https://essexdigitalservice.blog.essex.gov.uk/2019/07/05/weeknotes-1-5-july/

Weeknotes 1-5 July

After all the excitement of going live last week, this week we’ve been holding things steady, with our eye on some interesting new adventures.

Content

Caroline A held a workshop for Planning and Development, to find out more about their services, and to show how content design can benefit their users.

Caroline M’s been tweaking the Living Well site, and tinkering with a pretty massive and unfriendly PDF, to see if she can make it accessible for screen readers. She’s also been having a look at the functionality of some Umbraco sites with Simmone.

Collette’s been logging and reviewing the growing mound of user feedback we’ve had since essex.gov.uk went live. She’s also had chats with Magda and Chris about how to use the feedback and analytics we’re gathering for maximum iterative impact. She’s not messing around, I hear there are dashboards and funnels in the works.

She also went to a workshop looking at how the team can get involved in work around the adult social care financial assessment process.

Hannah’s been cracking on with the Trading Standards pages.

Sheila and I have been prepping for the debut of our content design workshop on Monday.

Sheila’s also been having a look at some exciting stuff around a step-by-step content type for adult social care funding, and visiting at a withering number of Local Offer sites.

User research

Magda’s been thinking about how to make sure that the team’s all on the same page when it comes to the user research work that’s going on, and, impressively, has the next 10 weeks of worked planned out.

She also attended the second user research community of practice. It’s starting to feel like a slick group of professionals coming together to learn from each other. The team linked up with our colleagues in the Research and Citizen Insight team to discuss shared issues, like recruitment, and of course, user needs.

Our second community of practice
Our second user research community of practice

Georgiana’s been doing lots of planning. She and Ben also conducted their first user research interview with Sheila and I. I don’t want to seem presumptuous, but it seemed to go well from where we were sitting.

Service design

Bhupinder’s planning a session to review findings arising from interviews with people diagnosed with dementia with health and care partners from North East Essex. This time will be invaluable in moving from research and insights to tangible actions. She’s also been making sterling headway with the apply for something service pattern.

Nic’s mainly been moving house this week (using thoroughly agile techniques, I’m sure). He’s somehow also found time help launch the new collaborative LocalGov Patterns project with FutureGov, do some planning ahead for our leadership Futures Academy and some initial scoping of new pieces of service design work around Mental Health and ASC Financial Assessments. Blimey.

Team highlight

Seeing essex.gov.uk out in the world, being used by the people of Essex is pretty special. It’s a great representation of what we’re about, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Share this page

Leave a comment

We only ask for your email address so we know you're a real person