Weeknotes – series 01 episode 01

Author Benjy Stanton
Date 5 May 2018
Category Weeknotes

My first ever weeknotes! Thanks to Dan Barret for finally pushing me over the edge and convincing me to start. This intro to weeknotes by Jenny Vas helped too.

Monday

I was off on Monday to look after the kids. I needed a 3 day weekend to recover from the Design Sprint and Tom's leaving do.

Tuesday

Tuesday I was busy catching up with all the emails I'd ignored last week. The most important was reviewing CVs for contract user experience designers to replace Tom while we hire a permanent replacement.

I also had to fill out the recruitment template on SharePoint for the permanent replacement. I think SharePoint is terrible and I predict that moaning about it will be a recurring theme in my weeknotes.

Carlie also showed us the National Trust tea rooms which are just a 15 minute walk from the office. There is a lovely coartyard too which feels a million miles away from the lovingly named 'Government Buildings', where ONS is based.

I started doing 1-to-1s with some of the new designers (Andy and Matt). They seem to be doing really well and I'm impressed with their progress despite me being too busy to really help them out much.

Lastly on Tuesday we had a chat about how to improve the maps we publish on the ONS website. There were some difficult conversations about how we balance rich interactive content with accessibility and progressive enhancement.

Wednesday

I was meant to be going to the Digital Accessibility Centre in Neath to observe them auditing the "filter a dataset" part of Customise My Data. But, I caught a stomach bug off the kids so I couldn't go.

Thursday

I was off again on Thursday to look after the kids, but managed to do some prepping for the contractor interviews during nap time.

Friday

We (the designers in digital publishing) held a second design review/critique session because I'd missed the usual Thursday slot.

Matt has started mocking up design patterns for the interactive content that we publish on the website, so we can begin to formalise the designs and be more consistent across releases.

Andy and Grace have started working on the UKSA Annual Report – it's shaping up nicely after just one week. I showed the new bulletin prototype.

I was a bit late leaving work, but managed to catch an interview with with Mona Chalabi on Radio 4's More or Less programme. It's worth a listen if you're interested in Data Journalism.