It has been a busy period recently with a lot of piecemeal tasks.
I’ve been:
- supporting the reviewing job descriptions as part of the transfer of CDPS into Welsh Government.
- sourcing training for the team in January.
- trying to complete some personal online training I’ve never got around to doing
- completing 6-monthly and 12-month reviews that always come thing and fast in autumn
- speaking with Cardiff Council’s Welsh coordinators team about approaches to bilingual services
I’ve also been planning for various events and community meetings:
- Dan Warren from Parkinson’s UK is joining our Content Design Cymru community on 2 December to share his experiences as a content designer
- Harry Thompson from Marvell Consulting will talk to the community on 16 December about their work building bilingually by default with Stats Wales.
- I’m talking at the Student Loans Company UCD community in December about bilingual design and content
- I’m chairing a lunchtime webinar with Ali and Kirsty from Adnodd, alongside my colleague Catrin on 1 December. They’re showing some work they’ve done together designing policy content in Welsh and English. I’m interested to hear about their experiences
- I’m planning a session at the Welsh Language Commissioner’s Welsh language and Technology event on 9 December. We’ll focus on the Digital Service Standard for Wales. Harry Thompson From Marvell Consulting has also agreed to come along to talk about their work.
- I planned 30-minute activity on behalf for UCD at our all-hands.
Highlights:
- GovCamp Cymru
- CDPS all-hands event
- catching up with some Content Design Cymru members. If anyone from the community fancies a chat, let me know.
Reading and ideas:
Here are some ideas I’ve come across and that I intend to write more fully on:
17% o siaradwyr Cymraeg sy’n ffafrio’r iaith gyda sefydliadau cyhoeddus. (17% of Welsh speakers prefer using Welsh with public organisations). This is a bit depressing but not a surprise. It also echoes some research we already have that points to usability and low expectations being a big issue. An even bigger issue perhaps is that the answer that’s always suggested is to work harder to promote the thing that is not usable in the first place. I have thoughts that I’ll come back to.
Ti, chi and the relationship between trust, formality and usability: this came up in a GovCamp Cymru proposed by user researcher Catrin Jones. This was a fascinating session on which I have many more thoughts to share
The language of digital and design in Wales: Are we opening up enough, or guilty of getting bogged down in our own jargon? Every sector and profession has their own jargon. I wonder if that’s a way of fencing off territories, until it becomes a reason to not work together when we should be? In the meantime, you might guess what I’m thinking from this little poem I did (I must have gone a bit mad with event planning recently):
UCD-DDaT
Be multidiscipline, have work to-do:
be user-centred, deliver value.
Work in agile, align the roadmap
Focus on outcomes, not outputs, asap
Research with users, follow leads,
write user stories, user needs.
Collaborators collaborate
iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate.
Your story points must be sized,
evaluate, hypothesize,
test assumptions, reject hype,
prove it with a prototype.
Run the retro. What went well?
Always playback, show and tell.
Then you measure your success.
And if you don’t? You’re in a mess.
Bye!