Wednesday was an eye-opening experience (as most UR sessions are), which changed everything for me, and really had notched my passion to “getting things done right” to another level.

Monday
Workshop session for roadmap planning - vision setting, goal driven and reminding the team what the point of the pilot is (not scale driven but whether we are doign it right). Pre-planning meeting - design work tasks a plenty, what a difference working alongside the team makes! Lets go!

Tuesday
User testing a very early version of a “calc”, a very busy process to get to the end - will be reviewing my notes (whilst chatting to the user) and presenting back to the team what I believe needs to be done - in a cheap and timely manner.
And then run through again with the user and see what happens!

Wednesday
Hopped on the train Chesterfield for another User Research session. This one was fascinating, one of my favourite ever URs. I even took a session (if you know me you’ll know I don’t often!).

Think these tweets explain it more:

Today was one of those days at work, where you know you are in the right place, for the right reasons and you have to do it for other people - the users.

Incredibly motivating, and the future feeling of satisfaction from succeeding will be HUGE.

— Mikey Cattell (@mikeycattell) July 31, 2019

After yesterday’s User Research (many will be impressed.. I did a session😂), loads to unwrap today and get the message across. I’m very happy and motivated to do this for the users.

— Mikey Cattell (@mikeycattell) August 1, 2019

The biggest difference (work wise) to other positions I’ve worked in - today I won’t be giving feedback on the product, but the service.
It’s taken me getting here to realise the product is such a small (but so valuable) detail, the service includes everything and everyone.

— Mikey Cattell (@mikeycattell) August 1, 2019

Splitting the two has allowed me to get more into “who is this going to touch”, not just those with computers, but (for example) workers, the strain of dealing face to face, time for calls, emotional support etc.

To fix this is a great task, but when it’s done - ooofff 🔥👌👍😍

— Mikey Cattell (@mikeycattell) August 1, 2019

Thursday
Morning de-brief on the findings from yesterday, the team has escalated the findings and I’m excited for the team to fix these issues, and also grateful as I know the end-users will really appreciate the support and feeling of “being heard”.

Sprint planning, with showing value of design we know, have allocated slots of time to do content reviews, design amends, etc.

Friday
Worked on planning the on-boarding pdf for new starters to the team. Planning for an interview for next week (I’m the interviewer).

Good things
Wednesday was the best / most interesting User Research session I’ve ever been part of, and really showed the gap of “who is the user”, and why I do what I do.

Learned things
Back to Wednesday, it is always great to be reminded that I am part of designing a service, not just a product. This is why I joined, I wanted to design more than just things on a screen, and that is most certainly my role here!

Difficulties
Back to Wednesday again, it was so tough seeing the users struggle with the “unseen” part of the service, but knowing we will fix it is a good feeling.

Achievements
Leading on from last week, and my previous post, this week was so different - having the team watch the users in action, and hear our feedback has changed the complete dynamic and I could not be more proud of this situation (and the team).

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