We might be deep into August, but in Service Design we’ve been going back to school, rolling out the new content design workshop.
Content
Sheila and I have spent the last couple of weeks developing a content design workshop for Essex. This week, alongside Caroline M, we finally go to deliver it to colleagues from the Education, Place Services and Library teams.
The feedback was really good, and it’s starting to feel like there’s a real keenness for a community of content creators.
Caroline M has been familiarising herself with the workshop, so she and Hannah can take charge of delivering it to a whole host of other teams across the council.
Hannah and Caroline A both went to GDS’s accessibility training. Caroline A’s continued with her epic environment and planning redesign, and Hannah’s been finalising some content for the Essex Teaching Awards, as well as sniffing out any PDFs that should really be online forms.
User research
Georgiana, Magda, Ben and Bhupinder observed research interviews with users looking at the childcare finder app. This involved lots of strong observation and research skills as well as some toddler wrangling from Ben.
Service Patterns
There’s been lots of planning for the next few sprints, and preparation for next week’s epic ideation session with the rest of the team.
Product
Simmone had a briefing with the Cabinet Member responsible for accessibility, which sounds like it went really well.
She also started tapping up people who might be interested in helping us with this work, and looking at reskinning some of our websites and apps.
Helen’s been adding some miles to the roadmap, and plotting where all these activities should be taking us longer term.
Team highlight
The surest way to test your methods is to share them. We spend a lot of time talking about standards for content, so it was fantastic to have enough time to really get to the heart of what that means and watch people put it into action.
We’ve got a fully booked run of content design workshops over the coming months, and by the end of it, I’m sure we’ll have a rich seam of lean, mean, content creators and editors across the organisation.
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