Week 3 - 20 October 2019

Work stuff

A bit of a scattered week. Lots of good stuff happening, but it’s felt a little bitty. Still figuring out exactly how to write these too...

We’re working to launch a new service at Farewill by the end of November. I’m not sure how specific I can be, but safe to say it’s tackling a real problem for people that are dealing with the death of a loved one. We’re all pumped about it. Expressing excitement through writing on the internet makes me feel weird.

I ran a service blueprint session for the new service with a few of those most closely involved in the product. Someone smart (who I worked with at Parliament) once said that a website is where an organisation’s dirty laundry gets aired. Organisations often think in terms of websites (or other ‘touchpoints’), but a website can only be as simple and elegant as the intangible service that sits behind it. It gets at something I personally believe - that you can only make really great individual touchpoints for users if the team understands the underlying service.

It felt like it went well, and gave us all a common understanding of how we envisage the first iteration of service running. Of course, it’ll all change after day 1 - but it felt good to all get on the same page, and vocalise some questions that it seemed we all had slightly different assumed answers to.

Back in wills, our plan to help people with more complex circumstances feels like it’s coming together. We’ve been really good at carving out an MVP for this. (props to Tam, PM for the Wills Experience team) At first, we’re just going to deal with people who actively get in contact with us before starting a will, before expanding the scope later.

And finally we got the videos back from our unmoderated research on the homepage - after a brief stress when I sent the wrong prototype link out 🤦‍♂️

Clare (user researcher) helped me figure out how to analyse the results, so the findings have much more depth than if it was just me muddling through. Thinking about the ‘so what’ of each insight, and how to make it useful to a product team was something I realised I haven’t done very well in the past.

Other stuff

I recently subscribed to Sok Pop - a ‘videogame boyband’. They make a new game every 2 weeks, which you can download for $3 a month. It’s a novel financial model for a games studio, and I love having something new (which I know will be short and stylish) to play with each fortnight (no game pun intended).

Last update: 2019-10-20 12:00:00 -0600