Weeknotes S01 E12
This week was a funny one. A lot of interesting and exciting work was done, but around this things felt really tough. I don’t know if that’s coincidence or if getting big things done just requires a bit of a battle at the moment, or maybe a bit of both. Anyway, here’s a summary.
What went well
Planning some user testing
Last week’s kick-off meeting for updating our volunteer management content left us with a knowledge board full of facts, assumptions and guesses about the content and how it’s used. My goal for this week was to turn this into a research/testing plan and present it back to the lead stakeholder.
To try and keep my project on track, I set myself a clear and fairly ambitious target of presenting something tangible back in a week’s time. I also decided to document my plans on the knowledge board and in an overview document, which ended up proving useful as the stakeholder took it away to discuss with their line manager.
It’s still TBC when we’ll actually get to do this research, but the goal is to do about six remote sessions, either with users who’ve used the content before or with users from our main target audience for this topic (volunteer managers). Some of the tests are focused on how users find the content (e.g. a card sorting exercise), others on how easy it is to understand (e.g. a highlighter test). All of them are borrowed from the ever-excellent Neon Tribe.
I think we’ll learn a lot from this approach and I really hope we can get started soon.
Pivoting content plans
With things changing so rapidly at the moment, our big content update project is being shifted around on an almost daily basis. Thankfully we have an easily editable gantt chart to record all the changes, but it’s left things feeling a little bit all over the place.
However. The reason we’ve made these changes is so we’re better able to respond to the changing needs our users have during and following the current crisis. As a result, the response to them has been quite positive, with teams whose content has been brought forward much keener than I anticipated to get it sorted and updated. This has been really encouraging and I’m excited to get things rolling on this work.
Learning as a team
So we’re working on a big project at a time of much furloughing and change… which isn’t easy. One of the things that’s really helping is the process the team involved collectively designed for running the project. This includes a weekly check-in and crit/show-and-tell session, at which we’ve all been able to raise questions and point out areas where more guidance or clarity is needed.
These weekly discussions have helped us iron out problems with our processes, set up training and shadowing opportunities for tasks where some of us feel less experienced, and have prompted me to write up clearer guidance for some of the new tools and techniques we’re using on this project. It’s a valuable opportunity to learn and solve problems together and I think it’ll really help us going forward. In fact, without it I think things would have quickly got stuck!
What was difficult?
Heavy emotional load
Lots of difficult things seem to have been going on this week, both at work, in my/friends’/colleagues personal lives and (more than ever) on the news.
It sounds obvious, but it’s really difficult to focus when things around you are so hard. That was already the case and has been since late March, and this week I think was my one of my toughest yet.
With other colleagues going through similar things, I felt very aware of how much I really on others’ optimism to get me through tough weeks and how that’s a lot to expect when we’re all going through it. Self-care and a bit of time away from everything is urgently needed. I’m taking some leave soon so that should help.
Focusing or hiding?
Closely related to the above, I did manage to get some chunky project work done this week. Unfortunately, focusing for long enough to do this meant ignoring my inbox and Teams for several hours and returning to a mountain of messages.
I did it, I think I have to do it, but it feels like a big challenge. Even writing weeknotes, which I find massively helpful especially for navigating my big projects with confidence, feels like an unacceptable use of time I should be spending ‘just doing all the stuff’. But the big projects are hard and need me to keep learning, and the stuff will never stop coming. I’ll keep trying to get the balance right.
Best practice guilt
Again on a similar note, the pressure of working during a crisis has put my team in a strange position. On the one hand, we want to do the best possible job: producing the most usable, accessible, user-needs-focused information. On the other hand, there’s a lot of pressure to do things faster than this will allow us to. Knowing where to draw the line is tricky.
I don’t want to grumble too much, as I expect a lot of content teams and others in similar delivery roles feel the exact same at the moment. In fact, if you do I would love to hear from you because it can feel quite lonely trying to get the balance right between user-centred best practice and meeting rapidly changing (and arguably very important) organisational needs.
To end on a more positive note, one thing that definitely does help me with this is feedback from users. There’s more user testing coming up soon, and we’re doing some great work as an organisation to source and share more of this, so that I think will help.
What helped with lockdown?
In tough times, I feel I need to get more creative with this! But anyway…
- Reading continues to be a joy even in the toughest times. I’ve read a lot this week and just started (finally) ‘Normal People’.
- The Headspace app — helps a tonne.
- Exercise. Trying to keep this as a daily constant in my life as it’s super helpful.
Until next week :)
