This week was my best week so far, loads of tasty work to get involved in, helping the on-boarding process for new starters (love working on people and relationships), and starting to present and showcase work-done is always a winner!

Monday
A really good catch up with the (wider) Leeds design team, as I got to know more positives and issues – I voiced challenges to the team to get them thinking more about “it’s not them… but possibly the lack of education as a team when if/we share work etc” and the responses were incredibly welcoming and I cant wait to work more alongside them to see if we can do anything to make the design process smoother and a lot more well-known within the company.

Tuesday
Sat alongside the content designer (Izzy), and we decided on an approach to tackle “how to get ahead of dev” in sprints – this should lead us to getting our work seen and heard as early as possible (and as wide as possible) – to avoid the current situation of working “from-sketch-to-dev” without opportunity to stop, breathe and challenge (from everyone).

Following on from last-week weeknotes, we revealed the first (early version) of a quickly-put-together PowerPoint presentation to showcase UR feedback. Incredibly useful, as the team has never heard the users voice, almost instantly led onto content amends - WINNER!

Wednesday
This was a huge day for the team, the project they’ve (I’ve only joined so can’t claim any credit) sweated over for months/years went live! Such a proud moment for this squad, and we celebrated by doing a huge call with all the teams (Manchester, London) and raised a glass in unison.

Amazing to see the product in the open, working and seeing people work together.

Thursday
Had a great meeting with the rest of Universal Credit’s design team, discussing “ways of working”, and volunteered to help on something I am very passionate about: “Onboarding for new starters”.

Also, attended a leaving do, good to see the team celebrate her wins and a chance for me to know others outside of the office.

Friday
Quiet day in the office - starting to prep plans for “onboarding new starters”, and running through the prototype with the team, with what I’ve done so far (avoiding that firework display of just unleashing something and saying “da-da”.

Also, Bundobust for lunch to celebrating launch!

Good things
Again, helping others is what I’m really into, and to be asked (and recommended by others), mean the confirmation of what I bring to the team is there.

Learned things
Everyone in the team wants the project to be a huge success and going live showed that massively (and the celebrations to match!).

Difficulties
Doing my expenses… just joking(!) although the internal system is an incredible… thing. Really, knowing where to start on things I am passionate about – whether its starting on prototyping and getting within people to spreading the word of design to helping on-boarding new starters.

Achievements
Being asked to help, whether its for advice on sharing work to helping the design team move forward. Doing the day to day design work is great – but going above that is even better!

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