Weeknote 20: The 3 Rs — reviewing, refining and requirements
This week has been all about refining user needs, reviewing content, and checking requirements and functionality match up.
Refining user needs on the community directory project
5 of us regrouped to refine and choose our 4 user needs from the list we were working on last week.
We fed this back to the rest of the GCD team and agreed that the 4 areas would be interesting and broaden our knowledge. But we also realised they’re still quite broad.
We’re now breaking these down to see what each could cover. For example, a need for ‘support to live independently’ could be specifically for dementia, disabilities, or preparing for adulthood.
We’re going to start thinking about the research which should help us scale the needs into manageable research activities. We realise we’re keen to learn a lot but we want to ensure we’re not watering down our insights by trying to cover too much in one go.
Web, content and data triage requirements
This week Yannick and I met to review the requirements for web and content triage and map these to functionality and capabilities in the IT request portal, Fresh Service.
This shows that the portal meets almost all our requirements and that it could be a good solution.
It’s good news as ideally we’d like users to raise all their requests in one place. This will also make it easier for multiple teams to get oversight of requests and means staff don’t have to know which team deals with what type of request.
Content designing job adverts
We’re growing our digital team and have lots of live job listings.
We decided to have a look at some of them in our content crits to see how we can improve them.
We’ve had some great sessions and drafted a new version of one of the ads. It’s been really interesting to see the impact some of the changes have on the tone.
Our changes have:
- simplified and shortened the job application
- reordered and reprioritised information based on what people care most about
- changed language to reframe criteria in a way that helps people see why they’re right for the role, not put them off
- changed the language in the ad so it is now ‘strongly female coded’. (This doesn’t put men off from applying, but increases the likelihood of women applying)
We’re waiting to hear if we can make these changes or if there are any parts we cannot change. But we’re hoping we get sign off and can roll out some of these changes.
It’ll be interesting to see what difference it makes to the number of applications we get.
What I’ve learnt
Some conversations go more smoothly than you expect
As content designers, we get a lot of pushback. This means we’re always prepared with our evidence why we should do certain things or to explain our suggestions. But sometimes you enter into a meeting, prepared for that pushback only for people to be like ‘yeah, we can definitely do that as part of this project’. Maybe a bit more optimism is needed but better to be prepared anyway I guess.
It’s sometimes best to clarify responsibilities first
This week we were asked to help with a piece of work. We chatted about requirements, made our suggestions, then moved on to allocating responsibilities. It was only then that we realised that someone else was already doing the content. It made me realise that at this stage (where content design is new and content ownership is not yet concrete), it’s best to clarify the suggested role of each person in the work before even knowing it’ll involve.
