Weeknotes No.36

Monday:
Presented my findings to the team around design issues that I’m finding on the prototype that may come stuck later on, I made a very simple user journey map showing scenarios and outputs and, simply highlighted any issues around lack of consistency or breaking away from the design system. This is the kind of team where you can do this simply and openly without any pausing and as normal, I open the floor to team discussion where we highlight what to do next.

Tuesday
Pancake day - do I need to write anything more?

Wednesday
One of my favourite days of the week, this day is saved for Replenishment, where we discuss what to work on next, this is an hour and 25-minute meeting, which works brilliantly. We discuss tickets (that are written out properly) and update quickly where we are etc, for example, I am working through some grade-A accessibility issues with the service at the moment (fed from the DAC report), and knowing we are doing the good work and the right work feels really good. As a side note, the service does not have many issues at all, so a lot of our fixes are “nice to haves” which is a one-off from my experience, as with anything accessible, everything should be a must-have.

I also may have bought a Sega Mega Drive today…*

Thursday
I am rebuilding the prototype to showcase the MVP, the actual thing we are realising in the wild soon - I know this is urgently needed as I am always wary of stakeholders seeing future work that we are in the process of playing with / seeing what fits, they might expect it all when we are only delivering 40% of it.
This has been more of a challenge than expected, due to some inline styles and absolute links found, but luckily I’m old-hat at this and nothing surprises me with quickly built/throw-away prototypes, but I am adding hygienic factors to the prototype to ensure we can add and build at speed cleanly going forward.
Also allows me to add more scenarios to the prototype for user research (we never user test, or test the user) if required.

Friday
Why am I just finding out about jamboard? It’s great for a quick presentation (of which I do a lot) and allows people to add post-its on the page with little effort.

Useful this week:
I am unsure who shared this link, but it’s been saved in my tabs to read later, so I’m sharing to see if its useful for others: An article on How to test a prototype with users, whilst I know most of this, its a great reminder and something really powerful to share with any mentees - also the full program is pretty good too.

*Turns out the Mega Drive didnt come as it was broken unfortunately. GUTTED.