Whats this, 3 weeks in a row. After the kids have gone to bed this time around though.

Things that happened this week:

• We presented a big chunk of work back to our senior technology stakeholder who hadn’t been to previous show and tells. Generally I wouldn’t want to have such a ‘big bang’ presentation, but others within their team had been attending and I’d seen evidence of our work being used and influecning other decisions already. One real positive was that he loved the ‘cardboard prototyping’ we’d used to explore different hardware solutions. One of my general objectives has been to encourage more low/mid fidelity prototyping within the design team e.g. desktop walkthrough, so seeing it supported from those in tech was a win. My other reflection is ‘Wow was that really this week, feels like forever ago’.
• Tues/Weds was mostly pulling together summary of research from being in store, it was another reminder of the importance of content design and information architecture. We’re not designing the tool, so it’s feeding back to others who often gratefully receive the feedback but are generally over-reliant on ‘a training video’ to fix design issues. Whilst that’s been something I’ve been keen to challenge, I’ve been really encouraged to see operational product owners advocating for designing for user needs rather than reliance on training materials.
• We also discussed the creation of an internal wiki at the user research community of practice. We have a dormant one that not everyone has access too, so are exploring how to refresh with new content and improved access. This is primarily for practical templates and processes etc rather than managing insights we collect. Interested to know if anyone else has cracked this?
• Thursday was a chance to celebrate (remotely) with the wider customer products team, discussing our achievements from the past year. A common theme was that it was a year of challenges (Co-op reorganised, stopped a lot of work and made 400 people redundant in the process) but we did still have something to show for it coming to the end of 2022. Train strikes meant there was no chance of me getting to Manchester for the Christmas ‘gathering’, but it did mean a quiet afternoon and a chance to tidy the shed a bit.
• Friday I shared with the team what the plans are for the new year. Being honest, trying to co-ordinate a plan that leadership in different places agree with has been the thing that’s probably been stressing me out the most over the past few weeks. I generally cope pretty well with work stress (I think) but this had the frustrating balance of being sort of within my control, but reliant on a huge number of other factors outside of my control that had no interest in aligning in a timely way. Thankfully the team a gracious and mature, even if the situations aren’t always ideal.

We also went to my daughters Christmas concert, which is the first we’ve been able to attend in person becuase of Covid. She’s just fallen asleep upstairs after pretty much singing the whole set of songs from beginning to end!

This weeks long read is a review of a book about McKinsey, the consulting giant. Its pretty scathing about their ethics & approach to business, but it also feels a helpful warning in the way design shouldn’t go in case it becomes “meaningless bits of management-speak festooned with cryptic acronyms”. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n24/laleh-khalili/in-clover