2023/07/07

I’ve been pretty poor at weeknoting recently, things have been and continue to be busy – partly in work (managed to be in a design sprint, whilst also prepping another bit of discovery work at the same time two weeks ago) but mostly outside. We finally have a house move date, contracts have been exchanged today and I’m spending a lot more time that I’d like to speaking to customer service chat tools right now! It won’t be news to anyone, but the fact that it is harder to move existing internet/insurance providers to a new address than it is to take out a new account with a competitor is just plain silly.

Anyway, I could rant about the terrible customer experience case studies I’ve lived this week, but nobody would enjoy that (apart from maybe me).

Aside from that, this week:

• I’ve been involved in recruitment for 4 roles. Shortlisting for one that’s just closed, tweaking the job advert for two roles that have just gone live and drafting a content design and a user research role too.
• I’ve been involved in conversations about ‘roles and responsibilities’ for different people within our teams. As with many things, there’s value in the conversations, but risk in being overly prescriptive from my experience. You want people to know the value and skills they bring to the team, without feeling pigeon holed, or like nobody else is there to support them.
• I had an interesting discussion about what people present at conferences and when speaking to people outside of their business and their true reality of work. I went on a bit of a rant about the negative impact these ‘glossed over’ case studies have when (often newer) team members when they realise that no organisation actually works like that. The abridged version of my comments (that people requested were included in weeknotes) are:
  • The key takeaway that I got very early on from hearing anyone talk about their work externally e.g. conference/meetup is that they’re only telling you about 50% of the story and it was almost certainly A LOT more messy than they’re letting on.
  • There is no perfect place to work, you just have to decide what kind of crap you’re willing to put up with.
  • Half of supporting junior colleagues is trying to explain that they’re not doing it all wrong because they’re not able to work in the way they read about it in that blog post, they saw that conference talk etc…AKA ‘Its not you, its them – The CX/Design/Agile Influencers are gaslighting you’
• Had a couple of other conversations about ‘we want to do some user research to make this thing better, can you help us?’. Which is really encouraging. Some of it comes through formal channels – others through user researchers sharing in ways of working sessions and people thinking ‘we could do with some of that!’. The challenge is always finding the right balance between pragmatically supporting people doing it for the first time, and trying to aim for some quality of work.
• I also came away from another design/engineering/product weekly discussion encouraged. Kudos to Jack in particular for leading that sesion so well, for bringing a service design lens to interaction design and being so open to feedback and learning as always.
• I’m watching (mostly from the sidelines) as two products get closer to delivery and its interesting to see the shift in cadence and urgency of things. I’m mostly measuring through cadence of chat messages, but things are moving at a fast pace now – progress made hourly/daily rather than weekly and I’m left wondering if/how that can be sustained, or if it even should be?

This weeks long read is…the moving house checklist. Well, its pretty much all I’ve read this week.