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

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• Gearing up for a bit of a break! This week was a busy one trying to complete a few things ahead of being off next week.

• I’ve focused on getting the first pieces of service manual content into a good place, ready to be shown to the organisation. Next week we’ll be critiquing two pages:

  • Introduction to user research for public services
  • Documenting and sharing what you learn about your users and their needs.

• To critique these pages, I’ve been working in the background on organising a company-wide async design crit which we’re referring to as a ‘Show the thing’. I proposed testing this method to open up our work to the rest of the organisation and get their input and feedback. I’m excited to see how it goes and if it works as a new practice within CDPS. Hopefully we get some good ideas, can identify our blind spots, and that the rest of the organisation has a feeling of shared ownership over the the service manual.

• Some things we need to communicate well and set clear expectations about are:

  • that we cannot act on all feedback,
  • that the content is always a work in progress and will change a lot as we progress and iterate,
  • that we need to draw a line on ‘good enough’ as things can continue to be reworked, edited and expanded forever.

• I’ve also been working on (but left unfinished) some content about Welsh-language considerations in user research, and preventing and mitigating associated risks and challenges. These titles are provisional, and I fully expect the content to change a lot with time.

• Had a good chat with my colleague and user researcher Andrew. I asked him to help me with the information around risks in Welsh-language user research. It was really optimistic to expect to have something in an okay place so early on, but it was a great start. I enjoy talking to him, he always makes me see things in a new light. Some things I’ve been thinking about:

  • there’s no such thing as objective, unbiased research. All knowledge is limited, constrained and selective. And building it is making choices and trade-offs: selecting what’s in and out of scope, choosing methodologies, what are valid and invalid data points to build a narrative, etc. It also involves an assessment (what is valuable?) and a trade-off calculation (what are we sacrificing in exchange of whatever we decide is worth it?). In many ways, user research in the public sector is practical research: it’s got a practical purpose so it can’t be objective by definition.
  • ‘user needs’ in the public sector are a misnomer. What we call ‘user needs’ are often organisational needs transferred onto the user. For example, being able to complete and send a form isn’t the user need of someone trying to apply for a parking permit. The user’s need is actually just parking their vehicle wherever they need. ‘User needs’ are often what the service needs from the user to allow them achieve whatever their actual intent is.

• I’ve also been thinking about design as action, activities to bring change over time rather than just objects or artefacts. You probably heard me talk about this already. But it’s naive to assume that just providing things (outputs) creates sustainable change: providing principles, guidelines, strategy documents and resources libraries will not bring agreement, acceptance or implementation. Change comes from taking intentional action (is this the definition of ‘work’?) to harness, steer and transform momentum and inertia. The ‘thing’ is just a representation of the invisible work. Outcomes over outputs.

• Enjoy the sun!

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