Weeknotes 16: inclusive design, letting go, retro dancing
Monday
We had our accessibility audit carried out by the lovely people at digitalaccessibilitycentre.org (DAC)in Wales. Luka Alexander went along to watch the testing and meet the testers. So far the results are looking great, which is rewarding as we’ve had a real focus on inclusive design right from the start.
As a team we’ve learnt a lot about different accessibility needs (especially ones that you wouldn’t normally immediately think about such as panic disorders and time out actions — this is all really useful for future services even if we don’t have that sort of functionality now.
I’ve started work on a handover trello board — listing the things that come next, where we are on various issues we’ve been trying to solve, and what I’d do if I was staying. There’s a sense of trying to get everything sorted before I go, but that’s unrealistic and the team are in a great place to take things forward.
Tuesday
I’d volunteered to help colleagues at BEIS with some interviewing for a product manager so I spent Tuesday morning sifting applications for the role. I really like working with other teams and departments on recruitment — it’s an opportunity to help colleagues out, and it gives me an insight into what skills people are looking for, as well as how different people approach applying for roles.
We had sprint 6 review and retro — sadly I missed the retro because of other meetings but it apparently involved dancing and pleasure/pain, loss/gain axes (I had to look up the plural of axis btw)
Wednesday
We spent the morning in sprint 7 planning. There was of course cake:
Over lunch Philippa, Cheryl and I did some more work for our coding course — there’s two weeks left and prizes to be won for the best team site built during the course. It’s not that we’re competitive but . . .
Thursday
Sprint 6 show and tell *— sharing early results from the accessibility audit and from the latest round of user research. Later on I demoed the beta site contents to our Board — great feedback from them, and we’re testing the site itself, and key user journeys with our Chief Exec and Chair this week**.
Thursday evening was the penultimate coding course — luckily (!) the projector was broken so instead of learning more things we all got to work on our project sites. I needed the time to consolidate what I’ve learnt so far.
Friday
I was out on leave on Friday but the team moved house (to the other side of the 22nd floor to join our technology colleagues.) We can finally stop camping out in other teams spaces. Most excitingly there’s loads of clean white wall space that we can’t wait to get our hands on.
Things I read this week:
Via @ClareMoriarty on twitter
I’m with you on this, @simoneverest. When I was asked to give a talk on digital transformation I started by defining digital as ‘the world we now live in’ & digital transformation as ‘changing to keep up with the world we now live in’ #keepitsimple
Absolutely.
and via HBR this great article on joy at work accompanied by my fave photo of the week
*snack vision was ‘spherical’
**point 18 of the GDS standard, our equivalent of the minister.
