February 2024 — month notes
This month I was able to get a little more stuck in to some work, having learned about the service and the team I’m based in!
Planned some Discovery research
On our service, we wanted to fill in some gaps in our knowledge (as part of a Discovery phase), as well as figuring out what our service name should be. Our service is an existing one, and doesn’t really describe what we do.
Having mapped our user groups already (thanks to Helen for re-sharing the Service Design in Gov training slides with me!), I planned research that made sure we’d be speaking with all our users.
As it happens — recruiting end users (patients and clinicians), primary users (suppliers), and secondary users (people buying the software) has been tricky — so that bit of research extended into March.
I ran a question and assumption mapping session that was pretty collaborative, that informed the discussion guides, and we made a start on research with internal users! For the first round of research in NHS England, I’m pretty pleased with how it went — we learned a lot and had a good mix of folks from the team and other researchers in adjacent teams joining us.
Service Assessment
Now I’m back in Gov, I was on an assessment panel for an NHS service assessment, along with former NHS BSA colleagues — nice to be working with Jeanette again! I’ve liked supporting service assessments when I can, and it’s been a helpful reminder for some of the work I’m trying to do in my own service team.
First mentoring session with FemMentored
I joined the FemMentored 2024 cohort as a mentor. It was great to meet with my mentee for the first time, and chat about their feelings going into a new role! My hope is I can (selfishly) sharpen up my mentorship skills, and als support my mentee through a big job change — something I did in the past when I moved to CQC for a leadership role.
Accessibility Lab session
This was so much fun! NHS England has a really well equipped Accessibility Lab — we got to meet the team and a few other new starters in the office, and get an intro to creating accessible services and how to use the lab.
We also used our service with assistive technology (like screen readers) to see how accessible or not our service is. We came away with some great recommendations about what we can do next to make our service more accessible for our users.
Presented some findings so far
Our programme (DSIC) has a monthly in person show and tell — so shared some early insights from our research there.
Insights like the clinical impacts of our service not meeting ours and our users goals, and how if we do our job well — we can support access to healthcare by making sure we can access our information across different health settings.
It was a nice surprise to see Chris King again too!
Raised risks to our programme
I can’t go into too much detail, but in getting to know the service identified a few things that would mean we’re working in more of a user-centred way, and the service is easier for people to use. Addressing those risks for our service would impact and change the DSIC programme (rightfully so).
Intro to UR in Gov courses
Somewhere in the middle of all this — I’ve worked with Annaliese Lamb, Louise Petre and Natalie Baron on drafting new content for a Future Learn course. Similar to the Intro to Content Design course, it will be free — and gives all people working in central and local government (or just with an interest!):
- an introduction to what user research is, and
- an idea what doing user research in the government context means, and how that works
We’re hoping it’ll be available later this year.
User Centred Dojo
Megan Doherty and Gabe Fender started the User Centred Dojo as a safe and inclusive place to learn and practice using UCD techniques and tools in the North East of England. Before Megan caught me at the bar (!) I’d been planning to offer supporting this community. I massively believe that the only way we get good services is by allowing people the space to learn how to design and create them — and you don’t always have the time to learn at work! So it’s been great to join the organising team, and I helped prep for the Feb session that Megan, Gabe, and Joanne ran.
Our next session is coming up in April — and is all about using storytelling to share research insights. You can sign up here!
Next month
- writing up insights from current round of research & sharing
- plan & run round of research with end, primary and secondary users
- updates to some ways of working in the team
- progress against some risks
- Services Week 2024!
