Weeknotes: Sunday 16 March 2025

The Duke of Wellington on a horse and with atrendy orange cone on his head

The past few weeks have been a bit stressful, but going back to business as usual from next week onwards. Really happy with how things are unfolding at the moment, though.

Here are some things that I’ve been working on and thinking about:

• Spent last week in Glasgow. Had some great meals, visited museums, hung out with friends (hi, Tom!), listened to some amazing folk music in pubs, and did the very fun Glasgow Ghouls, Ghosts and Gruesome Tales Tour about Victorian body snatchers and medieval witch-burning. As usual, some strange things happened to us. We randomly ended up having drinks in a pub packed with fans of Fish from band Marillion — along with Fish himself! We were also gifted a framed photo of ourselves eating a curry while we were still eating the curry in an Indian restaurant. And we spent a day in Edinburgh, where we had the best ice cream (hi, Graeme!) and watched Wales lose against Scotland in a pub (classic). Looking forward to heading back to Edinburgh soon with Liam to work with colleagues from the Scottish Government.
• Side thought: Glasgow and Edinburgh’s universities (along with London’s) were at the forefront of advancing surgery and medicine in Victorian times. Would that have happened without the conditions that enabled a black market for dead bodies?
• As soon as I got back to work, Liam and I ran our first user-centred design training with leaders from the Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service. We stepped in for James (our learning designer) to deliver it while some colleagues shadowed us. Exploring usability principles and the importance of being user-centred, we mapped a simple, familiar service from a user perspective (getting a haircut), and introduced them to the idea of service patterns. It was a brilliant session, and I’m really proud of the work we did. Looking forward to refining and running it again!
• On Friday, we continued the work at the fire service HQ in Carmarthen in a hands-on workshop around service patterns and service mapping. I can only speak for myself, but I had the best time and felt super proud of our team, and how it all went. I wasn’t sure if the fire service team would find it useful, but they really seemed to enjoy it. Big kudos to them: they were such welcoming hosts, and open to all our ideas, even when we made them prototype and ‘usability test’ paper service prototypes. It also created a space where we could have plenty of conversations about user-centred design in a natural, organic way. (Side note: It was great to run with my suggestion to prototype on paper — I’m keen on encouraging a prototyping mindset away from the tech.) Definitely want us to write something up about this and do a show and tell.
• Services Week is here! It’s great to see so much CDPS representation. Really looking forward to Gabi and Tom’s talk about How to do Welsh language user research when things aren’t perfect. I originally suggested talking about how we worked with the UR community of practice to develop guidance for the service manual, completely missing that this would be more relevant and interesting and relevant. A good reminder to step outside my own perspective and check with others. I’d also planned to go to Service Patterns: building consistent and repeatable services at scale in London, but it won’t be possible in the end — gutted!
• Next Pep Talk at Content Club confirmed! Imra Hussain (GOV.UK Design System’s community designer) and Calvin Lau (senior content designer) will talk about Bringing everyone into content design. They’ll cover how to work in multidisciplinary squads, instil good content practices, and upskill team members. Tickets are out tomorrow, so I’ll update this with a link.
• Have been catching up with the Carnival of Cádiz music contest. You might need some context: one of the main festivals in my region is the Cádiz Carnival, and the big event is a costumed music contest with different types of bands and styles. Loved Las ratas, the winners in the comparsa category.
• It’s sometimes hard to stop yourself from jumping into fixing mode, even when that might make things worse. Sometimes, you just have to let things run their course.
• Constructive criticism as building upon rather than pitching against each other — less confrontation, more synthesis. Super nerd note: Hegelian dialectic.
• A series: Pixar’s Win or Lose — I loved this on so many levels.

Check my previous weeknotes.