A weeknote, starting 9 October 2023
The Design System Day 2023 edition with bonus ModPo live taping
There is a lot of big stuff happening around the world (including my native New Zealand). I don’t have anything useful to add on any of them but am making space for them all. (Actually, I can say that I am gutted that this week was so busy that by the time I remembered that I needed to do my overseas vote for the NZ election I’d missed the window by 20 minutes! I remembered at 7:30 Saturday BST and needed to have it done by 7).
Design system day — in person
On Tuesday I got the 7:35 train from Newcastle up to Edinburgh for Design System Day. I think that this is the first wider-than-single-deparatment event that a government department has organised since the lockdowns? (Well, apart from Civil Service Live).
I got to be on a panel about design contributions, which was a fun experience. Props to Caroline for being a pro at answering questions, I learned from her that if I don’t quite understand a question, I should just say so rather than try and fudge it.
Aside from being on a panel, other thoughts of the day:
- I liked the discussions from the Scottish Government about how design systems can be used in terrible ways and how they’re looking at procurement to head this off (I want to monitor this).
- Also interesting was the Scottish government’s research library and templates. I need to sniff around the cross-gov slack channels to see what these look like. The comment about using the language of stakeholders to get research ops funded also resonated.
- Gosh Tash Willcocks is a charismatic speaker. I’ve been reading a lot of Amy Edmonson’s work (will mention this later) so it was nice to hear this extrapolated on, as well as the Johari Window (which a lot of us geeked out of hearing it referenced on the show Russian Doll).
- There were important discussions about trauma informed design—how researchers should be aware of it but also need support in their workplace to do so.
- It was also nice to hear the GOV.UK Design System team talk about what they are up to. I’ve been following the work on Exit this Page component since I found out that UCD people at the Ministry of Justice and Department for Work and Pensions were both looking at this area and so connected them, so it was lovely to see it come to fruition.
It was also wonderful to be able to go to the pub and hang out with people afterwards, before catching the 21:00 last train back Down South….
Virtual design system day and *gasp* doing a keynote
My travel plans had been made before I knew I was going to be speaking on Day 2—in fact I hadn’t even been planning to attend the virtual day and so had a usual day of work to do around my presentation—so after getting home late I was then up early to make some final tweaks to my presentation.
My talk was about something I care a lot about—understanding history. (I do wish I’d been able to talk about the Yahoo Design System but couldn’t make the narrative fit.)
Michael Tyrrell summarised it better than I could: “Just because something is in a design system, doesn’t mean it’s right, or right for your situation. Be curious. Find out more.” My notes on the talk are now on my website.
Thanks to everyone who gave nice feedback either on the Hopin app, the retroboard on on Twitter. Not gonna lie, I have been screenshotting every example to put into the folder I use when I’m having a bad day and feeling down on my abilities. (Everyone does this, don’t they?)
I briefly managed to get in and see a bit of Frankie Roberto’s talk about the upcoming task list component—have to say I really like the updates and look forward to it being released.
Yes there was work too
Part of the challenge of this week is that I’m off next week and some of the week after. So this week has been about making sure that things are in a good state:
- a service is going live next week and so as part of that I had to do a sign off that UX was OK with it going live
- we’re coming up to mid-year review point so I’ve been starting to go with my line directs through what this means for objectives
- I’ve been playing with whether we can use Adobe XD for digital sketching prototypes. We actually have it signed off (unlike Figma) and can collaborate using it, so I’ve been seeing how we can adapt an XD template someone has made for the GOV.UK design system and do things like make mobile templates. It’s looking promising. It won’t replace Axure until I can get something like Heroku or Railway signed off, but at least it means we don’t have to contort Microsoft Whiteboard for wireflows!
- our UX team did a sharing session about how our first few months of using the unmoderated usability testing tool Userzoom has gone. We want to try and use more of the tools such as cardsorts and treetesting (this will also be useful as we’re looking at how our student finance account may need to change because of incoming policy)
- I have been thinking a lot about training and information architecture. It’s great that Donna Spencer’s book on Practical Information Architecture is free but I’m not sure if my team could do with some training on Object Orientated UX. One that I’ll think about more when I’m back from holidays. (PS anyone from gov who can spare an hour to talk about it to my team, I’ll do you a time swap on something I can talk to your department about?
- Our student finance account may have a good use case for the new section pattern being used on the GOV.UK homepage. (Our student finance account home page can’t pipe up personalised information about finance so it actually makes sense to use something from GOV.UK). One of the UXers is going to investigate this while I’m off—GDS folk reading this, be prepared!
- I had intended to take Friday off but the prep for the keynote meant that I hadn’t got through everything I needed to before going on holidays so I recalled the day to finish up various admin.
Other links
- I got mentioned in dxw’s Ada Lovelace blog post about inspiring women. Aww, shucks, thanks Alice for mentioning me.
- Saturday was World Standards Day… apart from the USA, who had World Standards Day last Thursday. My take: sums up standards in a nutshell.
- A few events coming up with tickets available: Product for the People 23 November (Manchester), and UK GovCamp 20 January 2024 (London). I’ve got a ticket for Govcamp, I’m already thinking of pitching a talk about the sharing the forgotten histories of digital government.
- I finished Amy Edmondson’s The Right Type of Wrong. I think I’m hitting saturation point on learning organisation literature (and listening to the book start to finish did mean there was some repetition), but it was helpful in talking about intelligent failure as something that happens in novel areas where there are opportunities for hypotheses.
- Speaking of wrong: Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino researched lying and now—oh the irony—they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.
- The Designing Ethically Toolkit looks interesting.
Not work but you should know about this… ModPo
I know that some of the GOV.UK Design System organisers stayed in Edinburgh until Thursday. I wish I’d been able to wrangle that as on Thursday evening I did a whistle-stop trip after work up to Edinburgh for a Modern and Contemporary Poetry (ModPo) webcast.
For those that don’t know about ModPo, it’s that rarest of things: a massive open online course (MOOC) that has developed into a real community. Each September there is a 10 week course (I think it’s 10) of poetry run by Al Filreis of the Kelly Writers House the University of Pennsylvania with live sessions each week and TA hours. However, stuff happens around the year, there are extra tracks (ModPo Plus) and basically people have made friends from the course. I discovered it at the start of the pandemic and did it then. I haven’t redone it since, but had always wanted to get to the Kelly Writers’ House for a session. So when I heard that they were coming to do a taping in Scotland, I had to get there. I put my name down and got a spot at the Poetry Library.
Train problems meant I got in a little late and had to leave straight after for that (yet again) 21:00 last train back south—no pub for me—but loved hearing the discussions about the Beat Poets (including Scottish expatriate Helen Adams). The audience was a mix of poets, Mod Po diehards—someone came in from Prague!—and at least one other person like me who had lapsed in their ModPo attendance but jumped at the chance to be at live webcast in person.
The best thing about being there in person was marvelling at the setup. There were multiple computers, microphones, a lot of cables, and the tech folk acting like radio commentators doing prep questions when someone dialled in.
You can watch it online: you probably won’t see me, but I’m right at the back in a grey face mask.
Other stuff
On Saturday, I went to the Taylor Swift Eras concert at the Jam Jar Cinema in Whitley Bay. with my friends. What an assured performer and so many hits! Also, given that albums often set the mood with their opening track, it was interesting to see this also happen in the Eras tour (for those that haven’t been following, due to Swift releasing 4 albums since her last tour, this is almost a form of “greatest hits” tour going through each album she’s done). I do agree with the NY Times review of the film that it changes shots so often that it’s almost disorientating, but maybe that’s the way it is with shooting this type of concert. My friend Louise made friendship bracelets.
Next week I’m off to Boston and then Cape Cod—looking forward to it! Before that, aside from packing I’ve got an email inbox full of newsletters I haven’t had a chance to read, so there will probably be another linkdump next week.
