The hot scoop

weeknotes

Jun 28

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.