Weeknotes – series 01 episode 04

This week, we got a new graphic designer and a new user experience designer. Ryan Dunn popped in too.

Monday

Lead graphic designer starts

Monday was Joe's first day. Joe's the lead graphic designer in the digital content team. It's great to finally complete the graphic design team, hiring them has been my main focus for the past few months.

Tuesday

Tuesday was my usual non-work day, to look after the kids.

Wednesday

Contract user experience (UX) designer starts

Another new starter this week. We've hired a temporary UX designer to help while we hire a permanent replacement. Did I mention we're hiring a UX designer?

End of sprint 24

Wednesday was a good day for the new starters as we had our fortnightly show and tell, covering things we'd done to improve the ONS website.

Publish a dataset prototype

My main focus has been working on the 'publish a dataset' prototype. The next step is to test the second iteration with the publishing team, to see if we've solved some of the problems we found last time.

Thursday

Ryan Dunn pops in

Ryan from DWP visited on Thursday. At lunch time, he demo'd some of the things he's been working on, like Churchill. And afterwards we had a chat about starting a cross-gov data design community. Let me know if you're up for joining that.

Bulletin design workshop

We also had an all-day workshop to continue the bulletin work we'd started in the design sprint a few weeks ago. We wanted to get together and iterate on the prototype, following the first round of user research.

It was great to get product manager, UX design, content design, graphic design and editorial back together, working on the prototype at the same time. We also managed to book the best room in the house.

Friday

Catch-up with Joe

On Friday morning I had a quick catch-up with Joe after his first week. I'm excited to work with him and Andy to start taking control of the design workflow and plan out the things we want to achieve now we have a full team.

UX designer promotions

We also had a meeting to discuss promotion opportunities for the UX designers. The plan is to get UX design signed up to the 'variable grade' thing so that we can promote people when they reach the next level in experience and skill.

This will help us to reward good people, and hang on to them for longer.