A very busy week of hybrid working and supporting my eldest son on his quest for work experience.

Connection conversations

I am exhausted yet energised by the conversations I’ve had this week – feeling more ambivert that introvert in that sense!

We had a great workshop in person in Birmingham this week and it was wonderful to get to work alongside user-centred design colleagues but also meet service teams. In case you don’t know, we’ve got some big challenges as an organisation and while that brings emotional and practical considerations it can help with focus on opportunities too.

It was able great to speak with Stephen Read. We’d both been at Planning Inspectorate at the same time but not crossed paths directly, and also discovered some shared connections via Walsall Council.

For me this was a connection call with great energy and highlighted to me the importance of shared reflections, refining through experience the work and the environment that matters most to you, and made me so glad I did something a little outside my comfort zone in seeking out conversations this year (another reckless yes pays off!)

I also caught up in person with a former colleague and it was great to catch up about life, and what we’re finding valuable in our current work. We talked about the chaos of broad roles, and the freedom and challenge that brings.

3 things this week

EAST – are we missing the AS in public sector UX

I’ve been thinking about the behaviour change approach of EAST recently. It stands for Easy Attractive Social and Timely, and is model which suggests all four of these attributes need to be addressed for people to move toward a goal.

In public sector UX (and broader user centred design work) we focus on designing for the Easy and Timely attributes but perhaps don’t consider the importance of Attractive and Social. I’m not just thinking of visual design, UI or social media when I think of these attributes but whether we’re overlooking opportunities to tap into personal or community and belonging motivators more generally in our design work.

I think these thoughts will come together in a fuller post fairly soon – be great to hear from anyone who has used this method in the context of design rather than policy.

Hazard mapping in design communication

Inspired by the hazard mapping work of Erica Hall I started thinking about how we could use this as a consistent language to communicate our design.

Erica proposes adding hazard mapping to UX and information architecture documentation, to highlight vulnerabilities and additional to project risk registers and mitigations. This brings in a tool to support design ethics and I focused in on how it might help clearly communicate design decisions, or highlight areas in a design for focus to give best chance of success.

Here a hazard could be failing to meet accessibility needs, keep data safe, or distracting the user. By codifying groups of hazards and marking up wireframes or other designs we can use in our communication with stakeholders, in our asks of user research colleagues, or in broader product conversations as we look for the opportunities and prioritise the work.

This also feels as if it will become a blog post in time and again – be great to hear from anyone using hazard mapping or similar to these ends.

Relationships are the work

The best relationships of course don’t feel like work but with each week I’m reflecting more on how relationships – forming them, nurturing them, letting them go – is the work.

Recently I’ve reflected that all of my work in the last 10 years has come to my attention via my network rather than me proactively searching jobs listings, my best work is done when the relationships are nurtured, and growth sometimes means leaving relationships which have had their season behind.

I was particularly caught this week by Scott Gould‘s reflection that there are no difficult people but difficult relationships, and Carl Haggerty linking this idea to the premise an organistion’s greatest asset is the quality of the relationships not the people (he mentioned Arbinger Institute’s Outward Mindset in relation to this).

This has led me in a fascinating direction of learning and thinking about how the ‘outward mindset’ may be the fairly natural approach we take in user centred design toward our end users – those who are trying to complete a task through our designs and systems – but perhaps need to be more mindful of being in this mindset when nurturing our relationships with colleagues in the services we support. This may unlock new ways of working together or help support sustainable transformation work.

Shall we connect?

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

My February is fairly packed with personal commitments alongside work so I’ve not got slots in Calendly open at the moment. Do drop me a message if you’d like to chat though and we can find something that works I’m sure!

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!

You can also get in touch through the ways on my get in touch page so let’s see what we can arrange.