Quick prototyping ready for a busy new year

Another double weeknote, starting 9 December 2024.

My energy for blogging about work is dwindling as we get towards the end of the year.

But, I'm not being too hard on myself. Including this post, I've blogged 40 times this year, which is a recent record for me. Don't think I've blogged this much since my ONS (Office for National Statistics) days.

Focusing and quick prototyping

I've moved my focus over entirely to one team now. We have a pretty intense round of user research planned for the new year. We wanted to squeeze in some user research this year, but we just couldn't recruit anyone in time, before the Christmas break

Given the tight schedule, I think I need to completely stop showing up to the other team's stand-ups, let alone joining other meetings, as it'll just drain my energy and I won't be able to really contribute anyway.

(I think focusing for 2 or 3 months feels like a good amount of time to make progress. Then I can check-in with a few folks and see if it makes sense to move back to the other team or not.)

I've spent the last couple of weeks creating a prototype of the as-is digital service I'll be working on. Spending time recreating the pages has helped me think critically about what each page does, so it's been a useful familiarisation exercise.

It also means I'll have a head start in the new year when we start doing usability testing on some new user journeys.

We've done a few stakeholder reviews, and I think the wider team is happy with the progress we are making. Although I think the pressure will be turned up in January.

I've been trying my hardest to write quick, throwaway code, as I mentioned in my last weeknotes…

… I'm trying to resist the urge to build the prototype with high quality code. So that I can iterate quickly, and avoid getting drawn into fixing the out of scope issues.

It's been quite liberating, and I feel I've been able to move very quickly. Only slowing to focus on the specific challenges associated with our service.

I've been using the existing utility classes found in the GOV.UK design system. For example, these font override classes.

Then, when I need to, I've been creating my own. Things like border-left-grey-small. It's pretty scruffy, and not how I like to write more production ready code. But it means I don't have to waste any time thinking semantically about the components and patterns. There is obviously a time and place to work like that, but it's probably more of a beta exercise, once we're confident in design direction we are heading in.

Self organising team

We've landed in a team that doesn't really have what would say is a standard product and delivery setup. So I think we're going to have to be quite self organising.

I think there are pros and cons to working this way. But my feeling is that if we can stay disciplined in the way we work together we'll be able to move quickly.

Let's see what the new year brings.

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