Weeknote 1st to 8th March

Some of the things I was involved in this week

• Had another great introductory meeting with one of our new service design partners.
• Worked with product development leadership colleagues to collectively work on actions to deliver our strategy.
• Took part in the NHSx service assessor retro.
• Met with the lead user researcher community and talked about contractor onboarding and customer vs user experience.
• Met with Leila and discussed how we can put people front and centre of our delivery.
• Had a really productive session with content profession colleagues to work on our service design maturity model. This session was not just about using their brilliant content skills to improve it, but also making sure that content design was fully represented in the maturity model. Like many specialisms, content is often brought into a product too late and/ or seen as something that other people in the team can cover. We cannot be service led unless content is integrated into the end to end, front to back, service design.
• I attended our user research community bi weekly meet up to hear Toby and Wendy talk about some work they have been doing at BT to measure user experience. Peter also came to talk about work he has been doing to develop an incentives policy at NHS Digital
• Had an introductory meeting with Shera, our new Deputy Chief Medical Officer and told her all about our brilliant user research community. She was very interested in my offer to arrange an opportunity to observe user research so I’ll be sorting that out once she has had time to settle in to her new role.
• I have sort of finished my blog post. I have ducked in and out of writing it so much, I need another set of eyes on it. I have shared it with some colleagues to get some feedback and sense check it.

What made me think

I thought a lot about the terms customer and user, what those terms sometimes imply or mean to people, how those terms include and exclude or create divide and what words we could use instead that helps us have a shared understanding.

Some of the things I plan to do next week

• Review two more submissions to the Digital Technology Assurance Board
• Work with the design and user research leads on the the pipeline process of work packages for our service design partners
• Take part in inclusive recruitment training
• Catch up with one of the teams piloting the service design maturity model tool
• Chair the Coronavirus UCD community meet up