Weeknote 16: researching

Fortnight ending 05/05/23

The past two weeks have been an endless loop of planning for research, doing research and analysing and presenting the outcome of research. And also planning some more research.

What went well?

• We’ve been testing something we’ve built to support the Women’s Health Strategy for England. We wanted to find out whether what we’d developed was usable, that it was easy to navigate, that the language we’d used was clear and aided navigation and that the overall proposition made sense to users. Overall the usability testing went really well, in the sense that we did not uncover any major problems with what we’d built and we answered all our research questions. And we also gathered, as is often the case, lots of incidental findings and useful design/interaction insights which will help our team manage this feature long term and benefit other teams more widely. We also invited policy colleagues to join the research sessions and the feedback from them so far has been really positive.
• Other things that worked well during research that I’d be keen to repeat in future include: sharing guidance for policy colleagues in advance of the sessions so they know what to expect and what to do/not do, doing run-through’s with colleagues as guinea pigs to test our discussion guide and note taking formats, doing quick immediate analysis of the insights gained after each session which made the full analysis sessions much easier. Our note-taking Mural, which went through a couple of rounds of iteration, is being saved as a template for next time.
• We played back the analysis of our research in a Show & Tell with stakeholders and this seemed to go down well too. Our decision to work closely with this team who were previously unfamiliar with our user-centred design ways of working is proving a good one and it is helping with communication, sign off and general mutual understanding of our respective goals and constraints.
• Ed, our delivery manager, was away and so I ran retro and planning. It definitely lacked the fun and enthusiasm that Ed always brings to our ceremonies. I’d describe them as functional and basically fine and therefore qualify for this ‘went well’ section.

What went less well?

• We’ve been carrying out yet more usability testing on another thing — some new contraception content. Because of everything happening on women’s health I haven’t had much time to support the team working on this. I hope I might be able to give it some more focus next week
• I’m responding to lots of requests from many different angles from organisations, individuals, teams who for very good reasons would like to input into the development of our content. We have such a huge backlog of work and priorities that we have developed a pragmatic strategy to achieve a decent level of improvements to 100s of topics rather than do a first class job on just one or two (see Mark’s blog post if you want to read more about how we’re doing this). This a tough message to get across.

Coming up next week

• Mark and I are presenting some work we did a while back to develop a new linking policy at a newly-established forum for charities to learn about the work of the NHS’s national digital channels.
• We’ll be making some final decisions about how much research is enough research for our women’s health work
• Hoping to join some usability testing sessions for contraception content and to join the analysis and next step discussions.
• Roadmap planning time for Q2 seems to have come around quickly and will need to start thinking about it next week.