Another vibrant work week in which I’ve rediscovered the feeling of loving the work I am being encouraged to do, and feeling I am contributing something of value (I never take this for granted!).

Connection conversations

This week I’ve had the pleasure of connection conversations with some of my new colleagues.

It was great to reconnect with Simon Gray – a long time Local Gov Digital colleague and I’m extra happy he was able to get me back into the Slack channel for the community as well as for our wider chat.

I also met Alan Davies and talked about brand and organisational identity, and end-to-end user journeys.

Finally I caught up again with Nick Hill, and heard about some plans for upcoming events.

3 things for this week

Minimum usable content

This week has given me lots of hands on content design which has turned my thoughts back to the idea of minimum usable content.

As content designers we’re probably all working toward minimum usable content – what is the most efficient content design to meet a user need – but perhaps not in an explicit way we could explain easily to stakeholders. I’m certainly not saying anything groundbreaking here, but it’s good to think about what we do and how we do it every now and then.

GDS wrote about minimum viable content way back in 2018 describing how adding content sometimes added as a solution to a problem with the design of a service. When that happens the additional content can antagonise the issues for users as not only does the original problem still exist for them but now they have extra cognitive load because there is more on the page.

Similar to their suggestion to ask “how can we design the service so it needs less content?” I’ve been thinking more broadly about “how can we make this clear with the fewest, simplest words”. Designing content is a science and an art, and there is real elegance when you refine to the leanest version, the minimum usable, content for a particular thing.

Yes, you can widen the view out and start to apply the more common ‘minimum usable product’ phrase by looking at the information architecture (in a website scenario) or the user flow through a task. But allowing content designers to focus down will improve each mirco touchpoint for the user, but also help to refine the simplicity of a thing overall.

Making my peace with the pragmatic compromise

Pragmatic compromise was once anathema to my ears but now I consider it one of the ways path to progress can be paved.

Perfection isn’t often a single step away, however much you long for it to be, and so shipping, learning, iterating or working out which battle can be postponed without letting your user needs go unmet is well worth practicing and getting comfortable with.

For me, making a pragmatic compromise requires a pause. It involves remembering we are all working toward the same goal, but might have different ways to reach it. Pragmatic compromises mean holding the needs of your users tightly, but your ideas about how to meet them lightly. It means choosing to travel together, even if it’s by a slower road, rather than never setting off at all because we can’t share a map.

Progress over perfection, always.

Asking the right questions

There’s a whole load of mindset stuff I’m thinking about at the moment to try and ensure user-centred thinking is there whoever the user is (once again, no claims of being anything other than obvious with my thinking here).

Part of that is making sure we’re asking the right questions when we will be the user – such as when we’re checking a system or something we’re building will be usable not only on the front end but in the back stage too. This could be called the ‘authoring experience’ for the work I do or shaping requirements if we take a more general look.

My thinking here is making sure I not only ask the ‘Can x do y?’ but really get a good solid answer to a better question, ‘How does x do y?’. If it’s hard work to make the front end simple for people to use, it’s almost always impossible to find good user experience for the people managing that system longer term.

Asking the right question won’t solve that issue overnight but it’s a start.

What’s in the weeknote?

The process of capturing these first 2 weeknotes of 2024 has sparked thoughts on what they might include in the future. I want to make them a useful record for myself, but also interesting and useful for anyone who happens to read them.

I’d love to add a reading list (or listening, or watching) of some kind but manually compiling this feels unsustainable. The weeknote has to remain efficient and fun for me to produce in a limited amount of time (on a non-working day) so while it’s possible to add a link each time I’ve read something interesting it feels like a heavy solution. I’d love to hear if anyone has a more automated way to achieve this.

Shall we connect?

I’m looking for conversations and opening my calendar for opportunities to connect across 2024.

I’ve added a few slots to my Calendly for January and although they have nearly filled up I’ll add more for February soon. So if you’d like to have a short chat then please take a look.

If you’re a vendor please check out the latest news on my employer before grabbing a slot – these conversations are not an opportunity to try and sell to me. And if you do work at the same organisation as I do reach out on Teams so we can say hello!

If none of the dates or times work for you then drop me a note via one of the ways on my get in touch page and let’s see what we can arrange.