Weeknote 1st December 2022 – A short but busy week of analysis and workshops

A shorter than usual week as off for a 4 day weekend to celebrate my birthday.

This week has been a busy one. I started off doing lots of analysis, of the work I did last week and a while before about forms with additional documents, and our kick off session with our latest partner department for private beta. There was a lot to get my head around with both of these, due to a mix of complexity of the content and the number of interviews.

I opted to share the workshop outputs asynchronously with the team as a slide deck and video, but I’ll set up a sychronous playback session for the more detailed file upload work. We tend to default to synchronous meetings for sharing research. I want to make sure we have plenty of space for discussion, but also that we’ve got that discussion happening around the things we most need to discuss. I’ll experiment this time and see how it goes.

I also got the survey I mentioned last week out, and it’s had quite a few responses from only sending it to a few people. They must have generously sent it on! So I sent it out to a few more people who might be able to help with an ask to send it on. Hopefully we’ve got enough responses to give us some insights by the time I’m back from my long weekend.

In other projects, I spent a bit of time over the last week trying out some new approaches to visuals for my longform ambient music project. Rather than basing them on my own photographs, I decided to try to create something more atmospheric by using the Midjourney AI engine to generate some images and then try my hand at some video effects to give them some movement. This has led to the engagement with the new videos/pieces really going up a level, which is great to see. You can see and hear the latest piece here.

Next week I’m still off on Monday. Then we go into planning and starting a new sprint where I am really aiming to be realistic about what we can get done before people start disappearing for the holidays. I’m hoping that can include another round of usability testing, sharing what I’ve learned about forms with documents and planning for more testing early in January.