Weeknotes — 18 October 2024
Good chat.
This week I’ve been at Digital Leaders Week
It’s free, and I think you can watch most of the talks back anytime. Talks have been interesting, and I’ve really enjoyed making time to watch them and reflect. I find it very easy to put off watching that video or reading that article and instead get on with my work.
What I want to call out is a talk from a different conference, co-design in government by Martha Edwards at SDinGOV, and really enjoyed her nuanced take on it. I’ve not yet had the chance to do co-design, but I have wondered about how it works in practice. I enjoyed this honest and frank assessment on it. The fact that increasingly policy teams — not designers — were taking the lead and keen to implement co-design because it improved the impact of their policies was interesting to see and very heartening.
Taking time to fix the small things
The focus of our recent delivery work has been consolidating and improving content, to reduce duplication, improve user journeys and better link relevant content. Getting the small things right and taking the time to do so is worthwhile, so I’ve made sure we drafted and improved both URLs and meta descriptions.
This should mean we less of this: /browse/housing-local-services/renting-property/renting-from-a-private-landlord-cat/private-residential-tenancies
And more of this: housing/renting/private-tenancy
Accepting we can’t fix everything right now
In our discovery, we identified a confusing user journey from our site to another government owned site and then back again. In theory, great let’s fix that user journey, get the content in the right place and link to it from our service. But when we dug deeper with the policy team that owns both bits of content, that wasn’t going to happen, because of the limitations of the other site and whatever agreement they have with whoever maintains it for them.
We pushed the door to see if it would open, and turns out the security chain was on. Policy agreed something wasn’t right and that we should explore options, but need time to decide what they want to do. This is one we’ll need to document as design debt, and return to when we can.
It’s frustrating when we put time into identifying problems and suggesting solutions that get put on the backburner. But sometimes there’s more to a problem than just some ill thought out content. It’s an issue that also affects other sites. Perhaps logging the issue and dedicating proper time to fixing it when both us, the policy team, and the other digital team have the time to do so, we have to live with this bad journey, and extra content for the policy team to maintain.
Improving team guidance
I’ve stuck my hand up to help audit and improve our team guidance, as it needs a sort and a tidy.
When I think about guidance we use, I think there’s three tiers — best practice, style guidance, and internal guidance. Best practice is stuff we see on in our design system and service manual. That should apply across the organisation on multiple services. We rely on external style guides. So there’s inevitably a gap to “how do we work”. Sometimes it’s ok to have something there — we can’t expect everyone to work the same way as us, so sometimes there’s a need to note down what we do somewhere.
Everything we need to do is not always captured on service wide guidance or external guidance. I think it helps to say “here’s how to unpublish some content from our CMS, and here’s a step by step so we do it consistently and other team members know where to find it if they need it”.
I am mindful that we could make guidance clearer and easier to find, but if it’s not built into our workflow, then will anyone use it? Guidance can help a big team to work more consistently, but it doesn’t ensure it. How we get the team to buy into and use the updated guidance when they should do remains a point of reflection for now.
This week I’m listening to
Charli xcx — Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat
Pom Poko — Champion, after their amazing set at Mono in Glasgow on Monday.
