Bit of weekend working

A weeknote starting 18 February 2025.

These weeknotes are a little late. I was catching up on work over the weekend, so couldn't really justify blogging. But, now I've got a few spare hours on the train, so plenty of time to reflect on last week.

I'm heading off to our 3rd user research trip. Another 2 two days spent at an operational area, observing users and doing usability tests.

Last time, for round 2, I was updating the prototype until the night before. So this time, to avoid the panic, I decided to work a little over the weekend. Definitely better for my stress levels, but not ideal.

To be fair, nobody was forcing me to do work on the weekend, and I could've decided to reduce the scope of the iteration. So this was partly my own fault, but this research trip might be the last for a while, and I wanted to make the most of the opportunity.

Writing up and analysing user research notes

Last Monday I was still writing up and analysing my notes from round 2. For piece of mind, I wanted to do a thorough job, and make a list of my own key findings before going into group analysis.

On Tuesday the UCD (user-centred design) team got together and did some quick analysis and grouping of the findings, which lead to a list of things we wanted to change, and a list of things we'd leave until after round 3.

I felt pretty positive that we'd created an iteration backlog so early on in the week. But my optimism wouldn't last!

Stakeholder show and tells

We had a couple of show and tells throughout the week. One with a smaller team of key people, then later on in the week we did a more open one. We've had lots of positive engagement from stakeholders, but more and more keep turning up every sprint so it's starting to feel tricky to ensure everyone has a chance to input.

Our prototype includes 2 separate work streams, so there has been talk of splitting our show and tells in two, to ensure time to focus on each bit of work.

I think a quick sprint break is needed soon in order for us regroup and ensure we don't miss anything.

Updating the design mock-ups

In order to get shared visibility of the design changes, and iterate quickly, we have a mock-up of the prototype that the whole UCD team can access and edit. I worked closely with the content designer to implement the changes we'd agreed earlier in the week.

Despite moving quickly earlier in the week, the mock-up wasn't finished until Friday.

Planning research objectives and questions

Because the design mock-up wasn't ready, we had to plan our user research questions by going through the iteration backlog.

This meant we were looking at sticky notes of ideas, rather than finished screens. But I think it worked out okay. I quite like that the whole UCD team (content designer, user researcher and interaction designer – that's me) are working hard to be very agile, as a way to cope with the fast pace of this project.

Personally I'm very happy that we are iterating between each round, and I'd rather make a change that tests poorly, than avoid making any changes at all.

Although I also worry that I'm letting them down, by consistently being late to deliver the finished prototype.

Finishing the prototype on the weekend

All this is what lead to me working on the weekend. I wanted to start Monday (today) with a finished prototype. This meant translating the design mock-ups into code. Luckily the prototype was already setup from previous rounds of user research, so I was really just re-assembling it and making sure the screens still flowed together

The code is nasty behind the scenes, but I keep reminding myself that we're in alpha and it should be throwaway quality, not perfect. Still, I think that with a bit more space and time to think, I could implement some things to make the prototype more scalable, allowing me to add more data, pages and scenarios in a more dynamic way.

Sharing a video of the prototype

All this pain meant Monday (today) was plain sailing and I could focus on meetings and chats in work, rather than desperately trying to fit in time to finish the prototype.

It left me more time to test the prototype, both with a mouse and a keyboard. And I even had time to record a video of the prototype journeys to share with the team, to help with their last minute preparations.

I'd like to record these videos every sprint in future.

Paper prototyping

One more thing to mention, as I've blogged in previous weeknotes, I'm really enjoying prototyping the physical parts of the users' journey for this project.

For this iteration, I've mocked-up some lo-fi paper artefacts to help users get into the mindset of the task. They don't contain much in the way of realistic content, so I'm hoping they enhance the scenario, without users getting distracted by specific details that could become out of date. Let's see.