Made it to week two without giving up, I’m impressed.

• Most of this week has been supporting the team to pull together a presentation on the work we’ve been doing around tills for our senior Operations and technology stakeholders on Monday. They’ve done great work, and the battle (as always) is trying to share this in as succinct way possible. We could bombard people with process, user research clips, Decision stacks etc etc but we want to make sure its clear, actionable and to the point, with a bias towards ‘showing the thing’ rather than talking about how we made the thing.
• I’ve also been working through some line management changes (for me and others). We’re kinda set up matrix management (based on specialism), but with changes to the specialisms we have at Principal we’ve had to have a re-think and it always takes longer than you think – espcially if you speak to and listen to those who it will impact, rather than just make decisions on their behalf.
• I managed to put some time aside on Monday evening and Weds morning to progress my service design research work as well. It very much takes a back seat, but I’m still commited to finishing the thing! Monday evening was reviewing some new literature that was really relevant, I quite enjoy getting stuck into academic papers, but its definitely a shift in gear and mindset to day to day work. It also reinforces to me that I want my own work to be as accessible and applicable to people practicing design as possible.
• Got out into two Co-op stores on Thursday and Friday to test a new digital tool that we’ve not been involved in building (much), whilst a colleague visited other stores too. I always learn loads when I go out into store, as someone who works in ‘Colleague products’ I think time in store should be an essential part of my job (we do have ‘contact hours’ as part of our design team objectives, but they’re not really strictly adhered too). Being in store allows me to get a better feel for how stores run, which things work really well for colleagues, and which are terrible. Lots of the people I speak to in operations have worked in stores before joining an operations team, so often have 10/15 years more experience in a problem than I do from the off! Without diving into the details of the thing we were testing, some things that we learned/had reinforced were:
  • The tool was built on the assumption it would be used on mobile/handheld devices in store. Pretty much all colleagues defaulted to using it on their tablet – in landscape mode. It gave a very different experience (lots of scrolling & keyboard covering the screen when typing etc). The task is seen as a ‘back office’ task, so that’s the device they would default to.
  • IT service management call things different things to in-store colleagues (I mean we already knew this), always good to have the value of content design reinforced.
  • Its always the unhappy paths that throw things – they tend to get to get the least thought. I.e. one of the fields was pre-populated with the colleagues name, when it was right, super easy, when it was wrong a simple thing became very difficult very quickly! It had been designed on the assumption the data would be right first time!
• Finished the week capturing the notes from the store visits, I continue to be torn on the speed & flexibility of working in collabroative tools like Miro and slack to do wotk like this vs the throughness and traceability of things like full transcripts, dovetail (or even excel) for some proper coding. I’m fortunate to work with well organised people who structure their notes and insight forming well – but its still a continual effort to prevent significant wastage in the process!

Didn’t feel great this Friday, so made use of our new(ish) ‘Not feeling 100%’ slack status for the first time so people were kind!

I’ve decided a ‘long read’ for the week is going to become what I share at the bottom of these notes…so if you made it this far, as a parent of a 5 year old and a 2 year old I found this long read about how we’re trying to use toys to ‘cram learning into playtime’ an interesting read.