The Christmas lights have begun to twinkle in Chelmsford this week, and though it’s a bit early to start getting festive, we’ve had a pretty jolly week.
Service design
Bhupinder’s been working with FutureGov colleagues on the Transforming Adult Social Care programme. They’ve been developing our approach to experiments over the coming weeks.
Nic and Bhupinder have been preparing for the Local #GovDesign day in Birmingham on the 25th November, facilitated by the User centred design team in the Cabinet Office. This is an opportunity to talk about the journey of the service design team and kind of design work we are doing in Essex.
Maria and Bhupinder attended the Local Government Innovation Network, which has met with a renewed passion. They thought it would be an exciting opportunity to host the network at a forthcoming meeting and test our Service Patterns.
Ben and Bhupinder have met with our colleagues in Tech Services, to think about how we can use the booking service pattern to design a new experience for the short breaks. They used some sketching techniques we picked up from LearnFest to try our hand at sketching pages of a booking journey.
Essex.gov
Sheila, Caroline M, Magda and Ben synthesised the outputs from testing the adult social care step-by-step tool.
Caroline M’s been looking at the Essex effective support site, blogging about LearnFest and reviewing some call centre stats.
Sheila, Martin, Lino and I have been looking through the school transport application process and thinking about how to shape a discovery into this.
Essex Highways: report it
In this sprint we’ve developed the possible content types and what goes into each one (like title, meta description) for the new report it tool and corresponding pages.
Sheila will arrange a workshop with the Highways team to go through these and test them.
She’s also looking at simplifying the automated communications to users like, emails and messages on pop-up boxes, to make them easier to read and understand.
Julie is now helping with user research activities. She has great ideas on how we can more people to help with user testing.
Accessibility
Following Lottie’s arrival a couple of weeks ago, we’re very pleased to be joined by front-end developer, Jack. Lottie and Jack are going focussing on our accessibility project fulltime, which is fantastic.
This week they’ve been checking accessibility issues on the Essex 2020 site, updating our team’s presentation templates and started work on an internal comms plan for accessibility.
They’re just getting started, there’s going to be loads more great work to ensure that our online services work for everyone.
Team highlight
Last week we didn’t know Jack. And now we do.
He’s a fantastic addition to the accessibility project and Martin in particular is delighted to have another front-end developer to share the load.
1 comment
Comment by Mr M P Cole Esq posted on
Great stuff everyone. I hope Jack has the necessary skills of drinking cold brew coffee like Martin 😉