On Monday evening, we recorded another podcast. Ministerial project partner Ralf and I were invited to the eGovernment podcast to discuss the updated Service Standard.
After producing a short video for LinkedIn together just 2 weeks ago, we had plenty more time on this occasion. Within the 45 minutes of recording time, we dug into the origins of the Service Standard, its recreation process and latest developments.
A recent summer episode on the KERN Design System already shed some light on the interplay between it, the cross-government umbrella brand and the Service Standard. I tried tried to give further context during the conversation.
The episode is scheduled for Saturday, 6 September. I hope to see some light editing to smooth out some rambling of mine.
This will be the 4th podcast publication this year. I understand it’s important to use the medium to increase awareness around the Service Standard.
Celebrating the power of rapid prototyping
For Thursday morning, I wrote a short talk for our All-Hands adjacent ‘Show the Thing’ format. Lena and Tito delivered it.
“What to do when stakeholders just aren’t buying it?” was a leading question. We showed how we used a functional prototype to discuss a new kind of landing page for the cross-government umbrella brand.
As a prototype can be worth a thousand meetings, we showed our path of getting from sketch to prototype within 20 hours.
It involved sketching out the team discussions from previous weeks, which I did between morning meetings.
We had some things on a whiteboard around midday. Right before an afternoon sync, I had moved things from the whiteboard to Miro. Soon after that, Lena cleaned up a guidance draft she started producing.
By the next morning, Tito had moved all content and structure to a deployed HTML prototype. We still had a day to tweak minor things before the meeting with the senior stakeholder.
With the rapidly assembled prototype, we wanted to do 4 things:
1. Visualise what less senior stakeholders had agreed on
2. Show what we could do
3. Move the conversation along
4. Get senior stakeholder buy-in
Having the prototype ready to demo indeed changed the conversation among the stakeholders. That was the goal. It made things much more tangible.
We concluded our short morning input to colleagues with the question, “Ask yourself: Could these meetings be a prototype?!”
After the talk, we discussed how we can make HTML-prototyping the norm instead of the exception from Figma. We took another look at the GOV.UK Prototyping Kit and how the NHS digital folks are reinvesting in the NHS prototype kit.
Kicking off new work
On Tuesday and Wednesday, I participated in 2 kick-offs.
One was for planning the roll-out of the KERN Design System for justice services. We gathered for the second time on this matter. Now, things got more tangible, and we tried to break down the work into reasonable chunks.
While I was interested in some of the things the designers and engineers plan to do with the underlying platform, I was put in a group with other decision-makers. That made sense. I compiled information that other stakeholders should be aware of when a different design system is deployed.
The second kick-off I joined was for a new project helping another state IT provider improve a product that’s been live for a few months.
As had been in a scoping workshop a few weeks earlier, I shared my notes with the transformation manager and designers. We are planning some research very shortly. So, we walked through the different user groups – novel and existing users, layperson and expert users. We discussed how a blended approach of interviews, observation and usability testing might work for the context.
Given the limited timeframe and the team’s proper design focus, I will serve as a sparring partner.
Finding time to write
During my long-distance train ride across Europe on Thursday, I managed to get the next international blog post to almost 1,000 words. We aim to publish it later in September.
For the post, I still want to edit and publish the 3 talks we hosted as part of our ‘Design for policy’ workshop in early June. So far, I haven’t found the time. The blog post is a reasonable deadline to prioritise it. In one of the talks, the European Commission’s colleagues shared some of the academic studies that accompanied their work recently. They are waiting for some of the material to get published. Once that’s available, my recording of the talk can follow.
What’s next
I have another short week. I will only return on Wednesday and have another focus day on the train ahead of me.
Then, on Thursday, I will lead the interactive service pattern session that I prepared starting last week. Alisa, who led the KERN Design System roll-out workshop, and I checked in to ensure that our efforts align and that my service pattern collection and her design system revamp have some synergies.
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