Weeknotes E28

Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working at the Department of Health and Social Care. Each week I’m going to keep a running update of the work I’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.

My current priority:

Supporting the Healthy Start private beta.

Most interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…

Adding data to personas

I spent a little bit of time digging around different sources to compile data to back-up our personas. Here are some snippets from our most recent November 2018 report:

• 99.02% of the recipients of the scheme are over 18 or their parent/guardian are over 18 (thus the rest are either under 18 or children of under 18 parent/guardians)
• In England 20,184 retailers are signed up to the scheme. In Wales there are 1461. Northern Ireland has 912. That means we have a total of 22,557 in England, Wales and NI.
• 15.3% percent of those retailers are classed in the data as “Milk Roundsman”
• top 3 Claimants redeeming vouchers are Tesco Stores Plc, Asda Stores Ltd and Wm Morrison Supermarkets Plc

Blogging

I wrote a blog post about some research with retailers. I am encouraging the rest of the team to package up their excellent work to share in future blog posts!

Vitamins discovery team

I have been talking about a vitamins discovery phase for aeons. We know we need more evidence on the vitamins scheme so we can make meaningful decisions on how it will co-exist with the new Healthy Start service. This week, I finally witnessed the team all be together for the first time. 3 tremendous humans about to embark on a fascinating few weeks of research (plus a subject matter expert a couple floors above where we sit). It’s exciting. I can’t wait to see what they find. I stand back and listen with pride as they are off learning stuff independent of me. It’s very rewarding.

The first show and tell

The first show and tell with the pretty much fully stocked team.

Again I listened in with delight. Open, transparent and informative. We can improve and expand but we are on the right track. Definitely need to invite more people, try use plain English - not hiding the technical complexity of what we do but make sure they understand what the work we do means in a way they can understand. We showed a thing - live demo! We invited people outside of the department and their feedback caused further collaboration. Was happy.

User research ball is rolling

Last Friday we had the chance to speak to the Association of Convenience Stores. Probably in these weeknotes I’ve banged on about retailers (a sizeable proportion of signed up retailers to healthy start are convenience stores). Well this organisation is a voice for some of them and we managed to set up a call and chat about future collaboration. Was really good to discuss. We updated them on what we are doing and heard about them wanting to try innovative approaches or a new campaign in order to increase the usage of healthy start vouchers. They are happy to connect us with people for user research & can add questions to their 1000 person phone poll in early 2019. Might even get the chance to present at their board in Feb and discuss the work we are doing/get feedback.

In tandem with that we continue to chat more broadly and connect every dot we can. We’ve chatted to those in Scottish Gov, The Rose charity, Sustain and a whole bunch more this week. We’ve kept in the loop with the London Food Strategy folks.

I also emailed Curve about how their service could affect our future plans.

Content Review

We had an excellent content review session. Well presented, researched and suggestions on how we can improve. Gonna make the service simpler, clearer and faster for all types of users, continue to fight fluff. The right principles are in place and feeling confident. I echoed to team that content is more than copy, must be conscious of non-native English speakers and to not forget schema.org tagging. We will make things better.

Pre-paid card supplier day

So lots of efforts have been leading to this day. We invited 4 suppliers of pre-paid cards to come learn about our service and our plans.

Firstly, big shout out to colleagues in crown commercial service and in the department who all contributed to the agenda and tone of what the day should be. Some fantastic advice along the way shaped what we presented.

Roughly the agenda centered around:

• our objectives and the objectives of the scheme
• the history of the scheme
• the history of the redeveloping the scheme (what was found in discovery/alpha, etc)
• Toni did a great job in explaining how vulnerable the beneficiaries of the scheme are
• she also did a great overview of how the current scheme works
• then a big chunk on the opportunities to improve the scheme. I framed the problems/opportunities rather than just telling them a set of requirements. I think this was a good idea and influenced by others before the day. It gave us a chance to get feedback from the suppliers and spark discussion of new ways of solving issues we hadn’t thought of.
• then a section on our sketched out plans for how we want to work with the suppliers > a bit of thought over the week had went into this and i’m glad we did it. Gave the suppliers some clarity of what we expect the relationship to be. This was coupled with an explanation of how we work and we expect to solve issues together, over time with a focus on making the service better for all our users. No concrete requirements - we learn and improve
• then questions and discussions (available in private if they didn’t want to share stuff in front of other suppliers)

Got nice feedback from lots of people. Crown Commercial Service saying this type of day/relationship is their ideal way of working with suppliers, people liked seeing all the findings backed by evidence/data & the info we shared was what they needed and a great overview of the service. Really good we invited finance colleagues too because they have needs that we need to bake into the cake of what we are building and getting their input now was invaluable.

What I’ve been reading

1. Open data board game!
2. American eating habits - basically people are eating at home a lot more than in recent times.
3. A case for universal basic mobility. Basically everyone should be able to move freely, by whatever transport option that works.
4. Open data business cases to help ‘sell’ openness to your org.
5. Great story of a team building a website for a hospital. Shout outs to NHS Digital service manual and GDS service standards.
6. The UX of hotel rooms, 11 anti-patterns. A great dissection of odd things you find when you stay the night somewhere.
7. Carbon footprint of food tool which feeds into all my chats about the environmental impact of the work I’m doing.
8. Insight into the fantastic work of the Internet Archive!