by Gabi Mitchem-Evans, Senior User Researcher at Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.
My first go at writing week notes in the open! For a while I was writing week notes internally, but I’ve decided I’m finally ready to take them into the wild so here goes…
This week has been an exciting one as we ran a face-to-face User Research in Wales community event focused around doing Welsh language user research. Credit to @Tom Brame for the idea!
We’ve been cooking up this idea for a while after learning that user researcher’s in Wales want to design services in Welsh and English but are not feeling confident to do so. In Wales, the Welsh Language Standard specifies that the Welsh language should be treated “no less favourably” than English; meaning that all services should be accessible through the medium of Welsh.
It was our first go of transitioning from a 'Community of Practice' to a 'Community of Action'. So yesterday was about focusing on the positive action we could take to solve those problems, to contribute towards a co-designed set of principles/ considerations that will live in the Digital Service Standard for URs across Wales to use as guidance.
Tom & I presenting the intro deck for the day
We designed workshop activities to prompt discussions around the variations in:
User researcher (ability and confidence with the Welsh language)
Research topic (sensitivity of topic and technicality of language)
Participant preference (full Welsh experience > happy to participate in English)
An example of one of our Researcher profiles we developed for the activity
We had attendees from across Careers Wales, Welsh Revenue Authority, Monmouthshire County Council, Social Care Wales, Public Health Wales, Cardiff Uni and lots more. Our members shared their enlightening and important experiences, which have really helped deepen my own knowledge and will go onto support lots of others with this moving forward.
Some of our members discussing and post-it noting ideas for the activity
My key takeaways:
🦄 Fluent Welsh User Researchers are unicorns, we shouldn’t over-burden them or expect them to do it all! There is a skills gap that we need to tackle as part of the bigger picture, but in the meantime there are opportunities to empower those who are feeling less confident to take small steps.