A full week, and it’s been nice moving from some torrential rain to warm and sunny weather here in London. There’s nothing quite like that point in the year in London when the sun comes out more reliably and it feels like the everyone is finally coming out of the winter and spring into the…

First full week in my new role at GDS and it’s felt like a busy one. This is partly starting the new role and partly a few other events and things going on, but it’s been good to be busy and interesting to continue to get my head around the new remit. Getting started in…

Getting back into the habit of writing these weeknotes on what has been quite a busy week. After heading back from a wonderful weekend at a friends wedding in Exeter it was straight into the GOV UK Forms service assessment on Monday. Forms has been in Private Beta for about 2 years now, since just…

We’re on a firebreak sprint at GOV.UK Forms at the moment. It’s a chance to catch up on ‘business as usual’ work that might not normally get prioritised, as well as learning and development. I spent a chunk of time this last week editing videos of the research sessions I did recently with members of…

Another week on GOV.UK Forms, with a big focus this week on the members of the public who will be filling in the forms that our primary users build. I spent a big chunk of the week running usability testing sessions asking people to complete various forms. We started by testing all the different question…

Back to the weeknotes! If you’ve missed them, I did actually write one I didn’t publish a few weeks back, but decided to leave in draft due to the restrictions we have on communicating about government work in the run up to elections. Then I had two weeks of holiday. We went to Ireland for…

I wrote this a while back but just posting now we are out of the local election restrictions on communicating government work. Not written for a couple of weeks due to the much needed bank holiday, which we spent doing some redecorating and sorting out the garden. We also made it to see George Takai’s…

Writing up after a weekend of DIY, specifically re decorating our hall and dining room. I say re decorating rather than just painting as I have learned so much about prepping for painting, fixing cracks and trying to get surfaces right for the best results. We’ve got the place looking much nicer now, even if…

Belatedly writing this weeknote. I set aside some time on Friday afternoons to reflect on the week and ‘put it to bed’ usually, but this week I was working on something around research ethics across GDS until late Friday so used up all of that energy. I had started doing work on my end of…

Missed a week last week, which always means it’s been a busy one! Last week was mainly lots of research sessions. I ran 6 accessibility testing sessions with people with access needs, some of who used assistive technologies. Most of my work testing GOV.UK Forms has been using the prototype kit version so far. But…