By Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.

⬅️ Read my previous weeknotes

As we gear up for the Christmas break (can’t come soon enough!), here are some thoughts on what I’ve been working on and mulling over the past week:

• The AI guidance for the Welsh public sector I’m working on is being reviewed and we’re getting feedback from stakeholders and public sector colleagues. Something I’m missing is more specific guidance for practitioners. How can an LLM tool support you in your user research, or when you’re designing and producing content? When might they pose ethical issues or simply not be safe to use? I’m planning to start a conversation with the leads of our communities of practice in the new year to explore how we can work together on developing this kind of guidance and good practice.
• Last week, I mentioned presenting to the heads of revenue and benefits from all 22 local authorities in Wales. Well, it didn’t go as planned. Some organisational hiccups threw me off, and I felt like I fumbled through the entire thing. There were some tricky comments and tough questions, but on the bright side, a few attendees seemed enthusiastic about the idea of mindful design of policy and services.
• I’ve started mapping out a plan for the website refresh project we’re kicking off in January. Beyond reviewing the website, we’ll also be building a stronger brand narrative for our organisation. I’m thinking about ways to engage stakeholders to collaborate, making this a chance to deepen understanding of how our users access and interact with our website and other digital channels. I met with Gem, our communications manager, to discuss how we can push this forward. We also talked through comms and content strategy, and how different activities (weeknotes, newsletter, etc.) fit together and get aligned. I’m excited to get to work with Gem again!
• I’ve been writing our next newsletter. At first, I planned to write about history and progress as a dynamic of opposing concepts and the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. But I ended up saving that for another time, and wrote instead about the limits of incremental improvement and the occasional need for fundamental reinvention, with Thomas Kuhn’s The structure of scientific revolutions in mind. (Sign up if you’re curious!).
  • Side questions: what are the limits of incremental improvements through iteration? Is there a point where gradual change hits a wall, and you need to scrap everything and start from scratch?
• Analytics without context don’t mean much - without understanding the problem you’re trying to address, can they be more than just vanity metrics? Reality is always more nuanced than ‘more is good, fewer is bad.’ Sometimes, less is more.
  • Related: without a clear idea of what you need to learn and why, it’s hard to ask the right questions. And when you ask the wrong questions, you’re bound to get pretty confusing answers.
• What does ‘good enough’ really mean. How do you know when ‘good enough’ is actually ‘good enough’? ‘Good enough’ still needs to be ‘good’, so who decides what that is? Especially in a multidisciplinary team. Is consensus decision-making the best approach, or does it come with its pitfalls? We risk wasting time reinventing the wheel when we convince ourselves it is, but it isn’t.
• Issues arise from not spending enough time properly understanding and defining the problem before jumping into solutions. Chatting about this recently, a friend replied, “You can’t iterate your way out of a graveyard.” It’s hard to iterate toward the right solution if you don’t start somewhere close to right.
• How can an organisation shift from being expert-centred to user-centred?
• Can a system that does not enable and incorporate the new and different be sustainable, or can it only move towards stagnation and decline?
• After a few conversations lately, I’ve been reflecting on my approach to my work and where I see myself heading. Something clicked for me earlier today: beyond the delivery of outputs, I see my role as a designer (and design itself) as being about influencing better outcomes. It’s probably why I often feel that my work can go relatively unnoticed as a lot of it’s invisible.
• A series: Bad sisters

⬅️ Read my previous weeknotes