Weeknotes 3 – 6/12
It’s been quiet for me this week, which has been pretty great. When the pace is slower, my brain starts to have a bit more space for thinking new thoughts or having ideas. Not that any of those thoughts or ideas are fully formed yet, but they’ve started bubbling up. We’ll see if they make it anywhere…
Being present
My working week started with a couple of hours off on Tuesday morning — I went to see Skye’s christmas assembly which was a lovely privilege. I took Willow and both kids really loved the experience. My kids are teaching me that being fully present — and communicating joy at being present — matter a great deal. When our family put together some house rules, one of Skye’s suggestions was ‘when you listen, look with your eyes’. I like that a lot.
I have to be honest, most of the time I feel pulled in lots of different directions — in my thoughts as well as in practical tasks and physical locations. When I come home from work and Skye or Willow are telling me about their day, I’m half listening to them while also playing over a work problem, and thinking about what to cook for dinner, and who I’ve forgotten to message that day. That’s not good. I want to get better at being wholly present in the moment and focusing solely on the one thing or person that’s in front of me. That applies at work too — there’s so many things going on at once, I do find myself getting easily distracted. I need to get better at entering a conversation or meeting with my full focus and attention .
Chilling out
Wednesday I had the whole day off! I took a walk, had a chat with some fluffy cows, drank hot chocolate in a pub, enjoyed some reading and sorted some piles of mess in the house. Relaxing and productive. What. A. Gift.
Structuring, grouping and labelling content
Thursday I was back in the office. We made some progress on our work figuring out what content our users need and how we might group, structure and label those content areas in our new intranet. Alex, our user researcher, had some great ideas about how we could test our assumptions with our users. I’m really excited about this piece of work — we’ll be engaging with a wide range of users and stakeholders which always feels good. I’m really interested to get feedback on what we’ve done so far — it’s fascinating how differently people can categorize the things.
As an example, just this week I was helping Skye tidy up her room and was told off for putting a jumper in the same draw as the cardigans.
“Jumpers don’t go with cardigans!” she said. “They go with t-shirts.”
“But…” I said. “Jumpers are like cardigans, because you put them both on over a t-shirt to keep warm.”
“No.” Skye insisted. “Jumpers are like t-shirts because they don’t open up down the front.”
I have to be honest, that blew my mind! I’d never seen jumpers, cardigans and t-shirts that way before! Ha!
Making the most of user research
Thursday afternoon Alex led a great team session to look at what user research we might need over the next few months. We plotted some user research activities against our roadmap which was really useful. We also had some productive chats about how we can:
- embed user research into our different workstreams
- do ‘quick fire’ user research in the office without too much planning or prep
- make sure the whole team is learning from our research and that we don’t duplicate stuff
What does good content look like?
As part of our work on developing a robust content governance process for our intranet, we want to explore what ‘good content’ could look like when written by people who aren’t trained content designers. We want to support staff to write content that’s user-friendly and accessible. But we can’t expect them to have the time, resources or skills to produce content that a trained content designer might produce.
So, for the last hour of the day we got our heads together with some other content designers to think about what makes content ‘good’. We listed out a load of stuff — things like ‘meets the style guide’ (which had a whole sub-list to itself), ‘addresses the user’, ‘doesn’t have dead ends’, ‘is accessible’, ‘has a page title that clearly describes what’s on the page’, ‘uses short paragraphs’. ‘empowers the user to do a thing’. We then narrowed the list down to what we think are the bare essentials — things that will make a big difference to the user experience but are achievable. We’ll get wider feedback on this list, and think about how it might fit into our overall governance and support package.
More time off
Friday I had another day off (shocking!) — this time I went into Cambridge to do the christmas shopping. The shopping part was pretty overwhelming, but I enjoyed some detours around the university college streets.
It was a good week and I’ve definitely benefited from some time away from the office. Looking forward to getting back into the work flow for the final 2 weeks before Christmas!