Making things work

weeknotes

Feb 25

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!