A weeknote, starting Monday 19 June 2023
It has been a white-heat-cover-all-the-things kind of week. Lots of people are on leave, both in my team (my line manager, my lead peer, and a couple of line directs) and those that affect my line directs’ work(at least two unexpectedly — they were put on a multi-disciplinary team recently and somehow the fact that both were off for several days didn’t come as part of the handover). Between the to-do list of covering lead-level role gaps (one programme could really do with a senior or lead service designer rather than me covering it), moving people around due to absences, and other admin, something was going to slip. This week the spreadsheets to get security permissions to even thinking about using Heroku, Github and Figma went by the wayside.
On Tuesday I subbed in for my manager at the cross-gov Heads of Design virtual meetup. There are interesting things happening in the mentoring space, and there are also discussions about how to make these sorts of events more visible beyond weeknotes (like this one!)
Aside from the white-heat of working, it has also just been heat-heat. On Wednesday I met with colleagues from the Department for Educations’ user-centred policy design (UCPD) team about some upcoming work. We’re now back to two days mandatory working in the office, so given that it was given it was 20 degrees, rather than take a bus between the Student Loans’ Company Lingfield Point office and Department for Education (DFE) office in Bishopgate House, I walked the 2 mile distance. I forgot to heed my own mantra to ‘leave lots of time for last 100 yards’—I’ve been to the Darlington Economic Campus to meet people in other departments but found out after many diversions that DfE is down the street and with an entrance on the other side of the building! Spinal Tap moment aside, the meeting was useful in being able to look at physical documents rather than peering at a business process blueprint on a screen. I didn’t realise that some of the team were Darlington base and (in fact ex-SLC!), so that makes for easier in-person collaboration in the future if required.
There’s been a theme over the week about specialisation and understanding roles. My business architect colleagues have been trying to unpick the difference between their role and service design, as they hadn’t found the DDaT description of a service designer or the Ben Holliday’s business design compared to service design blog post particularly helpful. I wonder if the good services description is more helpful (emphasis mine):
seeing services, understanding what makes a good or a bad service and being able to understand the needs of your users and interpreting this into ideas for new or existing services
Since initially writing this I discovered that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are doing work to create shared models across these two disciplines.
We’ve also had a discussion about specialisation within UX. My UX line directs are venturing into the world of unmoderated usability testing as we just bought Userzoom. We’re mainly using this to test marketing outputs. As we don’t split user research and interaction design (yet), one of them has noticed that writing the descriptions for a usability test straight after making a prototype with language from comms is a hard switch. I’m going to do a deep-dive with the team on the craft of writing unmoderated usability testing scripts (they have already had some training but it takes a while to ‘bed in’) but this has also reiterated the value of specialist roles—it allows people to stay with one lens (user, policy, business) and then use the others to make any conflict of values explicit.
On a different note, on Friday, Frankie Roberto kindly took the time to show our UX team a bit about the Apply to Become A Teacher service. It’s an interesting user group—they are a key priority for government to support (we want teachers!), and so the student finance options not only include Student Finance England loans and maintenance, but special DfE bursaries and studentships. He also spoke about his user group:
- some have to commit to walking away from a well-paid job to be a student and then getting paid again as a teacher—so they need all the guidance about the finance available that they can get to make an informed decision. In this respect I was reminded of the work by Helen Ebaug about ‘role exit’. The original exemplars include cases such as leaving the military or retiring, but the cycle has been moved to consumer products by Joe McLeod (I found out about this model from his Endineering course) and can easily be switched to careers. The main point from this is that a change related to identity is a slow process with points.
- he mentioned that teachers find it weird that while the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) qualification is a postgraduate one (PGCE) they have to apply via undergraduate student finance, and in fact may even initially apply incorrectly and not get their finance first time. Even more weirdly, the Department for Education will then pay the tuition fee amount anyway. As a relative newbie to student finance myself, I’m not entirely sure, but suspect that this may be due to the finance model: according to GOV.UK, currently undergraduate tuition fee loans (including integrated masters) are paid to the university, whereas masters loans are paid to the student. If the Department for Education is going to write off the tuition fee anyway, the undergraduate model may be easier to administer. (I’m not sure if there is a similar reason for the pre-registration postgraduate healthcare course also being an outlier on the undergraduate student finance list).
- many may either be migrants or have lived outside the UK: at least a few had gone right through the process of applying to find out that they weren’t eligible for student finance yet. (Does the guidance need to be clearer or even interactive on GOV.UK as a form of smart answer?)
Other things:
- I’m continuing to chip away at different lenses for understanding the work. One thing that I like to do is separate out people or personas from the ‘eligibility scorecard’ of the various government things that they might be available for. (This was a trick I picked up from tax work). To that end, I’ve had a go at a ‘level 4–6 student finance in England funding card’ covering various types of student finance and shared it on twitter last weekend. Thanks Ann Collis for the extra adds on local councils.
- Citizens’ Advice are creating a library of positive patterns for online shopping.
- and the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) are experimenting with service assessment formats.
- And finally, on Thursday night I continued one of my favourite rituals—doing to a design school grad show. I’ve tried to go to Northumbria University’s Reveal show ever since I was a student there. This year’s outing included some very slick videos, youthful ideas, and some variable modelmaking that took me back to those days of paint fumes and panic. And it is even a grad show if there isn’t a point of thinking “I’d love to look at a bit more but the building is so hot that I need to just get outside?” (a quirk of the shows always happening in summer, no matter if you’re in the UK or NZ).
