We’ve been keeping it seasonal this week, setting ghouls, following beast practice, even the odd Poe and tell, but always frighting for the user.
Essex.gov
Sheila and Caroline M have been preparing 3 month content reviews for the school transport and contact us sections. Sheila and Magda have also been preparing a presentation to present insights from their school transport user testing to stakeholders.
Step by step
Sheila and Magda tested the step by step prototype with users. This is really going to help us optimise this feature.
Highways
Sheila and Ben tested the Highways report it tool with some users. Seeing how people interact with this service is going to be vital to improving it. They also had a session to synthesise the insights from the testing they’ve already done.
Financial assessments
We started the week with our second show and tell session, where we shared some of our working hypothesis - things that we think are happening, but that we need to understand more.
We got some useful feedback from colleagues which were used to draft some data questions for the financial assessment team. The results of this should help us to identify where we can have the most impact when we move into prototyping.
We attended an Income and Service Managers meeting where we tested some of our hypothesis with ASC professionals.
We talked about the things we are hearing and what we think that means around two key areas:
- are we having the right conversations about financial assessments at the right time?
- why are financial assessments not being correctly triggered at the right time?
These questions resonated with ASC service managers and we received some immediate feedback which we’ll be following up on next week.
We've also continued to make links across the many programmes of work that are happening around financial assessments. We've learned about new invoice templates, updates to mosaic recording forms, improved processes and systems changes and integrations that are all being scoped, evaluated and implemented. There’s a lot going on!
Next week we will be observing some social worker practice training around financial assessments, making a brief appearance at the Adults Leadership Team meeting and continuing to reach out to professionals and service users to keep building our understanding and sharpening our questions.
Caroline A met with the Finance and Procurement team to understand their processes better and see examples of the written comms they send out.
She also mapped out the structure of the Care cost calculator to get a clearer idea of how it works and any limitations and read through peer reviews of other authorities’ services and drafted some content based on our assumed user needs.
Accessibility
It’s been quite a quiet week for accessibility. We’ve been focussing on how we can collaborate with our colleagues in Tech Services on our forms project. More locally, we’ve been looking at how we can draw on the service patterns nous in our own team to make sure our guidance is tip top.
Team highlight
On Wednesday we had our second planning meeting for our LearnFest session in a couple of weeks. It’s really nice for the whole team to emerge from their product streams for some proper box-avoiding, cliché-busting, creative endeavour.
I’m pretty sure we’re going to come up with something that will challenge people’s assumptions about user-centred design in ways they definitely won't be expecting.
1 comment
Comment by Mr M P Cole Esq posted on
Awesome stuff - keep going!