learning

📅 Daily note for 26 January 2024

Remember my course! It might be really helpful for you or a colleague!

Excellent podcast about what Iran is up to these days.

Giles thinks learning materials in organisations ought to be better quality, and of course he is right.

Simon Wardley shares some thoughts on project delivery that are well worth reading.

The Future Councils Playbook is a “set of tools to help you understand complex problems and their impact”. These are useful of course, and as much good practice support we can get out there the better. But a step change in local government digital quality is unlikely to result from such things – we need more.

More Simon Wardley – this is a fun new intro to his mapping, etc:

Yesterday I made use of Colin Stenning’s excellent local gov CMS research to help write an options appraisal for a council’s new website technology. What a legend!

Getting started with user research workshop recording

The workshop that Lizzie and I delivered went down pretty well, I think. You can find out for yourself by watching it back.

It’s a quick canter through different methods of undertaking user research, aimed at those new to the whole idea. I think user research is a super-important thing for digital teams to get involved with as quickly as possible, because it’s a cultural game changer. If you want to be more user-centric in your work, there’s no better way of doing it than actually speaking to, and understanding, your users.

As well as watching the video, you can:

  1. Download the slides
  2. Read the questions and answers that didn’t get looked at in the workshop
  3. Read the chat notes from the session
  4. Listen to the audio

Lizzie also has some fab stuff that will help you on your user-centred design journey:

Digital age operating models, with Eddie Copeland

One of the elements of the Loosemore definition of digital that doesn’t get as much coverage as the rest is the bit about business, or operating, models. That’s probably because it’s really hard.

So I loved having this chat with LOTI‘s Eddie Copeland about his 6 ideas for future operating models for local public services, which he wrote about a few years ago when he was at Nesta.

I think it is fair to say that this really is just the start of this conversation, but I really hope that folk can take inspiration from what Eddie shares in terms of thinking about how certain services could be completely transformed from the ground up.

As I explained in this post, it isn’t always going to be possible to be truly transformative, and sometimes less ambitious approaches are more suitable. But I think every council needs to have this kind of thinking in their lockers, ready to take the opportunities as they arise.

FREE online workshop: getting started with user research

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

This workshop is free for public sector people. Please use your work email address to make it easy to recognise you!

It’s happening on Thursday 16 December, 12pm on Zoom.

Book now!

User research is one of the most important stages of any successful digital project. However it often gets missed, and that’s often because people just aren’t used to doing it.

Involving service users in research and testing is a big cultural change for organisations, and takes a fair bit of confidence to start doing for the first time.

In this workshop, Lizzie Bruce from Cake Consultancy joins me to introduce common user research methods, as well as some less well known ones.

We will also talk through how to arrange user research sessions for the first time – where to host them, how to recruit users, how to record sessions and turn them into actionable insights.

At the end of the workshop you will feel more confident about:

  1. Including user research activities as part of your digital project
  2. Choosing the best user research methods to meet your objectives
  3. Setting up your user research sessions, in terms of location, equipment and practicalities
  4. Finding and recruiting users for your research
  5. Turning your research into actionable insights

Don’t delay, book today!

Book now!


5 videos to help leaders understand digital

Following on from the workshop I ran with LGiU last week on digital for leaders (which went very well, thank you for asking), I shared a few bits with the delegates – further reading, if you will.

Part of that was a set of videos on YouTube that cover some of the important areas that folk in senior positions really need to understand, delivered by people with far greater expertise than me.

Here they are – try and get them in front of your senior leadership team, if you can, and book in a chat with them shortly afterwards to help them apply it to your organisational context!

1. Digital Government: Not Complicated, Just Hard – Tom Loosemore

2. Applying digital to everything – Janet Hughes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy8jgRLej0U

3. Situation Normal, Everything Must Change – Simon Wardley

4. Human-Centered Data Transformation – Kit Collingwood

5. Designing government services that meet user needs – Martin Jordan

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