The X in UX

weeknotes

Feb 17

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 🏯🏙🌳