This was our first week onsite with our government partners, so we spent much of the week settling in. A few highlights:
Tuesday:
We’re official! We took a trip across the river to Gatineau (Mike’s first time in Quebec) to get our ID badges.
Wednesday:
We attended a Design Research Show and Share session hosted by Canadian Digital Service/Service numérique canadien . It was a great opportunity to learn a bit about some of the really cool initiatives going on across the federal government, and start to get an appreciation for some of the subtleties associated with researching on behalf of the government.
The Show and Share was hosted the same day that Colin MacArthur, Head of Research at Canadian Digital Service, and John Millions, Head of Policy at CDS, posted a blog post clarifying some of the differences between User Research and Public Opinion Research. Good stuff that researchers in the private sector don’t really have to consider!
Thursday:
Late Thursday afternoon, our Code for Canada team (Mike, Maddy and I) finally attacked the whiteboard by our space, and started diagramming and documenting assumptions and questions. After a few days of information-intake, it felt good to try to make sense of it. (Spoiler: we haven’t quite solved it all yet ;-)
Friday:
We walked through the existing travel and expense system - until now, we’ve been focusing on the problem space: what users are trying to get done. Today was our first peek at how they are getting it done now. Our partners had been pretty careful up til now not to anchor us in the existing solution, but it was helpful to empathize a little with the people we’re designing for :-)
We also set up our tumblogs so we can be sure to capture our work as we’re going!
