Weeknote 3: Design system day, working with the best team, and the first week of studying UX
Spinning plates
This week has largely been about spinning multiple plates.
It’s been the official start of my user experience degree apprenticeship. I also went along to Design system day virtually on Wednesday.
A lot of time away from my day-to-day, which was a refreshing change to a normal week. But now my apprenticeship started, my normal week — my old week — is a thing of the past.
From now on, I’ll need to aim for 6 hours minimum (ideally more like 8) to be dedicated to off-the-job training for my apprenticeship. It’s a bit scary to be back in academic study and to dedicate so much working week time to my personal development. But I’m super lucky to have a great team around me and great leadership who are supporting my journey.
Design system day
One word for design system day — awesome!
It’s always invigorating and inspiring to meet colleagues and guests at an event and talk about work. Seeing the great work that is happening across government, and just how awesome the gov design community has really inspired me this week.
My favourite sessions (although I loved all the ones I managed to attend) were:
Frankie Roberto’s — Design Systems: the contributors perspective. Key takeaway: Inspired to get to a point that I can contribute to components and patterns, and share more of the work we’re doing in Ofqual with the community.
Vicky Teinaki’s — Design pattern histories. Key takeaway: Just because something is in a design system, doesn’t mean it’s right, or right for your situation. Be curious. Find out more.
The best bit though, were the conversations and chats that happened across the day. So much knowledge and passion in our community. So glad to be joining it.
The best team — what we’ve been up to
Did I mention spinning plates? There’s so much great work happening in Ofqual’s digital, data and technology teams. We’re largely a centralised team so we’re all working on multiple projects. I’m not involved in all of them, but I am looped into 4 or 5 of them so there’s a lot of work to keep on top of.
Subject matter specialists service
My main focus has been on our Subject matter specialists service. You may know from previous 2 weeknotes that I’ve been designing a journey to allow people to apply for new areas of expertise they can offer Ofqual, and to potentially reapply for any they have been unsuccessful in previously.
This week has felt a bit like writer’s block on this (is designers block a thing?). So I’m grateful to have some of Dom’s (our consultant interaction designer) time going forward to help me solve this problem for our users. He’s already got some great ideas so I’m excited to see what we come up with.
Commissioning — what does that even mean!
In the background over the last couple of months I’ve also been working on designing a process to help us manage and track our work with specialists to support business planning, budgeting and operational management of work. Internally known as commissioning.
This week that really ramped up and working with our excellent (new-to-role, but-not-new-to-us) Product Manager, Lauren, we got all the first user stories ready for refinement and proposed our solution to the team. More to do on that front.
We’ve also been doing some internal user research with those designs led by Clair, our Lead User Researcher. So far so good, more on that front next week too.
We’re going to try out our first cross-government show and tell session next week! I’ll be presenting some of the designs above, if you have a gov.uk email address and would like to join, you can register here.
Find a regulated qualification
Over to our Find a Regulated Qualification service (in Alpha). I’ve got more of a supporting role on this front at the moment, but the team is doing an amazing job.
Our interaction designers Phil and Dom are prototyping out journeys ready for usability testing.
Our user researchers Clair and Jess have just launched our first ever card sorting activity, so we can get a better understanding of our users’ mental models, and how they relate and use information about regulated qualifications. You can take part if you like! Find a Regulated Qualification card sort | Optimalsort by Optimal Workshop
Week one in the bag
Did I mention I’m doing a degree apprenticeship? That kicked off this week with our first workshop on Monday afternoon, and I spent Tuesday afternoon doing some additional work and getting up to speed on everything.
Our first workshop was an introduction to UX project lifecycles. We discussed fundamentally what a lifecycle is, what different types of lifecycles there are, and then drilled down into business, product, and agile lifecycle examples.
I found it to be a gentle start. Like dipping your toe in the water before diving in the deep end. More than anything it was nice to finally meet all my fellow students.
I also couldn’t help but feel like I needed a space to discuss stuff and ask fellow students questions about the programme, what we’re meant to be doing and how people are finding it. Somewhere away from the moderated discussions. Inspired by X-GOV slack, I set up a slack workspace for our cohort and sent the link round for everyone to join. Hopefully everyone finds that valuable over the 4 years we’re studying.
This week’s reading list
Finally, stuff I’ve been reading this week. The focus has been to get through as much of the reading on the UX project lifecycles module reading list. Mainly Lean UX: applying lean principles to improve user experience, by Jeff Gothelf (3rd edition) so that’s taken most of my reading capacity.
However I did take some time to read this article: Bridging the gap between academia and the EdTech industry, the value of former educators in UX Research by Yu-Chen Chiu . Which I found interesting. There’s not enough EdTech UCD focused stuff shouted about.
The best read of this week was from Content Design London. The results of their great british cake card sorting exercise. Well worth a read. Great British Cake Sort — the results! — Content Design London.
Previous weeknotes
Weeknote 1: Getting started in user-centred design
Weeknote 2: UX apprenticeship enrolment, back to the drawing board, and OOUX
