Weeknote 2: UX apprenticeship enrolment, back to the drawing board, and OOUX

Enrolment… Now what?

This week was getting everything squared away ready to start my Digital User Experience Degree Apprenticeship.

I had an enrolment meeting with QA to get all the paperwork finalised and sent off. There was a lot of information covering the programme timetable and things I need to do; like log my off-the-job training hours and complete some mandatory e-learnings on safeguarding and the like.

I also then met with my programme leader and fellow students. It was great to see and meet a diverse range of people on the programme, from companies like the BBC, local councils, other government departments and even an organisation which is a blend of barber shop and nightclub/events company!

Sam, our programme leader was really engaging and made the introduction nicely interactive. A good sign of things to come.

I then set about finding and completing everything! From Northumbria University “Blackboard” where our course materials, assignments and other information is hosted, my new Northumbria uni email account, QA’s “Canvas” web app for learning modules and for uploading off-the-job training logs.

There’s been a substantial amount of information to consume and act on this week. Too much. It made me think about the UX of education and training. Tough gig, but we’re all users too, right?

It also made me think about our onboarding experience in some of our services.

Work stuff

This week has been all about analysing last weeks round of research on our Subject Matter Specialists service.

The analysis is fascinating. The main thing we wanted to test, around users being able to understand what they could apply or reapply for within an area of expertise tested well. So that’s great.

But the biggest realisation was that the solution we’re testing just didn’t really fit into our users mental model of reapplying and applying for new stuff.

Reapplying for something was like making an update to the original application, a change. Whereas applying for a new area entirely should be more like new application.

Makes sense. Even though the jobs to be done (JTBD), are very similar; select what you want to apply for, submit some evidence.

Because of this difference in our assumptions and our users mental models, most users just couldn’t find the start of the flow. So, do we try to rebut the mental model (Nandos restaurant style) or do we reflect it… More discussions and research to be done! Back to the drawing board.

Interesting things this week

Observing a peer-review service assessment

What a great experience. I got to sit in and observe a team being put through their paces in a peer-review service assessment. They were totally awesome. Delivered an amazing presentation which linked back to the service standard all the way through. And you could tell that they had done a great job during their Alpha stage.

It was intriguing to see how these go down, and the level of detail that assessors go into to make sure that people are delivering for users and putting their needs first. And of course, delivering value for public money too.

Object-Oriented User Experience

I’ve been looking at Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) after discovering the Object-Orientated UX podcast by Sophia Prater earlier this week. The techniques are a useful practice to kick-off or retrospectively audit design. Sophia is bang on when she says designing with stickies is liberating and helps steer away from solution-ising too soon; before you understand the complex relationships between things and heading down a path that would be difficult to come back from.

I had a very quick go (1 round) at the ORCA method from OOUX on a single user journey in our service. This doesn’t really capture everything but it’s a useful exercise for thinking content mapping first, interrelationships and metadata (assuming you first have the research to understand more about what these are!). Must explore further.

Design system day

So excited about design system day. This week they released the session plan. Looks great! There’s a lot of talks I’d like to go to that conflict. So must keep an eye out for those recordings.

Next week

Next week is a big week.

• I start my first 10-week degree apprenticeship module: UX project lifecycles. Workshop on Monday.
• Attending design system day on Wednesday 11 October.
• We’re doing some internal research on a user journey for Ofqual users that I’ve designed.
• Our stickers will hopefully be delivered!
• And of course, more design work on the user journey mentioned above.