I’ve not weeknoted for over 6 months now.

This is a cheat week to get me going again. I was on holiday for most of it…

We went to Cyprus. Don’t worry, this is the only holiday snap you’ll get. Only including it because as we stood and looked at this pier/hut thing going out into the sea my wife said to me:

“I’ve never been anywhere like this, its like the holiday brochures”

To which I responded “Yeah and that tells you all you need to know about what they don’t show you in the brochures”. Full of the joy of holiday cheer me.

Because this place (where we stayed two days) was nice in many ways but a bit like living in the Truman show, if the Truman show was mostly filled by people you suspect made their money via dubious means.

Oh we did some culture too. The ancient city of Salamis.

Got stuck in a German tour group by accident, and were too British to leave for a long time. Also continued to remark about the fact that if this was in the UK everything would be roped off, but here you could bump into the original Roman marble statues as you pleased.

I was only back working for one day, and that day was pretty minimal after a foolish choice of later flight home with two young children.

One thing that did crop up was someone pointing out that I hadn’t done any user research to inform some work I’d been doing. And it was fair, I fell fully into all of the usual thinking traps that I’ve seen other people do in the past (and tried to nudge them on too). The things people say often sound like:

1. But we have very firm boundaries of policy/regulation/law to operate within, so there’s not much scope for actually incorporating the feedback, it would just be a waste of everyone’s time.
2. I’ve spoke to some internal people who represent our users, they thought it was OK
3. The user researchers had a lot of other priorities and this was just a quick thing that needed doing, so we didn’t want to distract them.
4. We can just put it into beta/live and then learn from that.
5. It was a live service issue, so it needed acting on really fast and we had a good steer from the couple of examples that were already cropping up.
6. Its a pretty niche situation, so it would have been really hard to recruit for people to feedback on the process.
7. Its all been signed off by leadership so we’d need to gather some really strong evidence to do anything, especially as it would likely increase the risk.

I could say all of these things about the work I’ve done too. And they’d be true, as they often are when other people say them too. But I’ll also say that I could and should have found ways to get user research done as part of the work…because

1. Even when there are firm boundaries of policy/regulation/law to operate within you still need to explain them in ways that are relevant to your users, not just in the ways your organisation thinks about it.
2. Super users/internal reps/community group representatives can give really valuable feedback, but they don’t represent the breadth of people’s experiences, and cant speak from person experience about every situation.
3. There are often ways the user research teams can weave asks into their already planned research, and if not – then they’ll tell you and you might have to adjust timelines accordingly. The best bet is ask as early as possible.
4. This will always be true, but its about de-risking that launch.
5. There’s always a risk that you respond to try to meet a generic service need, by designing to a very specific example. Design research qual is small sample by design, but going beyond the one or two examples will be really helpful to consider the other possible ways the service could/should be used.
6. Recruitment for every single edge case can be really challenging, but if there are people who are going to need what you’re designing then its worth seeking them out for their input.
7. Again, this is a classic case of asking for user research too late. If its all been signed off, then the real opportunity for research has been missed.

Reflecting, I realised I had become the stakeholder that frustrated me before. Well-meaning and intent on getting something done, but missing the opportunity to incorporate design research at the right time. Maybe too pragmatic, and not enough service design purism, for once.