Weeknotes of Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.
⬅️ Read my previous week notes
As we develop service manual content, we’re considering how to get feedback from the wider CDPS community through content critiques. I don’t want to exhaust everyone after a few sessions, so pitched another idea to the team this week. We’ll experiment with what I’m provisionally calling a ‘Show the thing’, but with the twist of adding elements of an async content crit. The goals are:
This will complement insights from other engagement and research activities, such as more conventional content crits with SMEs (the user research community at the moment) and content testing with real users. I’m planning on writing a blog post about this experiment once we try it to share our experience, learnings and templates.
I also supported the User research in Wales community leads to organise the community in-person meetup happening next Thursday. We’ve steered towards developing a series of considerations about the Welsh language for user research, because we do not feel that the Welsh public sector and community is at a stage where developing prescriptive guidance or principles on bilingual user research is realistic.
I’ve also suggested producing some content based on the experience of Welsh-language participants of user research. User researchers who lack confidence in using Welsh seem to worry that using Wenglish or doing sessions that are not fully Welsh will get negative reactions from participants. As far as I know, Welsh-language users are welcoming and grateful that they are listened to, and that the Wesh language is being considered at all. Easier said than done though!
Though our proposal for the cost of living project was approved internally, we need to get to an agreement with a local authority in terms of what we can and will do, their involvement and commitment and so on. We’re meeting them next week to discuss all this. Hopefully we can find a way to make this work for both organisations and teams.
I watched Alex Garland’s Civil war and whoa! I watched most of it with an open mouth and left the cinema in shock - I’m still recovering. I think (hot take warning) a big issue with most films nowadays is they can’t build, manage and resolve tension effectively - both creating it and resolving it. But I haven’t seen anything this intense in years.
Side note: I need to replace my climbing shoes but going to a shop to try climbing shoes is an entire thing. There must be a lesson there though: You won’t go far with shoes full of holes.