Weeknotes no.4
21- 27 September
Energy Hackathon
My highlight this week was supporting the digital Energy team on their Hackday. Becky and the team have been putting in so much careful planning, it was great to see the event come together so smoothly.
The purpose of the day was to re-design the debt and complaint letters energy companies send to their customers as there was insight they could be improved to help meet their intended outcomes. Each team was made up of people from different companies, from start-up to huge established companies, with a mixture of communications and regulatory backgrounds.
Our team was working on a scenario where a busy young family had moved house and had experienced issues setting up his direct debit. After 2 months of contacting the company, it still was not resolved. Our task was to redesign the ‘8-week letter’ based on his user needs.
The day started with talks from a range of experts. The highlights were the content designers from GDS and Abby from HMRC who had run experiments with letters. We started with empathy mapping, then we wrote out the specific user needs. We then ran a ‘KFC’ exercise, where we mapped what people need to ‘commit’ to, then write out what they need to ‘know’ and ‘feel.’ This was to help us form the content of the letter and think about what tone we should be using.
Mapping this on a grid with business needs / user needs grid prompted a lot of debate around what is a business need and what is a user need. One of our needs was that people may want to switch supplier, and one person said a company would never give this information in a letter to encourage them to switch. Another person argued that being being open, transparent and giving customers options would help build trust and could help retention, which would have a high business value.
After this the team split into smaller groups to do pair writing and refine the content of the letters. At the end, we brought it together for a content crit. This is where the moon landing ice breaker came in handy. After negotiating the most important objects to take on the moon, the team used the same skills to agree what content to include by listening to each other’s points and offering constructive feedback.
At the end, each team shared their letter and reflected on the process. There were some really good design decisions based on the user’s context and needs which completely changed the tone of the letter. We tested our letter on Hemingway and it had grade 4 readability which was nice to see.
I didn’t know much about the energy sector and fortunately haven’t had to complain, so terms like ‘deadlock’ letter were new to me. If we can redesign the content, maybe we can come up with better terms than ‘deadlock’ when it comes to resolving complaints?
The next step would be to test these letters with real users, so one of our user researchers gave them then a take away handout to take back to their teams.
It was great to see people asking each other about other things they do and their processes. I hope they go back and remain curious about user centred design.
It was a great day but I was exhausted by the end. I enjoy facilitating but making sure everyone is heard, people understand the task and stick to the time is quite draining to do all day. I have a lot of respect for teachers who day this every day, with lots of marking and paperwork on top!
Service Design Community of Practice
On Tuesday I spent the afternoon with the Service Design team for the community of practice. We started with a really nice check in activity. We each had to select an item from a rather random selection and describe how best it reflects how we work. I picked a ball of orange wool. I liked the colour. I pull at threads in my work a lot and wonder when I’ll get to end. I often end up untangling knots and finally making sense of things so the wool can become something useful. I loved hearing what everyone else had to say. I’m lucky to work with a great team of thoughtful designers.
We also did the user manual of me activity. We’ve done this as a lab team but it was nice to do it again with this team. We shared back our manuals in pairs and myself and my team mate had a few things in common, like needing to mix up our locations during the day, needing to have fun in our work, and having a slower start in the morning to warm up to work. Thanks to Lauren Currie for bringing this to Citizens Advice, it’s moved from team to team and starting good conversations.
Getting out of the office
On Friday I went along with Izaak our product owner to the Mitcham office with is part of Lambeth and Merton Citizens Advice to run a workshop on the waiting room experience. It was really valuable to get their views on some ideas that came out of a previous experiment. We decided on which ideas to explore further, threw away a few, wrote our assumptions and looked at how we could measure the impact. They came up with some variations on the ideas which was really helpful.
I got so much from the conversations it was quite humbling to see how little I know, but reinforces why we need to spend less time in our usual office and more time with our colleagues across the network. The team also invited us back to observe the waiting room again, it’s always nice to be asked back!
Wrapping up our volunteering experiment
We finished the week with a workshop to wrap up our volunteering experiment and there’ll be a full blog post from the Lab team coming soon. One reflection that came out is that we can’t have flexible volunteering without a more flexible, user-centred approach to learning.
Open House London
Last weekend was Open House London which is one of my favourite weekends of the year. This year we visited the Freemason Hall in Covent Garden. The Freemasons were a bit of a mystery to me, even though my grandad was a member. It’s a stunning art deco building, with beautiful details in the tiles and stained glass. They also have giant chairs which upset a toddler when he discovered he wasn’t allowed to climb up and sit on it.
Afterwards, we went to POSK, the Polish Cultural and Social Association in Hammersmith. The guided tour told us about the history of the building and tooks us into the including the Joseph Conrad room. We learnt a lot about Polish history and they also gave us free cake and tickets to the jazz bar. The Freemason’s Hall were charging from slices of cake from Sainsbury’s, so this edged it on the hospitality stakes.
Disconnecting
I enjoyed reading this article by Marissa Bate on having to use social media for work.
I’m not a freelancer myself, but I do use Twitter a lot in and around my work. I joined it before I left uni and so many opportunities in my working life and people I know who have helped me came out of it. But I also hate it at times, how increasingly addictive it is by design. How much the constant updates and lack of context puts you on a constant state of feeling on edge and overwhelmed.
I know people who have felt pressure from their manager to promote their work on social media, especially for some agencies. I know someone who even had it in their objectives even though he really didn’t want to. There’s a lot you can get out it for free, but I really don’t think we should be making people feel like they need to be maintaining their own twitter presence to do their job.
I now delete the app from my phone unless I need it. I have Feed Zen installed, so if I access on a browser, my news feed is a blank white space. I feel so much calmer, spent time on things I want to do and I sleep better if I just stay away from the noise.
I do miss things for sure. My boyfriend will feed me various memes over whatsapp so I don’t miss out too much. I like tentatively dipping in and out, but I’m enjoying relying on it less for work and the need for constant updates.
Reading, watching and listening
I’m enjoying this track by Cate Le Bon and Brandon Cox from Deerhunter. I love that they had both admired each other’s work from affair, then they met and collaborated on a record.
I’m reading Out by Natsuo Kirino which my friend recommended to me. I’m not normally a crime fiction fan, but I’m reading Japanese fiction before I visit in November. It’s pretty grisly, but the bleak descriptions of the women’s lives and their experiences are perhaps worse than the violent parts.
I’ve finally finished The Wire, ten years after everyone else. Aside from watching it again, we now need a new series to watch. We’ve just started Succession which I’m currently enjoying a lot. I also discovered that the co-writer Jesse Armstrong has writing credits on Children’s TV classics The Queen’s Nose, My Parents are Aliens and Tracy Beaker.
