There’s quite a few people on leave, so this is a lightning quick update of another barnstorming week in the Service Design team.
User research
With essex.gov.uk live, we’ve been taking some time to do some much-needed testing on our education pages. These pages see some of the heaviest traffic on the whole site, so getting them right is vital.
Recruiting people for testing is one of the biggest obstacles to this. You have to get the right wording, in the right channels to make sure that people engage.
Magda and Sheila have been working at blistering pace to achieve that this week. They managed to get sign off for a recruitment message in one of education’s most high-profile email shots and got Tech Services to implement an auto email straight to Magda’s inbox.
Within minutes the first responses were starting to trickle in.
This sounds small, but it’s not. Getting departments to work together, and get things done quickly is hard.
Magda’s top tips: catch people before they go on leave, send them short, clear actions, and tell them how their contribution, no matter how small, has helped.
Service patterns
Bhupinder’s been working with Georgiana to produce user journeys for the ‘check something’ service patter. They’ve also been thinking about how a ‘check and apply’ flow could help could help service areas and tech teams.
Bhupinder’s also been developing ‘how might we’ statements for the service patterns.
Georgiana and the service patterns team have been looking at planning for the next few weeks, and thinking about what they want to have achieved by September. It’s already looking really positive with two patterns mapped out.
Content
Hannah’s been continuing her trawl through the Trading Standards section, with a particular focus on accessibility issues. She’s also been working through some of our fast-track modules, and started some discovery work on the services we sell section.
I’ve been chatting to our colleagues in Coroners, and looking at an exciting new form for blue badge applications.
Team Highlight
As you can see, this week we’ve been working at pace, which isn’t unusual for an agile team. What’s been really nice, is a lot of this work has been pulling us beyond the normal boundaries of our disciplines.
This is the way we want to work. You can't be agile if you're stuck in a silo.
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