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

⬅️ Read my previous week notes

• My colleagues, product owner Phil Baird and service designer Gwenno Edwards published Service manual in beta: some lessons learned which I helped edit.

• Started writing content for the service manual. It’s fairly general for now, and includes:

  • Introduction to user research in public services
  • User research principles
  • Understanding your users and their needs
  • Documenting and sharing user needs

• I hope to get more specific as we get input from user researchers and people doing user research, including the User research in Wales community.

• My hope is also that the service manual is co-designed and (at least) co-owned in future by the different communities of practice we manage.

• Some colleagues and I met in person at sbarc | spark for some planning - I had so much fun, so please more of that!

• We planned the face-to-face User research in Wales community session later this month. The focus will be on user research and the Welsh language, with the goal to develop some sort of principles or considerations on the day. This will be a starting point to develop and build upon in future.

• I’ve been thinking about how language competence is complex, non-binary and contextual, and how that’s not often considered in the design and delivery of bilingual public services. I’d like to change that.

• Our proposal for the cost of living project was greenlighted which is pretty exciting! I feel like it can be a playground to test many ideas and design decisions. Hopefully we can start moving soon! It also gives me more time working with some of my favourite people.

• I watched Monkey man and Wicked little letters, and discovered Would I lie to you? which is my new (and only) favourite TV show now.