I’m catching after a couple weeks missed due to:
Getting back into writing weeknotes feels as hard as putting down the chocolate, but after a visit to the bathroom scales recently it’s clear that some effort is needed to get me back on track.
Catching up with colleagues post-xmas (and post-move) was really nice, particularly with the content designers on Tuesday. By then we’d moved back into a full lockdown so I took a leaf from our Comms team and made sure we spent some time finding out how everyone was feeling, and to see how we could all work around the child care pressures some were facing.
Everyone is feeling a bit jaded now; during the first lockdown it was scary and different, but it felt like we just had to get over this temporary hump and all would be OK again. People talked about having relegated important things (and people) due to the crisis on that basis, but this time around the feeling was that things needed to be different.
I finally got the shot in the arm I needed by attending a brilliant Show and Share, led by Alex May, on discovery work into our Housing service.
I thought it did an excellent job of focusing on the circumstances and feelings of the people that turn to the service in need, and how we need to design around them.
There were so many takeaways for me from this session; how services can incrementally slip from their peak over time, the impact of language on user perceptions of a service, and the absolute, mind-shattering importance of content design and a good user experience in key life experiences. I was fired up and wanted to be involved to help make things right — it was like a light switch being turned on.
It turns out that others in the team have felt this way too over the years. So maybe this is the year that it happens. Gotta love service design!
For a few weeks we’ve been struggling with our COVID pages. They’ve grown incrementally from a crisis response, to community mobilisation, to keeping active through to help with finance and food. I think I counted 40 pages at one time, all cross-referring and not really creating a clear path.
So it was another shot in the arm to come across Essex’s approach to the same problem. This just strengthened my conviction in the power of content design as a key shaper of public service, and showing it around to colleagues got them similarly enthused.
Seeing this takes me back to first hearing Padma Gillen talk through his Lead with Content book, and him describing the designer/subject matter expert approach in working with services. It feels like our CMS migration is a great opportunity to reset the balance between content design as a discipline and move away from the copy/paste approach asked of us sometimes.
The dead time between xmas and new year did give me the opportunity to spend some quality time with Liferay as a CMS, with the Digital Place gloss that Placecube have put on it. I’d decided to work through from a top-level category through its 2nd and 3rd level categories down to ordinary pages.
Although there are still some design tweaks I’d like to see, it was great to start visualising the new site with real content. It took me longer than I thought it would to make the logistical leap to how Liferay manages the types of content, and I still need to take the rest of the team with me.
On that back of this I put together the requirements for our 2nd training day, this time mixing things I feel the team need to really understand with things I still don’t quite understand. Alongside that, I finalised the training needs for a separate session on subsite creation in Digital Place, as another key part of our delivery of phase 1 is a replacement site for Public Health Dorset.
By the tail end of the week I started to get a bit anxious that we hadn’t pinned down answers to all the questions we’ve raised, found solutions to the functional requirements we need to recreate, or got a clear idea of how get to the end point of the project. It took a few hurried conversations and exchanges to get things in gear, but next week we’ll be looking at options on how we progress the next stages.
Long before I arrived at Dorset Council my content design all-stars were pushing the accessibility agenda across the council, and it was great to see this in action this week at a(nother) Show and Share on the Local Plan consultation.
Rather than settle for the (inevitable) PDF + survey that appears to be the norm in councils (even the ones with a great accessibility track record), our Planning colleagues decided to try something different. Not content with what SaaS products had to offer, a self-build project was chosen using Achieve forms as a base. Users can select the sections of the Plan they wish to comment on, and have their views on policy content asked in the midst of the text rather than in a separate survey.
As a new initiative it had a couple of people concerned, so my colleague Amanda suggested using a Show and Share to better explain what the approach was and take feedback to meet the (fast approaching) launch date.
It was a really successful event, and brilliant to see a non-Digital service leading a Show and Share like this. I hope others get wind and we start seeing more.
At the end of the week I had a bit of a surprise request coming from a Cabinet member and the Dorset Association of Parish and Town Councils. The reorganisation of councils in Dorset has created a schism in the communication channels that local councils had become used to, and all realise that something extra is needed to help bridge the gap between us and them.
In the dim and distant past I used to be a (part time) Parish Clerk for a small parish in Oxfordshire, so have a bit of an insight into the information needs and also the onslaught of communication that is thrown at a local councils. I’m still not sure if dedicated web pages are necessarily the answer, but designed well we might be able to fill some of the gap.
It was a good chance to prototype the pages using Digital Place to mock up something eye catching but building on the top tasks/category pages approach it uses. We’ve got a meeting next week to kick around the prototype and see if this starts to meet some of the needs. Then there is user testing planned with some friendly parish clerks. Should be interesting