This is not really what I did this week. This meetup poster is not nearly representative of my activities in the past days; it is quite the opposite. But by the end of the week, I managed to frame a poster and put 2 others up on the wall in a spare minute.
We are good to go for next week’s meetup, and I’m looking forward to it. However, all spots are gone, and a growing waiting list exists.
Helping to bring in new people in different roles
Much of my time this week went into hiring and procuring activities.
We have not 1 but 2 working student roles prepared and ready for publication. The first is a user research operations position. We are looking for a human factors student or someone from a similar background to help us across service areas and teams with operational tasks. That includes preparing, running and analysing user research activities and creating summaries.
With various related degree programmes in Berlin, Sonja and I are reasonably optimistic about finding a suitable person interested in gaining hands-on experience.
At the same time, our parental benefits team is looking for a forms designer to help them create and maintain their PDF and paper forms. It’s an ongoing task that keeps our designers too busy and away from other pressing activities. As a role for a working student, it’s operational and somewhat technical. We expect decent knowledge of Adobe InDesign from the candidate to create well-structured files resulting in accessible PDFs. I hope enough graphic design students with sufficient technical prowess in the wider Berlin area are interested in this.
As various teams suddenly need support, I have spoken to several freelance designers this week. We might be looking for service design, interaction design, and user research support in up to three different areas. Some work is more operational, and some is tactical with strategic dimensions.
Dealing with procurement processes and filing evaluation forms for candidates is not my favourite task. Occasionally, it keeps me busy, like this week.
Somewhat apart and still related, Marion and I spent some time sketching how to place accessibility content, guidance and tools on our website. That‘s relevant for communicating with talent and articulating our expections.
So far, accessibility has been mentioned only a couple of times outside of our blog. But we expect the people who work for and with us to bring at least a basic understanding of accessibility and inclusive design and research approaches. So, we need to make that clear. We have done some work and continue to do more. Making those learnings visible with stable entry points and sharing the tools we developed in-house is vital for attracting the right talent.
We could be doing many things, but we need to start small. Hopefully, we can add some accessibility-related content before the end of the year.
Another non-related building block for attracting talent this week was an interview. I recorded a conversation with Philipp Thesen, a professor of human-computer interaction, and Birgit Marger, a professor of service design, for the German Design Council’s Design Perspective podcast. We spoke for about 40 minutes about service design in the German public sector. The episode is supposed to be published in January.
Manifesting new frontiers for designers
I was most impressed this week on Thursday at about noon. The 3 designers on the Digitalcheck team did a project shareback during our discipline weekly.
While working on digital-ready legislation checks, they started running short-term ‘regulatory support’ sprints. For some weeks, small multidisciplinary teams support a federal ministry‘s policy team just working on a new piece of legislation. We started doing this at the beginning of the year, when working on a new energy tax bill.
The key activity is bringing the outside operational reality to the law drafters. Writing laws that cannot be implemented due to operational real-world constraints will have no or very little impact. So, the key question is: Can we, as the state, deliver on the policy intent in the way the law draft describes?
The multidisciplinary team checks that. It moves product, tech, and user-centred design expertise upstream. In the context of the energy tax bill, this meant bringing policymakers to head customs offices to show what processes look like today and map them to sketch how a law could effectively support the policy intent.
Investing in this, bringing multidisciplinary digital expertise to a government initiative early on, reduces a lot of burdens, and essentially waste, further downstream and increases success factors severalfold.
I am hopeful we can prove the positive effects and work with more ministries in the future on legal initiatives.
Imagine having user researchers & service designers review new laws & regulations before they get proposed. They could check which proposal in a law-in-the-making makes sense, is operationally feasible and can deliver on the intent. That’s what we are doing, and I’m so impressed by the team’s work
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 1, 2024 at 8:37 AM
Also this week, I did a joint talk with my colleague Magdalena on ‘digital first vs. digital only’. We visited our colleagues at Gematik, the digital agency of the Federal Ministry of Health. Together with another guest speaker, we joined their regular exchange and learning format, ‘THE WEEK’.
In our 25-minute input, we argued that digital does not equal online. Instead, referencing Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital, we reframed it as a way of thinking and working. Digital transformation work can have very physical outputs. I mentioned DWP’s ‘Check your state pension forecast’ service as an example, where now the online service looks just like the letter that massively benefited from the transformation work. I also showed our current work on legal aid (‘Beratungshilfe’), where we also brought the things we learned on designing the online form to the paper form.
All of that resonated with the 20-ish people participating. I look forward to further exchanges with our colleagues in the digital health agency. There are some very obvious synergies waiting to be released.
‘Analogue access in a digital world’ was the topic at a @gematik.bsky.social exchange as part of their series THE WEEK @magdalena.bsky.social & I stopped by to share our thoughts on ‘digital first vs digital only’, inclusion & what we mean by #digital 👉🏻 Slides on GitHub: github.com/digitalservi…
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) October 29, 2024 at 6:33 PM
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What’s next
Next week, we have 2 returners.
After a year-long break, UX designer Nadine rejoins us on the justice information system stream.
Legal designer Franziska will join us on the small claims service part-time and pair with content designer Sue. I have a lot of hope for this pairing setup.
We will run our first peer review on Wednesday morning for a non-Digital Service offering – for a service created by the German Environment Agency. The team from behind an all-new environmental information platform – mvp.umwelt.info – have been interested in engaging with us since meeting in the Federal government’s digital strategy learning cluster a few months ago.
It will also be our most diverse peer review panel. Forty percent of the panellists are from outside our organisation. Tatiana from in-house consultancy PD is joining us as a reviewer for the collaboration sections of the Service Standard. Simon, lead designer at the Federal Information Technology Centre, will join us as a design peer to cover the Service Standard’s usability and accessibility points.
Following up on last week’s pre-kickoff of the DIN SPEC work, we have the actual kickoff on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s the first official step in creating a lightweight national norm for quality criteria for public services. I have big hopes and some fears.