Hello, and welcome to my 30th weeknote. Pretty pleased with that. I’ve not always kept fully up to date with them all, but I’d still say that’s good goings.
If you read my weeknotes last week, you’ll know I’ve been thinking about the future of these weeknotes and how I’d like to write them in a way that feels more inspiring, manageable and more me. I’d decided to give a new format a go, and I’ve been reflecting on how that went, and made some changes. So, welcome to version 2.
Hope you enjoy
Last week I tried a new format for my weeknotes. Focused around a photo from everyday of my week, and a bit of text to accompany that. And in true agile form😉. I’ve tried something, learnt from it, and iterated it.
Some things didn’t work for me:
- Only once I shared the blogpost and looked at it on my phone, did I realise it was TINY for mobile users — not good
- Writing in InDesign and importing as a picture means you can’t make use of the Medium accessibility features I like, such as the read aloud and predicted reading time functions — really not good
Some things that did work for me:
- I enjoyed the better and more experimental formatting of pictures / text. You used to be able to better format photos in Medium, having them to the right or left of text and also changing the size of the image. Medium got rid of these features last year, unfortunately. And I find the Medium formatting pretty limited
- It also got me thinking about whether Medium is the place for me to write and share these weeknotes. But that’s something to think about
I do enjoy this type of format, I enjoy it being driven by visuals and the opportunity to make use of my very expensive Adobe CC membership🥲. So I’m trying a slightly mixed format this time, pictures formatted in InDesign, and the words written in Medium.
I set myself a goal this year to try more recipes, and particularly to cook more of the Asian food I fell in love with when I was traveling South East Asia at the start of 2020.
This weekend I cooked Khao Soi, a northern thai noodle soup. This recipe isn’t strictly ‘new’ as I’ve cooked it a few times now, but it’s just too good. I also really deviated from the recipe this time, and it’s very much NOT traditionally made here, as I added in a bunch of random veggies that you’d never see in a dish of this in Thailand. But I’m not sorry about it. It was so delicious, as always!
I can’t recommend it enough, and you should all try it!
Reading — a habbit I’ve never cracked.
I’m very guilty of just going through bouts of reading constantly, then not at all for week. I enjoy reading... I just find it hard to set a routine for it, plus as a dyslexic, I’m not naturally gifted in reading and find it really exhausting at times.
But, I’d bought a copy of ‘The Service Organization’ recently and have been chipping away at it over the last few weekends. I know I’m not really the target audience for this, although it’s about the design of services, it seems more for those senior leadership teams and organisation heads of. But, I’m still finding it really interesting and valuable to read. If nothing else, it’s giving me the tools and knowledge to better push for more structural organisational change in big departments, and how to position the value of that work.
Now, this is something I’ve been working on for a while… I’m writing a blog post for dxw about being a service designer in beta. In the last 18 months I’ve been primarily working on beta projects, a space 19 months ago I was completely unfamiliar to. I’ve learnt a lot in those 18 months, I’ve also had countless crises of confidence and wobbles, but now feel relevantly confident in my role and value as a service designer in beta. So I wanted to share those learnings and growths in a blog post.
It’s all finished, and in the queue of blogs to publish on our website. I even had so much to talk about, it’s a two part series! As someone who 18 months ago didn’t think I had any value to offer a beta, I had plenty to say here! Stay tuned for that to be published!
This week has been lots of brain hurty stuff… Whether it be the new branch of work I’ve recently picked up to kick start on, or the last few bits of work I’m wrapping up with the main delivery team — they’ve all made me go 🤯🫠🤯🫠 about 25 times a day!
Now we’ve got our MVP service launched which enables uses to do the high level and key tasks, we’re left with the meatier, more complicated and brain hurty stuff. Most of this stuff involves multiple user groups, a messy web of legacy documents, systems and behaviours to try and change, while also just processes that make zero sense. So it’s been lots of long, complex, but valuable slack Huddle calls this week! I look forward to a weekend of not thinking about anything more complicated than what I’ll have for dinner!
Something exciting happened this week. I got my own set of keys to the Neontribe castle. At the start of the year, dxw announced that Neontribe we joining the dxw family, which has been very exciting for everyone! Extra excitingly for me though, Neontribe is a Norwich based agency. Which means I have an office I can use!
Despite having met the Tribers a few times now, this week was the first time I made it into the office for the day, and was given a set of keys to use so I can pop down and work from the office whenever I like.
I have to say, there was something really nice and novel about walking into a phsyical office for work. Although I’ve been to the London and Leeds dxw offices, I joined dxw during the pandemic and we’ve since become remote first. So I’d never had that routine of going into an office for work everyday. This was a really nice change, and I’m looking forward to heading in maybe once or twice a week!
I’d mentioned what a brain hurty day this week has been. But, it’s also been very rewarding towards the end of the week, where I’ve been able to take lots of that messiness and complexity and distill it into something more digestible and understandable.
I’m focusing a lot of my time in this new branch of work, and so have been reading loads of quite detailed guidance to understand the process. Yesterday I started to pull those detailed steps up a level, to understand from a more high level and pull out what the key service steps are in achieving the service goal. Forgetting the detail of emailing someone something, filling in x,y,z form, or phoning this person. What is actually happening to help users achieve their goals.
It’s been quite nice to step above all the noise of those processes and look at it from a higher level. This will hopefully allow me to dive in and out of those two levels of visibility where needed, while also consider how we might chunk work up moving forward.
That was my week, and my version 2 of this new format. Let me know your thoughts, feedback and suggestions.
Have a wonderful weekend all. And I’ll see you on the last day of March (HOW!? Don’t even go there!)
Morrighan 🖤
