Days are gone

weeknotes

Jul 10

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.