14 October — 28 October

Digital Service Design Weeknotes

What we’ve done in the last 2 weeks

We set two sprint goals to achieve this sprint. One, develop and document a strategy and plan for document migration from GEMS (our current system) to the new investment service. Two, prepare a structured and content designed legal agreement journey in the service for collaborative work with legal.

It’s been a mixed bag of user research, collaboration, content and interaction design, technical analysis and research analysis, among other things. Our users have also been a mixed bunch; of colleagues — and how they store documents using GEMS — and also, successful grantees, and how they work through the process of forming a legal contract with the Fund.

• There’s been lots of collaboration as we prepare this part of the service for comprehension testing. We’ve been working with our colleagues in legal and governance looking at the terms and conditions of small grants and information we share under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This next stage will see us share the content with our research panel to understand if our language and the design, or layout, of the pages in the service are clear. This is our first attempt, and this work will go through many rounds of iterations and changes, as we learn more about what our users understand, what our organisation requires, and any pain points along the way.
• Looked at the high-level structure for content in the legal agreement journey, thinking about which sections will be on which page. There is a lot of information for successful grantees to work through when they form a contract with the Fund. We are looking at how to make this process work online, in a way that is easy to follow and understand. Interaction and content design worked closely together on this piece of work, to make sure that when we’re testing the content, we’re showing it to users in the structure we think it will follow in the service.
• We’ve been doing lots of work to redefine and adapt our vision and roadmap to the changing circumstances and timelines of the past few months, and sharing that widely with our colleagues.
• To help with our document migration strategy, we’ve been working through a list of all the document types stored in the current system, analysing their content and how they’re used, and making decisions about which document types we will (and won’t) migrate to the new service, and why. We have written these decisions up in a series of Decision Records, to capture the decisions we’ve made, and the context and consequences we noted when we made the decisions. We work in this way to help communicate with others, but also to help us understand when we might need to revisit a past decision, if the context changes.
• We’ve also conducted some user research to help inform our document storage plans. We need to make sure that we choose a tool which enables the various ways our colleagues need to use and access documents. We ran two rounds of research with staff — one to understand how they find and use documents, and one to test a concept we had mocked up. This has helped us identify some further technical exploration we need to do, before we settle on a document storage approach.
• We’ve iterated upon our proposed file-level document storage structure as part of our document migration work. This has involved considering the current structures that documents are stored within and combining these into a single structure which will allow us to programmatically access documents via the new investment management system. We’re expecting to iterate upon this structure again based on feedback we receive.
• Following up on some feedback we received from a user, we’ve been exploring what it means for a service to be trauma informed. Initially, this has been desk research to understand the concepts and approaches, and we’ve identified some further activities to run as a team to help us find ways to incorporate some of these approaches into our service. If you’ve worked on trauma-informed services, content or design, we’d love to hear how you approached it.
• To help with the ongoing management of the current grants management system (GEMS), we’ve also been gathering and refining various documents and processes, including checking and updating our privacy impact assessment, and refreshing and documenting our approach to handling system issues, outages and incidents.

What we’ve learned from and shared with others in the last 2 weeks

• We caught up with a team of colleagues to learn more about their work to capture and share data about applications and grants being processed across the teams in the Fund, whilst the investment service is being developed

What we’re planning for the next 2 weeks

• We’ll be testing our first version of the legal agreement content for comprehension to help inform any future iterations. This will continue to be a multidisciplinary effort with collaboration outside the team too, because both interaction and content design have a role to play in making this content as easy as possible for readers to understand and act on. All the members of the team will observe sessions, to make sure we all have a good understand of how our users are responding to this part of our service, and we all have some context before heading into analysis.
• We’re also going to run a mini-discovery sprint on the payments process. We ran some initial research and analysis on this during our wider service discovery, and now we need to pull together what we know and any gaps we have, to plan our next steps — that might be further exploratory research, testing some hypotheses with experiments (prototypes), or testing some possible implementations with technical spikes. This is a part of the process where information is handed from our service to other systems, and back again, so it’s important that we work together to consider what our users need, what technical constraints exist, and what implementation options we have, to make sure our prototypes are testing ideas or approaches we could feasibly implement.
• We also have a couple of technical spikes ongoing to test some aspects of our document storage and retrieval approaches, including looking at how authentication will work, and following up on some of our findings from research on this part of the service.
• On the current service, we’re going to do some work to review how we capture the monitoring that is in place, to help us spot and resolve issues quickly and effectively.

Things we’re thinking/worried about

Like most of you reading this, we’ve been working at high intensity and in difficult circumstances for quite a long time. We’re therefore thinking about what more we can do as a team and individuals to protect our wellbeing and support those around us. A few things we’re doing:

• Some of us are taking longer lunch breaks to take some time outside during daylight
• Several of us are taking or planning in half days or long weekends
• We’re trying to reduce some of our meeting time, using things like shared documents structured around questions or headings, to give people the flexibility to feed in at a time that works for them. That makes it easier to take breaks when we need to, which can be hard to do with a calendar full of calls!
• We’re sharing non-work things in our dedicated social-space chat channel — everything from DIY updates to pet photos, recipes to TV recommendations.
• Perhaps most importantly, we’re all working to maintain a space in our team that feels safe enough to say when we’re having a tough day, or we need a break.

Things we’ve been reading and watching

• Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful. Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life by Tara Haelle
• Feels Like Faster vs. Is Actually Faster by John Cutler
• Influence and the Integrated Review by the cross-party British Council APPG