Weeknotes 7–13 Dec 2020
By: Mar Murube
Tags: User Research, Product Design, Service Design, Local Gov, Weeknotes

This week we launched a new digital service to help people in Camden get food support during the COVID-19 crisis. This is the result of just 4 weeks of work; it has been a truly great project to be part of, and I have enjoyed working alongside Time to Spare, other teams at Camden Council as well as food banks and volunteers organisations.

The project was born as an emergency response to the original risk that families would stop receiving school meals in half-term and winter holidays, and to provide support to those worst impacted by the COVID-19 economic crisis. This is why it was so urgent, and we had to drop many of the other things we were doing to create a service that would be released in time for Christmas.

Conducting user research and usability testing while others were designing the UX and developing the product has been challenging. We took a hands-on approach recruiting and scheduling sessions exploring some of the existing council’s link with schools, volunteer and charity organisations. After a round of interviews and behaviour-driven tests, we spent most of last week analysing and synthesising insights to refine the first version of the site and influence the larger service design piece.

Now, I don’t know for others, but for me; I find that understanding and assimilating user research requires a deep focus: this was also the week when I had to hit the ‘pause’ and/or ‘stop’ buttons on other things in order gain the necessary mind space to understand, process and interpret research findings. So meetings were cancelled, I stepped back from IM and always-on e-mail, and decided to turn off most notifications. I also started using the Forest app to help me focus on things for set periods.

I am enormously grateful to the rest of the team for understanding, and I’m intrigued to see if I will be able to keep (some of) this going through next week.

As many of us continue to work remotely through this pandemic, we’ll need to find balance between instant communication, effective collaboration and our ability to focus.

Other things from the last days

We learn by sharing, and I’m always interested to see what others are doing/using… so I tweeted about my home studio set-up and tool stack for running remote user research, inspired by Samantha Davies, user research lead at Monzo. I was hoping that others would follow and we could make a nice thread, but it didn’t pick up. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I finally got a standing desk, hoping it will help alleviate some of the neck and back pain from spending most of my waking hours in front of my screen.

Ran another workshop to teach people how to use Miro for distributed teams. Those guys are going to start to have to pay me soon! (the workshop was with friends, so no big deal) 🤪

I listened to Barack Obama on the Brené Brown ‘Unlocking us’ podcast (highly recommend!)

Worried a lot about Brexit, the lack of a deal and how it will impact us, since we have family livig both in the UK and in Spain 🤞🤞🤞

That’s not all, but it’s a good part of it! I hope you had a great week too and are taking what’s needed to look after yourself and others. 🤗