This week the post-its have been set swirling as we’ve been synthesising some user research and putting our shoulder to wheel to push our accessibility work beyond pre-discovery and out of sprint 0.
Content
Caroline M and Hannah delivered the last of our content design workshops. We’ve trained more than 50 people across the organisation, who've almost all said they now feel more confident creating clear content based on clear user needs.
Caroline M’s been continuing to work through our PDF register, looking at what could be converted into web content.
Caroline A’s published the new planning and development section, making sure, what can be really complicated and specialist content is clear and optimised for search. She’s also been prepping the natural environment pages, which should be released into the wild early next week.
Hannah and I have been getting our head around some forms work. This is being included in the accessibility stream of work, and it’s really excited to be in a new product team to start improving our services moving beyond sprint 0.
Service patterns
Magda , Bhupinder, Georgiana and Ben, along with some business analysts from Tech Services, have trawled through every booking journey you can find on essex.gov.uk.
As well as being a fun way to spend an afternoon, they were able gather some tech-inflected insights to help feed back into the patterns work.
The team have also been synthesising user research for the childcare-finder app and school transport application for the ‘check something’ service pattern.
This looked at the real-world experience of parents in Essex and generated a huge amount of data. Synthesis gives the team a chance to pore through it, teasing out themes and common issues. This then forms the bedrock of the rest of our design work.
User research
As well as the patterns work, Ben’s been in the big smoke at the Innovation in Government Summit listening to speakers like Hilary Cottom.
Service Design
Bhupinder took a break from patterns to attend the kick off for phase 2 of the Transforming Adult Social Care project.
Team highlight
As a team, we always aim to give 110%. Though maths might not be our strong suit, we have a dim awareness that it isn’t always possible to deliver on this.
That hasn’t stopped the team ruthlessly raising our accessibility score.
We pulled it up from the mid-80s a few months ago, and by last week it was hovering around 99%.
Not content with this, Martin’s deployed further fixes taking us up to the heady heights of 99.6%. Watch this ever-decreasing space for news on improvements.
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