mmmm
Since 2003, each October, Kraków hosts Unsound Festival and briefly becomes the best place in the world to listen to music in. For attendees days take on a new rhythm: wake up around midday, rush to a performance in an anatomical theatre, weave past stag dos and over tram lines to attend panels and lectures in the main square, find obiad on the way to the evening gig, finishing up at the club.…
I’ve been a head of design since March, working on several GOV.UK products and channels: app , chat , pay , notify , forms , emergency alerts . I’m having a lot of fun but there’s a lot to adjust to and to make sense of. The job is largely about building a brilliant design team that’s fit for what we need to do. To do that job, I need to have a really clear sense of what a good design team means…
An outcome that you and your team is trying to affect is probably fairly static, say, reducing the bureaucratic burden on the public . But how you get there is not, and it changes based on your assumptions, data, successes, funding, failures, ability to convince people, ability to make quality products, and so on. The work you’re doing in a digital product team is about going from A to B. I often…
Here is a dichotomy that has been on my mind recently: user-facing services, or enabling platforms? What’s an ideal relationship between these two? It’s not some grand plea nor is it directed at anything or anyone in particular. I just like working through things in writing, and all this blogging is giving me FOMO. An organisation like GDS is special because it is responsible for both the front…
Working in the open in the public sector could really do with a renewed, optimistic case for it. By working in the open, I mean teams thinking out loud, announcing product changes they’re trialling, sharing good practice, stuff like that. We have countless examples of these on GOV.UK blogs from the last 10 years. Here are a few reasons why working in the open is good for you and your teams: It…
I get to use the gym and swimming pool for free on the weekend in the borough where I live because the council wants everyone to be healthier. All of the museums around me are free, and I get to see the world’s best art and enjoy the city’s best buildings without paying a penny. I can walk all over the UK on well-maintained footpaths and there is legislation in place to keep them. All of these…
Designing digital products over the last decade has mostly involved applying well-understood techniques to novel use cases. We matured as a digital profession, built design systems, agreed on what good looks like, and made some useful things for users who haven’t previously benefitted. I think this is changing, and AI is throwing us back to a world of unknown unknowns, with lots to make sense of.…
Digital product teams really don’t like it when the final output of the thing they’re working on is dictated to them. They prefer be given a problem to solve, and agency to work out the best way to solve it. This is right: organising your teams around outcomes, not outputs, gives better results. Starting with an output can lead to teams going around in circles, because they don’t know who they’re…
Buildings, like most other things, age badly if they’re not maintained. Some of the best mass housing projects in the UK have disappeared because of terrible maintenance . Part of the issue is that decisions about buildings are rarely made by the people that live in them. Maintenance, like landscaping, cleaning, or fixing the lift, is the responsibility of a property management company or a…
Homes are too hard for people to access. They can be too expensive if bought or rent and are not available for all that need them as social housing or otherwise. Housing is also not evenly distributed. Poor people, disabled people and people of colour are most likely to live in housing that is precarious and unsafe , which negatively impacts all other areas of life. Building more homes is not…
There is a walk-in COVID testing centre right by my house. A few weeks ago, I had the unexpected pleasure of using it and dear diary, it got me thinking. You rarely see or experience services in their entirety right in front of you. You do with other things that are designed, like posters or websites, where the output is relatively contained and controlled. Services can take weeks to get through,…
I read an article earlier this year about the weird relationship British people have with walking . I could relate to it, a lot: walking for leisure was new to me and so were vast networks of footpaths all across the country, cutting through public and private land. I enjoy it as much as anyone now and obviously it have been doing it a lot over the past year. This article is in praise of the long…
I've been working on ‘transformation’ for the past year. It's an unhelpful, precarious word, but we’re stuck with it. Through it, I’m learning a lot about working with people who are new to things like agile and user-centred design. This is about a few of those learnings, focusing on the words that we use to describe work; communication tools that describe intent to others. Outcomes, user needs,…
Someone who moved out of their home country at 16 once told me that their Portuguese more or less stopped developing when they left so now they fear that they will forever sound like a teenager in an adult’s body when they use it. It’s been on my mind since because, lol, how horrific is that. I had to pick up a leek the other day to show my sister what I’m putting in a risotto because I forgot the…
I’ve been thinking about how weird working in a big organisation is and how nobody tells you that before you join. I worked in small companies before joining the public sector and continue to be shocked by how different doing what is effectively the same job can be in different environments. There are so many things to learn: who to talk to to get a new laptop, how to make sense of the org chart,…
Fuck it, I’m gonna start saying things online! I’ve been really enjoying reading these from various people I work with or used to work with or just know of and it seems like a useful way of reflecting on what you’re doing. This, combined with an idea for a fun layout (this isn’t it, I need more content) was a perfect storm, so here we are. Gonna talk about work because not much else happens and…