This week was a short one as I took the first 2 1/2 days off. Hence, there is a bit less to report here this week.
Taking another stab at discipline pages
I took a few hours this week to work on my least progressed side project at work: Our discipline pages.
It’s an idea that came up sometime in late 2022 when our organisational website was still relatively new and we iterated quite a bit. We realised that people had questions, which the website didn’t answer. That is still the case, and it is the case for both partners in the ministries and potential applicants.
I mentioned the jobs-to-be-done for the pages back in week 40. They haven’t changed much since then. But with the input of our talent team, who have talked to countless candidates since then, we worked out what additional questions we should try to answer, so that they don’t pop up in every other interview.
The question include these:
- How big is the discipline?
- How big is a team?
- What is the team setup?
- What does the collaboration with ministries and government bodies look like? What are cultural differences? What are related challenges?
- How mature is the setup at Digital Service?
- What does the tool and tech stack look like?
Since my last attempt creating these pages, we collected a ton of additional material. We recorded talks and podcasts, published blog posts and articles. So, I want to embed and reference as much rich content as possible. Because that material answers a good portion of those questions in solid detail. So far, our content is out there, but it is not easily discoverable or accessible.
Our comms team collaborated with our talent team to redesign the career page. Our discipline page work can benefit from that other workstream as it generated new building blocks and design patterns.
So, in my next iteration, I will incorporate those patterns into my draft. I hope to get some time from a content designer to review my content throughout the coming week. Ideally, we will then have a first version live by mid-August.
Preparing more user-centred design roles
The discipline page work is tied to new roles we plan to open. There are a few new pieces of work we could be starting in the coming weeks. For that work, we need more design and user research capacity.
We could be adding up to 4 more roles until the end of the year, and opening the first role by next week. To promote open roles, the discipline page for design and user research would be handy.
With a strong ongoing demand for service and policy design profiles, we might be calling it just that: ‘service/policy designer’. So far, the standard design roles we have opened were called ‘UX/UI designer’. On various occasions, we added a semi-prominent line about a ‘focus on service design’. But by advertising roles in such a way, the roles might be overlooked by designers who don’t use Figma and create interfaces. If they see themselves as a service designer and that is the role they want to be in, they would skip any role that has a different design focus.
Our work in the space of digital-ready legislation grows. We increasingly do more short-term policy support work. Hence, describing the work we look for people with dedicated skills for is a must.
There are service designers in Germany, but policy designers not so much. Again, other countries are much ahead of us. Effectively, we might have been the first people to hire user-centred policy designers in the entire German government.
What’s next
This week will be a full week again. I very much hope I have time to write.
I hope to finalise the peer review report from last week and shortly get it ready for publication. I also want to make proper progress on 1 or, even better, 2 blog posts.