Hack - 9 to 13 February
Work week
The week started with the decision on platform choice we’ve been treading water waiting for. Happily it’s ended up nearer to the third way I’d advocated last week: Launching a stripped down ‘beta’ site using our established tech and frontend, while setting expectations that more functionality and content will be coming through a public roadmap.
But then of course the real work starts, and with a gnarly hard deadline coming up fast before the end of the month. So lots of getting the team together, setting clear goals each day, working out what really needs doing and where we need others onside. We’re also working radically in the open (compared to our wider team) using the justification that it will save time all round.
It was typically hard crunchy work for first 2 days. First to define, agree and communicate our scope, then some rapid design and tech decision making, but amazingly we were already set to demo a prototype site to a group of cross-government stakeholder/users by Wednesday afternoon. I wasn’t there (still non-working/parenting day Wednesdays for me, going strong since 2022💪 ) but judging by feedback, the team, including brand new content designer, seems to have smashed the session out of the park.
Building and maintaining trust with users in departments is maybe the most important part of our work. Our approach has been to carefully explain not just what we’re confident in, but also where we’re less certain, especially about future plans. We’re also constantly asking for input and feedback to learn about the realities of departments we’re looking to support. It’s really heartening to see this honest approach get buy in from our leaders and those outside the organisation.
The end of my week did get consumed by too much domain wrangling and testing set up, and not enough design, but I’m still confident that something useful will be in place by deadline.
On a less positive note, our preferred candidate for the user researcher role to support all this work long term has dropped out. Not quite unexpected, but we may need to get creative to fill this position sooner than the 5 months it took to not get someone in at all.
Hack-a-thon
Amongst the above, I was somehow able to keep a 2.5 hour block in my calendar free to take part in the latest Design System Hackathon run by GDS, and the Ministry of Justice team running the new GOV Reuse Library.
I’m very glad I blocked out the time. The facilitators did a great job setting a playful tone and leading a group of 100+ through a fully online ‘hack’ session.
Our goal was to ‘inspire’ a team starting to look at improving how designers and devs building services can discover and use components and patterns in the ecosystem of public sector design systems that now exist. For example:
- GOV.UK Design System
- Ministry of Justice Design System
- Scottish Government Design System
- NHS Design System
- Office for National Statistics Design System
- Department for Work and Pensions Design System
My lovely group had a lot of fun fleshing out our idea: ‘The Great Design System Bakeoff’, a 3 day challenge where teams of cross gov digital people compete to build the most chimeric public sector service possible, with the winners voted for by the wider community. Our proposition was this would:
- take advantage of the current situation where learning about design systems is often reliant on relationships and connections
- build relationships and community across organisations (and therefore shared understanding of different systems)
- leverage the power of “razzmatazz” to highlight the various systems and the valuable work of UCD teams
No idea if this will prove useful to the facilitators (most ideas were a little more grounded and had less photoshopping of Noel and Prue). But since the GDS Design community session last week I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘having fun’ at work, and the serious benefits that can result. This felt a perfect opportunity to give that a go, so am excited to see what happens next.
To do
- Set up the next ‘X-Gov Sheffield meetup’ for Tuesday 3 March
- Enjoy the Winter Olympics while we have it. It’s ridiculous and great, isn’t it.