Kate Tarling

Service outcomes and measurement, Kate Tarling

Developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index: Lessons from Bogotá, Barcelona, Freetown, Seattle and Seoul, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Joyful

I sometimes think that the week (aka 168 hours) is my favourite period of time to experiment with routine, ride the troves between hump day, feel the early rush of a weekend, before settling into the stillness of Sunday. Time is such a fickle thing and the idealist in me is constantly moved by it.

How it went

• Support with thought leadership on product > customer centricity

• Workshop prep on customer excellence for a private healthcare provider

• Produced research cards as workshop material for a consumer health company: ft. trends and provocations, to get some creative juices on future-proofing the business

• Analysed a mountain of discovery material for my new project (initial research, insights and just more clarity on what the overall mission/vision is about)

• Finalised my goals as part of my development plan for the year

• Very little brainstorm on portfolio epics to come out the back of the new project (from a CX angle)

Working in progress

This week has been thriving with all the healthcare-related opportunities I’d dreamt about since I started my Master’s degree. There’s too much to cover in a single note, but perhaps most exciting bits have been kicking off with my new digital retail and health project, meeting the team, getting to know ways of working etc.

We have three months to get a service blueprint together that will bridge retail + health through an enhanced digital proposition — alongside revisiting the design system, E2E infrastructure, product management, and many more. Retail has a lot of accessibility to learn from health, and vice versa, health can borrow much from personalisation. Whilst the project has yet to officially kick off, we’ve been burying ourselves with pre-read materials, familiarising ourselves with the discovery work and mapping out the different micro-journeys that have been defined as target-state. For when we start, this will give us some sort of skeleton or ‘worksheet’ to bring to the client, before the real work is done to fill in all the gaps.

Researching in progress

I spent the last weekend laying out a 6-month plan to writing my dissertation at the end of year. I always say that planning is the eating-the-frog part, and putting together a research proposal for review is very much that. Whilst one part looks at reflexivity (keeping a research log to acknowledge my biases), the part I’m opening up to participation will involve workshopping/interviews, looking at personalised outcomes for death, ideas for governance, defining metrics for success. I’m not too worried about the ethics process, although there’s a lot of clarity I’m missing on the delivery format and recruitment strategy. I still have a long way to go, but the slow way > no way.

Very selective reads

The Triple Diamond, Nora Guerrera

Filling in the gaps - The case for public backlogs, roadmaps, Ross Ferguson

Days are gone

There have been many-a-random weeks, yet few get to this level as of late. I’m always one nervous breakdown away from realising I have this much time to get that much done, but in the name of grim humour and lots of advanced holiday planning, we persevere.

240 hours

• User research sessions

• Proposal support for change-fatigued banking experience

• Journey/persona building support for a university client (last min design tweaks to a violently colourful brand)

• Looking at the shift from product-to-customer centricity as prep for a client workshop

• Intro-ed Service Design to a few work experience students

• Mini-onboarding as a service designer on a new project (ft. retail and health)

Life as a designer

At the time of writing, I’m counting down the final 5 days of my GDS project (😢). Most of design has been ramped down to build, and last week was UR heavy: testing a new upload pattern, which has been received very positively! This part of the service involved asking the user to download an Excel template, submit an filled-out version, accepting an adjusted version, and doing this again on a recurrent basis.

Simultaneously, we’ve been working on redesigning a multi-upload pattern (to be more GDS-compliant). This involves somewhat of a non-sequential task list, consisting of multiple files per task (with the ability for the user to upload as many files as they want, whenever they want) — almost like a ‘storage’ unit of files in different drawers. I’ve been revisiting a long-time interest in information architecture recently, and the art of building great experiences of mental models.

Life as a student

With only a year left in my Masters degree to go (gasps), I’m still scrambling to organise my dissertation and what needs doing/planning for the next few months. Academia is definitely not something that comes naturally to me, flying solo and whatnot. So far, I’ve got an overview of the research that needs to be done (ethics-dependent) and a backlog of reflexive inquiry over the next X months.

Bookmarks

What is Information Architecture?, Jorge Arango

The design leadership dip, Andy Polaine

Systems thinking + design = ?. What do systemic designers design, why…, Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer

Information architecture core concepts, Donna Spencer

Concept, DOC

A plea for the lost practice of information architecture, Vicky Teinaki

What can we remove?, Steph Ango

Write when you have something to say, Anton Sten

The Dangers Of Outsourcing Our Power As Actualizers To Technology, Erik Brown

The hot scoop

Happy Friday, it’s been the warm week that everyone prayed for, yet still complained about, because we live in London. I know my reflections are pivoting away from GDS but I’m keen to keep thinking, writing and blogging because life is short and we have much to learn and too much to risk forgetting about.

Week coming in hot

• Attended a training session on delivering services with ✨ excellence ✨

• Finished off some slides for national contact

• Finally drafted my professional goals

• Last two weeks on GDS (sadly still silenced by pre-election)

• Reading this

Citizens vs users

As I slowly roll-off from my long-term GDS marriage (now at half capacity), I’ve been splitting the rest of my time between development / admin / BD. For a few days, I got to work with new faces on a proposal for a national contact strategy. The lens of citizen-centric design has always been an unchartered territory of interest for me, and now that I have a better understanding of public services and customer experience, this intersection feels weirdly spacious.

Part of the proposal involved translating CX principles (largely geared towards retail/private) to a public perspective, but there was something about simply altering the content that didn’t always sit right. I’ve spoken about the design of making things public before and its distinction to the the design of services of mass consumption (i.e. software), but I now see these differences going beyond accessibility — bleeding into processes like development (over strategy), governance (over alignment) and continuous improvement (over iteration).

Goals

I finally bit the bullet and started drafting my goals for the performance year. For the next 12 months, I’d like to:

• Demonstrate the value of design, and what this looks like across different sectors

  • At its core, design is still about solving problems (as much as mitigating its effects). I’m conscious that craft is only as useful as its ability to answer the how (i.e. how introducing a manual step for a user can be more empowering > deterring), but sometimes I ignore my intuition by business decisions more often than I’d like. Working on this means leading more with design, and filling in some big girl shoes.

• Leverage experience as a way to do ‘growth’

  • If design is of experience, what does this look like when done well? I think ‘growth’ is a compelling metric, yet something that conveys very differently in the public sector. For me, part of this goal means looking at the various ways to measure success, as much as proving that a correlation exists between experience and X metric.

• Continue developing as a V-shaped hybrid

  • Over time, I’ve found myself crossing disciplines (sometimes serendipitously so, like when I found service through hospitality) or in skillset (when I started my first UX role on a project). I’m a big believer in designing my own career, and this means being more intentional with crossing these boundaries (aka a fancy way of saying ‘step out of my comfort zone’). Right now these zones look like service/UX, but I’d like to visit new places like strategy, systems thinking and business/operations.

Reading

How Data-Informed Design can help you navigate these turbulent times, Kai Wong

job title: it’s complicated, Brad Frost

How I used feedback to analyse my work behaviours, Harry Vos

Good services can support bad policies, and bad services can support good policies. It's messy, Harry Vos

Designer’s Maturity Model, Alipta Ballav

What might a high trust, productive policy process look like?, LNH

Making a system to create a system, Beau Ulrey

Closing the gap

Good afternoon, rare Friday scribble from me. This week I came across Erika Hall’s post on making stupid websites and have been obsessed with indieweb experimenting.

What happened

• Still designing in pre-election silence

• Thinking about my professional goals

• Supporting a new proposal for a national contact strategy

• Reading this

• Designing dumb on html (on Jekyll)

An ode to my first design child

Pre-election silence means I still can’t talk about the incredible progress we’ve been making, but it’s also that time where design activities have been ramping down (ready for build) so I’m due to roll off very soon. It’s a pretty surreal feeling seeing as it’s the first (proper) project I’m rolling off from during my 18 months at PwC.

I’ve gone through hills with the team: from witnessing the passing of one GDS assessment (private to public beta), to seeing one whole release into life, and taking part in the making of a brand new gateway service. Coming at 12 months, I’ve come from scrambling on Figma to prototyping with the gov design system as a true GDS interaction designer. Some noteworthy moments:

• Learning from our ex-Service Design Lead, whose patience and trust played a huge role in nurturing the confidence I needed to defend my craft

• Owning my first workstream for 3 months and building my first gov.uk pages from scratch. I’ll never forget how long I spent on thinking about accordions and faffing about with auto-layout…

• Taking my first-born designs to UR and getting to sit through the entire process from planning to decisions

• Mastering the compliance of WCAG to design a seamless spreadsheet experience on Excel

• Being a part of the GDS community, learning from assessors, accessibility advocates and the wonderful weeknote community

It’s been a long week but I’m really optimistic for the future work in store. Watch this space!

Reads

Why Designers Need To Speak Business, Anton Sten

If your organisation is revenue driven try using phrases replacing phrases like ‘inconsistencies’ with ‘design debt’ to describe the situation. People in revenue hate debt.

It’s just a blog, Annie Mueller

small unknown complex life, Rebecca Toh

I don’t know if it’s just me but I always get a warm and fuzzy feeling in my gut whenever I stumble upon an interesting blog written by someone who is living their small unknown complex life God-knows-where. I feel connected by our common humanity. We’ll never meet, but I can picture them sitting on their sofa writing on their laptop or using the computer in their kitchen, writing when the kids are asleep, writing in the morning, writing when the first snowfall arrives, writing about their new job, about losing their job, about moving to a new city, about this film they just watched, about their husband who died a few years ago. A blog is a small and beautiful thing and I am grateful it exists.

Cognitive bias cheat sheet, Buster Benson

Public luxuries, Kuba Bartwicki

Why can’t more really nice things be accessible? Why can’t public services exceed expectations?

See: the public experience

Weeknotes rules, Giles Turnbull

Complex web design is an overlooked opportunity that needs designers, Kai Wong

Why Designers Need To Speak Business, Anton Sten

Ten years on - reflections on Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, Ben Reason

The Rise of the Citizen Experience, Dustin Haisler

Monthnote

As we enter the pre-election period, I’m mindful of keeping work-stuff out of weeknotes at least until July. The entire month of May has been jam-packed with travel, illness, blissful days of doing nothing in Hong Kong, running, falling off routine and then back again.

Life, as of late

• Overdue catchups

• Seeing 90% of features to sign off 🚀

• One Firm One Day (supporting a social enterprise based in Scotland)

• My first big girl promotion! ⭐️

• Budapest for a weekend

Life as a designer

Since I can’t touch on work, here’s a generic update for now. My first days back have been a mental juggle between catching up and trying to slide myself back in the week-by-week planning. The design team hasn’t been this small in a while, but our 2:1 UX to content ratio has been an efficient trio for dividing and conquering flows of all sizes. We used to split work according to internal/external, which had its pros and cons:

• Pros: clear responsibilities, less planning needed to align on tasks, less time spent on each other’s meetings

• Cons: disadvantageously siloed, less transparency, less context for the inevitable handovers

As designers, we’re constantly designing how we do it as much as what we do. This makes being organised a ridiculously handy skill to have (and one that I truly believe anyone can harness).

Life as a student

There’s not been much dissertation work going this month as I’ve been preoccupied with getting my module assignments over the line. We went over a design sprint in March, during which we were tasked to design a healthy ageing programme from the lens of frailty. This meant speaking to actual users, pulling our own insights, seeing concepts from 0 to life — some of the things I missed doing since becoming an actual designer (the irony).

Reading

Consortia and Coalitions: embarking on collaborative journeys, Bill Bannear

The new zeitgeist: relationships and emergence, Bill Beannear

How to organise yourself — Part I, Jared Spool

Six definitions of love, Steph Ango

How to become a Senior Designer — from an ex-Google, Meta Designer, Yu Tong Xue

Dark patterns versus behavioural nudges in UX, Andrew Tipp

Public sector capacity matters, but what is it?, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

“Mindsets” approach as a tool for identifying patterns of user behavior, Anna Zhila

Discomfort is a Strategic Advantage, Luke Wroblewski

Could Omotenashi (おもてなし) be the Service Design of the future?, Rebekka Bush

How design is governance, Amber Case

“At a fundamental level, all design is governance. We encounter inconveniences like this coffee shop every day, both offline and in the apps we use. But it’s not enough to say it’s the result of bad design. It’s also a result of governance decisions made on behalf of the customers during the design process.”

• See [variety: law of experience]

Homebound

I know I said I wouldn't skip a weeknote but I let life get in the way again. I also don’t feature the other side of my double-life very much—the one where I study/research healthcare and design—so here's a new kind of recap ahead.

In a nutshell

• Redesigned a flow that enables our users to request to make changes, including states for abandoning these changes, recalling/restoring them, and requests for either

• Monthly team day in London ft. in-person retro

• Finally finished my research proposal (just in time to reclaim 4 hours of a weekend)

• 13 hour leg for 2 weeks back *home* home aka Hong Kong ♥️

As a designer…

The last two weeks on my project have been UX heavy as we revisited screens for the next flow (due for build by Q3). It’s also awfully inconvenient as my 2-week leave clashes during a time packed with high-level design, but already I’m excited to see all 4 of 4 flows near-sign-off by the time I’m back (and in our new and shiny Figma system ✨).

I sometimes forget to appreciate how collaborative the UCD process is. Despite the overwhelming number of meetings, silo is design's worst enemy. So is virtual fatigue. We had a monthly retro in person in London last week, which saw some great ideas for things like making sign-off easier, and meetings more productive (rather than in abundance).

On a more positive note: we released our first child into public beta! As of last week, about 1237 gov employees can now dip into a digital we helped create. Hopefully this will make it easier for them to achieve their admirable 5-year ambition 🔨

… and as a student

Recently, I've been pouring a lot of energy into my research proposal for my dissertation. This is my exploration into death, and the role design can have in bettering it. We see design do a lot of good work in healthcare. The 21st century has been very good at prolonging life, but not nearly as good at helping us die.

Modern day dying is complicated, expensive, ambiguous—yet we all can't help but die—and for many deaths, this happens in a less-than-ideal way. Research also says we have pretty good grasp of ideal; the typical person wants to be pain-free, at home, not a burden for family, tend to spiritual needs, plus whenever possible, an experience described as far from clinical/medical/systemised (i.e. uncontrollable).

For months, my research has gone from discovery > hypothesis > proposal of methods to look at mortality engagement and personalisation (both in isolation). Part of this means being reflexive (not to be confused with reflective). Like the latter, but in a way that carefully acknowledges my own biases and subjectivity, aka the reason for why I research in the 'open': build a mind fortress for public scrutiny. The other part involves lots of interviews and contextual inquiry, which I can’t really go into until I get an ethics approval. So that’s next.

Human things

The days leading up to my flight home was very hectic so running took another low on the priority list. The humidity where I'm from also makes running an unnecessary challenge, so it's back on the human hamster wheel I go (except for an upcoming evening with Midnight Runners)! Here’s a growing list of unique things I love about home:

• The city’s hilly terrain

• A promenade being a neighbourhood staple

• Something open on every corner… 24/7

• Not having to bring a jacket/dress for the cold

• Good fruit (and being spoiled with variety)

Reads of the week

Dark Patterns are now illegal in India, Canvs Editorial

The Diagram that Shows the Value of Great UX, Jared Spool

Digital front door: Alternatives to a business case, Rumman Amin

The All Day Hey, Steve Messer

40. Imagination, Vicky Teinaki

Practice productive idealism, Scott Berkun

On being sedentary

I tried a thing last week and skipped a weeknote, with the intention of squeezing two-in-one. Lesson learnt, because 14 days of lessons is a lot to lean on memory alone. So here’s a snippet of what my calendar looked like, plus some thoughtful commentary.

What the heck happened

• Figma sign-offs on 3 big features, carrying Release 11. to 2 forwards!

• Lots of time polishing, tidying and getting these flows into a more organised system of files (a fantastic obsessive-compulsive exercise)

• Pulling together a service blueprint for one of our services: how payments will work with solution architecture

• Workshop prep for a proposed ‘tactical’ solution as an alternative to retiring one of our payment solutions

• On school… lots of headspace poured into my research approach for my dissertation

• Steady progress towards my essay submission (proposal of RQ and methods)

• Been restlessly sedentary all week since my hydrocortisone knee injections :(

What I learnt as a designer

Recently, I’ve been honing a lot of my craft and feeling the test of momentum. There’s been a lot of changes in the project (contractually and in scope) which has resulted to planning, designing and delivering all at once (probably not even in logical order). We’ve managed to sign-off on the flows we had worked on all the way back in December, and interrogating all the necessary updates to these features (in light of our new gateway service we had started working on this year). You’d think it’d be smarter to build the structure of a home before you start furnishing it, but unfortunately, reality doesn’t always agree with design.

Organisation has also not been our strongest suit, which we’re now feeling as a massive hindrance when working across 3 workstreams, 3 releases, and 3-ish features all at the same time. So I spent this week doing a lot of Figma housekeeping, and now I’m seeing everything in our shiny new system, it’s making me feel more excited to tackle future screens.

Headspace* (or lack thereof) is another occuring theme. Design is a collaborative practice, which means a majority of my day is spent in working sessions, huddles, and conversations to align with different people, etc. Sometimes this means I get very little time left to for deep work, and in reeling from my burnout-era, I’m trying to not resort to too many 5ams in hopes of getting concentration in whilst the world is still asleep (I say as I write this at 630am).

What I’m still figuring out as a human

*Re above. Plus a few more:

• Learning to be OK with physical rest… especially when I’m injured

• Being confident, even in the face of uncertainty (seek probability instead)

• Taking ownership, even if decisions aren’t always mine to make

• Communicating capacity, even if there’s always more to do

• Maintaining momentum, even when motivation runs low

Run notes (Week X/?)

So much work and life has happened, yet not much running…

The pain in my knees has defeated me, and I only just managed to get my steroid shots, so made a difficult decision to move my race (intended for a week from now) to June. For the next 2 months, I’m hoping to do all the things I wanted to do but had running stand in the way, like boxing, tennis, F45, pilates, park runs/chill runs… I love fitness but being too rigid really took the enjoyment out for me.

Maybe these were my joints threatening me to chill the heck out, but I hope it doesn’t take a needle (or 4) for me to finally listen next time around.

Words that taught me stuff

Good and useful writing, Robin Rendle

Should You Rent or Buy a House?, Nick Maggiulli

The Advantages of Imposter Syndrome, Dan Mall (loved this one)

On Being a Slow Thinker, Carl Barenbrug (meta-thinking is underrated)

Persuasion, Christopher Butler

The most infringing chair design, Steve Messer

Certainty, probability, risk, Steve Messer

Why it seems like the sky is falling for digital design, Jan Takacs

Strategy that Works, Jurriaan Kamer

Framing research integration, Jason Mesut

Revived (a weeknote, starting 1 April 2024), Vicky Teinaki

Visualising research using Framework Darwinism, Jan Chipchase

Service Safari: Selling online and sending items with Vinted and Yodel Store to Door, Sam Villis

Uji, Ivor Williams

Mindful storytelling

Happy jam-packed April — my calendar is sweating with assignment deadlines, but I’m ready to start redeeming myself because March really spoiled me…

Snippets of the week

• Gathered credentials for a new telecommunications opportunity

• More service blueprint support

• Planning for a Service Design 101 session

• Design support for payment changes in our ongoing workstream, together with the solution architecture team

• Reviewed my quarterly personal finances (throwing it back to my hard earned cashflow skills)

• Prep for a podcast I’ve been invited to guest on, on being a change-maker!

On selling my story

This week, I spent a lot of time in existentialist limbo, thinking about who I want to be (in line with what I’m good at). Last year, I gave a talk on creative types and personalities and how spending a lot of my younger days procastinating on Buzzfeed quizzes helped me sell myself into a decent career.

I’m a huge believer in brutal honesty (especially in higher education) and I really wish someone told me how important it would be to know thyself, but better yet, sell thyself — aka tell a good story. Recently, I’ve been sifting through the past work our team has done and crafting them into shiny credentials (messy work disguised with attractive simplicity).

Storytelling has always been a cornerstone of the creative industry, because people only know your work as much as you allow them to. Sadly, stories also have the power to put filter to fact (I see this a lot), and this is when I argue that design can sometimes get a rep.

I used to think that design = strategy, because if not by nature, the alternative must be by design. This thinking pulled me to strategy in my first job, until I realised what I was doing was just telling a lot of stories (i.e. sugarcoating, white-lying, truth-omitting). Basically I became really good at saying stuff, even if this stuff wasn’t always backed by research or empathy. I saw this in the world of brand/marketing a lot, but I wanted to design-first, story-later.

I also spent Friday preparing a Service Design 101 session and thought a lot about who I was versus other consultants (who ostensibly, also did things like service blueprints and maps, much like a snippet of my own week).

A good analogy is comparing a designer of services and service designer. It’s different. We ask different questions, try out different things, and measure success dissimilarly. Everybody designs. If you do anything intentionally expecting an outcome, you are trying to do something by design. But not everybody is a designer. This meta-thinking was the first instance I saw cybernetics come to life, because there is a difference in the ‘doing’ and ‘intentionally doing the doing’ (aka being an observer of design). Much like re-prompting a LLM, different outcomes happen when you re-process something. ChatGPT is only as powerful as its abilities to take your input onboard every single time. It’s sorry when it doesn’t.

If we can all do design, let’s harness it properly (telling a good story doesn’t hurt either).

Run notes (Week 8/11)

1. Rolling 300s (14 x 300m at 5:45/6:09). This week I decided to eat the frog and do my least favourite run first. I was very bored on the treadmill, but doing these on a human hamster wheel keeps me on a strict pace.

2. 7.5km easy. Pretty boring but ok.

3. 11km long tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Reads and bobs (no bobs all reads)

Modern Housing: an environmental common good, Dan Hill & Mariana Mazzucato

Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Stewart Brand

Unintended design consequences, Isa Perrson

Good design is invisible, but so is design that harms, Isa Perrson

Designing Good Public Services for Everyone, Charlotte Vorbeck

Design is a Job, Mike Monteiro (finally started this one)

Retros

Happy bank holiday weekend! I have a timer set for 15 minutes for this one, so here goes.

4-day week

• Signing off part of an application journey to align with our gateway service;

• Onboarding prep for our new UX/SD team TDA;

• Mini design retro to reflect on new ways of working (effort - impact);

• Service blueprint updates based off changes re-point 1;

• Internal team planning to revisit new meeting cadences (i.e. weekly design crits)

A personal retro

Weeknotes have been feeling more like a burden > reflection lately and these are the times that call for a personal retro. I started this habit 4 months ago on the pretense that a ‘recap of a week in my life’ could enable me to be more productive (yet reflective), and deliberate (yet critical). Not all my weeks look like the former, but in practicing the latter, I’ve been able to interrogate why this might be and do things just a tad differently the week after.

For many weeks, this gave me enough fuel to keep the notes going. Reflection is a taxing process and perfectionism often gets the better of me. Going forwards, I’d like to experiment with more of a fluid approach (so bear with me as I thought-vomit for the next few weeks).

On being part of a team

With planning taking up most of the project capacity, I’m enjoying spending my time on team admin like onboarding prep for our new apprentice + planning a year of socials as the new lead. So much of my headspace has been ramped on the project in the last few months, that I sometimes forget to embrace my role in our wider team outside of my own work. It’s lots of overdue catchups, outdoor walks, coffees and BD for me.

Run notes (Week 7/11)

I managed to do 2.5 out of my 3 runs this week. The endurance is very much there, but speed needs work. With only a month-ish left to go before my race, I’m going to take the intervals up a notch. Fear is the mind killer, indeed.

One of my favourite runs took me out to Battersea over the weekend, where I had company for the first time + just the right dose of sun to leave you wanting more. I’m not going to lie, easy runs usually suck for me, especially when I forget that running isn’t just about the mileage, pace and cadence (even if I’m training). What I want to remember will always be more than just numbers.

Little reads

Doing weeknotes, Giles Turnbull

How to organise yourself — Part I, swardley

Where Do the 3 Concept Types Come From?, Indi Young

Researching Complex Systems: Navigating around Inclusive Digital Finance, Kimora

Why We’re Thinking About Design All Wrong…, Abah Gift

Why UX designers should create object maps (and how to start), Alan Wilson

The GOV.‌UK Design System is iterating more quickly, Steve Messer

The goals less taken

March has been an unroutinely month which has been throwing me off my game. But we’re back, a little sleep deprived, feeling 25, and more optimistic than ever.

Week in a nutshell

• Revisiting the hierarchy of one of our services to tie it back up with our gateway service

• All efforts into carrying Release 1.1 forward, as we define priorities for the next few releases

• Updated some internal sketches for our working release (a tedious task that may lose relevance completely)

• 1-1s with a few aspiring service designers

• Finally completed my self-review ahead of moderation

Who I wanted to be

I spent a few hours on Friday filling out my self review by digging through one performance year’s worth of feedback. Where I work, we do this to evidence the goals we set for ourselves in the first quarter, and these were mine:

• Be an advocate for design

  • Practice coaching/leading/mentoring

  • Demonstrate the value of design to ‘non’ designers

  • Act as a voice for design, especially as the sole designer of a project

• Be a versatile design champion (hybridise)

  • Get comfortable with different roles (i.e. strategy)

  • Hone my technical craft

  • Expand skillset to the point of delivery (i.e. deliver wireframes as a UX designer)

• Be embedded in my niche as a gov/public service designer

  • Embarking on my masters in healthcare

  • Establish my design specialism (GDS)

  • Put myself out there (networking)

In hindsight, I made some pretty good calls: they allowed me to fuel on progression, and helped me navigate decisions like embarking on my masters and the project hats I wanted to wear.

Who I want to be

Looking ahead, there’s a lot here I want to revisit. Sharing goals is scary. It lends to external accountability — i.e. when I signed up for my 10km race, I held back on telling anyone for a while in fear of failure or giving up.

These are the times I remind myself of the value of learning/sharing in the open — not for validation or accountability — but simple, candid honesty and passive collaboration. It means being open about what I’ve done, but also how I sometimes don’t, and inviting myself/others to better feed into my work.

I’m someone that is always goal-hungry, to the point where I forget that even meeting one goal can be an incredibly hard feat (let alone three stacked in different areas of my life). This year, I’d like to be more precious about setting goals that serve me, be more open about what I’d like to achieve, and even invite others with like-minded goals to meet them with me.

Run notes (Week 6/11)

This week I completed 2 out of 3 runs. My easy run felt fresh and HR-happy. I had missed my intervals because my knees were feeling off, but I let my guilt go with a 10k redemption at the end of the week. It was veryyy slow, but felt veryyy good. I hope my joints can keep up with my overly competitive self.

I also finally gave pilates a go, which really humbled me. For ADHD reasons I struggle to enjoy low-intensity exercises (i.e. yoga), but my body is craving low-impact these days. Pilates/barre is slow, but these low-rep, high-effort movements kept me on my toes (literally).

Word bites

Goals, Goals, Goals, Sabrina Feuerherd

Journeys and joining things up, Vicky Teinaki

Do the Right Thing, Cap Watkins

The Full Circle, Steve Messer

Is systems thinking the new buzzword for UX?, Meghan Bausone

DesignOps: rethinking operations with design thinking, Patrizia Bertini

Distribution of Powers. Short version, interesting reads, Wild Thinking Studio

The 10 best UX interactions of 2023, Peter Ramsey

Complex vs. complicated, H Locke

Nerding

Bi-week note edition because things have been spinning in all corners. For the first week in 10+ notes, my brain felt drained after 10 days of attentive classroom-ing, teaching and work. I’m learning to value my headspace more, and avoid over-committing, even if sometimes my calendar looks deceivingly open.

March is also an extra special month because it’s my birthday. Quarter century club in 3 days (aka St. Patrick’s Day)!

So far… in a nutshell

• Venturing into academia. I went to art school, so I was never research-trained beyond desk level and surveys (oops). Having access to a library again has introduced me a wealth of white papers, obscure databases, and publications — can’t wait to pick some serious brains.

• Attended some very, very interesting lectures. I'm still amazed by the quality of content and delivery in the program! Some of my favourites:

  • Sensorial design from the psychology of response/reaction/interpretation, delivered by ENT surgeon Dr. Mountain (a true U-shaped hybrid)

  • Service delivery in healthcare as 'performative art'. This completely challenged my thinking of healthcare = service. Dr. Kneebone directs the Centre of Performative Science between Imperial College and the Royal College of Music, at a school that draws from medicine, science, art and music.

    • I’ve been thinking a lot about the plane of U-shaped hybridism and transdisciplinary lately, and how I can diversify myself as an individual. It’s made me more receptive to learning the things I had always deemed myself bad at, i.e. STEM.

  • Design ergonomics and spanning this to digital, services, systems (making these interactions more 'comfortable')

  • De-anthropocentrisation of healthcare, and questioning the shift to patient-centricity. Must humans always be on the top of the ladder?

• 3-day research sprint where my team looked at the design of the speculum, and made some provocations on the fear of sexualisation in healthcare. What an amazing time to be a student, wow.

• Delivering a systems thinking workshop on my return to the Design Management cohort @ UAL

Run notes

Week 3 of my race training and I’ve just crossed the first peak of my longest distances, before I taper off for a week. Mentally I’m hyped, but physically I’m drained and praying for my joints everyday. I realise that whilst I love the hybrid format (boxing/F45/runs/resistance training), my recovery/sleep has been taking a huge hit. Going forwards, I’m going to drop the resistance days (!) to really focus on honing those runs. Calories up, cardio up, sleep hours hopefully up?!

Birthday

Birthdays are my favourite days (my own and my people’s). Every year, we get 1 out of 365 days to spoil ourselves, demand attention, be wished for, practice socially acceptable narcissism, take the day off work if we want, celebrate all week if we feel like it.

I’ve always loved birthdays, but it’s also meant I put a lot of pressure on myself to hold this day to perfection — even if the odds of March 17th being above average is no better than any other day. I think about all the birthdays I get to have (the milestones, 30th, 65th, 100th?). I think about the birthdays I did have, which in memory isn’t many, but a few of them I’ve been lucky enough to call the happiest days of my life.

This year, I’ve never been happier to turn 25. What a sensitively, positively fucked up year it’s been, but I’m no longer writing it off as ‘another year’ over with like I used to. We only get so many birthdays in a lifetime… so you bet I’m going to do my best to make every year better than the last.

Running low on reads, but here’s a great book for you

I'm pretty beat and running low on headspace so I'll leave the bulk of my recap here. I haven't been reading as widely but I've been obsessed with Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro.

If I were to compile a mandatory reading list for all designers, this would sit nicely in there as Design Ethics 101.

Making things work

February is one of those limbo months where people have fully recovered from Christmas/New Year, survived a sobering January and suddenly it's Spring. It's a short month, but extra short for me, as I head back to my part-time Masters for two weeks.

Week in a nutshell

• Supported the delivery of a product roadmap (work estimations for the next 2 releases of the year)

• Last prototype refinements for our new gateway service, which has finally been signed off and ready for build

• Housekeeping, feedback soliciting, overdue catchups...

In defence of user-centricity

As a designer of services, I get to choose the kind of things I want to make easier, faster and simply the better option for people to choose.

It used to be hospitality (arguably the most customer-centric path one can take): I love food and drinks, I was good at attending to details, and I found joy in surprising people with reasons to have spent £10 or £100 on a drink or meal.

It's difficult to price experience, but you can make people feel more informed in their choices through validation. Typically, this means doing the stuff I spoke about last week.

Some growing and life experiences later, I stopped identifying as a hedonist. The idea of gratification, making things beautiful and chasing the next best thing tired me out. Instead I found joy in things just working. Like that sigh of relief when you go through the e-passport gate... and it actually works.

I say ‘actually’, because most times it doesn’t. When public services roll out, you find a lot of skeptics and laggers? The Vision Pro doesn’t though. When a £2+ trillion tech giant shows you something shiny, people get in line to be early adopters.

That's because Apple loyalists see them as less risks > but rather informed choices, and that is simply due to trust. The emergence of new technologies (scanning your passport or mixed reality headsets) makes trust a very, very valuable currency when pricing experience.

So when you serve people that trust Apple over the UK Border Force, what can you do? Excellent design is belittled by distrust (hence why we do co-design, workshopping, etc.). And trust is earned, with unprecedented, consistent user-centricity. No excuses.

The roadmap to a digital government is a long way ahead, which is why we have careful governance (i.e. WCAG AAA) and phases like Alpha, Beta, etc. As a designer, I've choose to work on public services because unlike Apple, the government isn’t motivated by profit, competitors, or radical whitespace creativity. They simply need to make things work, and doing this well means making it work for absolutely everybody. To me, that 'sigh of relief' is a better feeling than unboxing a new iPhone.

Digital government was already behind when we saw skeptics, and it only takes one failed experience for trust to crumble. If we can't be relied on to make things work, how can we be trusted to release anything at all? Call me an idealist, but I witness a lot of user-centricity missing in the backbone of our decisions made this week. Being a junior-level designer means I don't always get full transparency, but I’m very deliberate to not let this become a veil of ignorance. Here is also where I'd like to emphasise that all views on my site are my own, and not of my employer's, ever.

There is a tremendous impact that designers have on this world, by being gatekeepers of things that get used and serve people. It’s an onus on us to say no even when it begs harder questions, slows release, or disappoints the people (those who paid us, for that matter).

Run notes

Week 2 of my race training and my knees are starting to get the best of me, so it's lots of religious stretching, mobility and cooldowns for me.

Thesis update

I recently posted an overdue update to my thesis research. It’s my other stream of working and learning in the open, as a way to invite feedback, validation and questions. So please send them my way!

Reads of the week

Products deliver outputs, services deliver outcomes, Tero Väänänen

Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss., Matt Edgar

The State of UX in 2024, UX Trends

Don’t specialize, hybridize, Steph Ango

Do interesting, Mat Johnson

Design is a Job, Mike Monteiro

The X in UX

Whew! I'm back from my trip to Tokyo. Quick recap: lots of sushi, shopping and (spontaneous) snowing.

It wasn't the relaxing, beach kind of holiday but I got my reunion with my parents (after almost a year apart). Being away from home gets easier, but never easy.

Head-first into my first week

• Got back from the airport at 2am and dived straight into Monday, 6 hours later 🥱

• Trying to make jetlag work for me with a 3am start 🌚

• Bid farewell to our Service Design Lead 😢 (but hello if you are reading this!)

• Lots of catchups with our new UX Lead, who's been brilliant as an advocate for design and fearlessly pushing back when required 💪

• Supporting our new Service Design Lead on the *final* sign-off of our service blueprint (I was kidding the last time, apparently) 🙃

• Some roadmap planning for our 2 key workstreams 🚗🚙

• Lots of engaging, productive and timely conversations within the team on GenAI with the launch of ChatPwC 👀

• Ironed out some internal sketches from the UR I missed out on while I was away 👩‍💻

• Started training for my 10km race! 🏃‍♀️

What I learnt, challenges

I came back with my priorities scattered this week, as I’m finding my feet between service and UX. By trade I am a service designer, and this project has been my first opportunity to step into a UX role. I always say my title is a convenient excuse for my subpar visual design skills — yet in the last 6 months, I went from not knowing how to Figma beyond moving boxes and text, to putting together clickable, accessibility-compliant prototypes using the GOV.UK design system.

But that's all just practice. Any half decent design system should be as intuitive as lego (I do love lego indeed). The reality of UX is so much more than wireframes — aka boxes on a screen — but rather driving the interactions between these boxes and shapes, from a lens that champions experience. This can mean doing things for the user like:

• Masking complexity with simplicity

• Relying on intuition > training

• Making things easy to use (especially if it's already a challenge to complete)

• Honouring accessibility, from impairment to emotional nuances

• Optimising for efficiency, because nobody wants to fill out your form anyway

• Achieving seamlessness where possible, to second nature degree

• Designing for gratification, and see to lots of happy paths

  • I'd argue that gratification looks more emotive in non-public services. Things like personalisation, animated interfaces, things that make the user go 'ooooh', or whatever floats your creative boat and brand.

In fact, the biggest challenges I've faced as a UX designer on this project have been things like translating a workflow using folder structures into navigational tabs / surfacing an error message in a spreadsheet without ignoring/disrupting a form-filling experience. It's seeing to these challenges, ticking off the points above, reviewing that progress over testing, and doing this on repeat.

Somehow this turned into a reflection into my practice rather than the week — but I'll park my note here. FYI, if you ever ask me about what I do, it will almost always turn into a lecture. Sorry!

Personal anecdote

I'm training for my first 10km race in 6 weeks! It's my first attempt to get back into serious running, post half-marathon injury in 2021. I never would've guessed it'd set me back 3 years, but I am back and feeling very energised after some beautiful runs in Tokyo 🏯🏙🌳

You should read

The 7 types of rest that every person needs, Saundra Dalton-Smith MD

Design & systems thinking in healthcare improvement: Patient Ecosystem Mapping, Tom Inns

Information architecture in the world of GOV.UK (a weeknote, starting 5 February 2024), Vicky Teinaki

Planning; everyone’s favorite past time, Beau Ulrey

To Caracas with love, Houda Boulahbel

Choose optimism, Steph Ango

• I featured this before, but this really played a vital role in getting me through this week

100% user-supported, Steph Ango

Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?, Julie Smith

Governance as a service, Richard McLean

The secret life of people with high self-control (it’s easier than you think), Riikka Iivanainen

I am a creative. Jeffrey Zeldman