Cycling to work, observing operational users and Cate Le Bon

A weeknote starting 6 October 2025.

Highlight this week was my day in the office on Thursday. I decided not to drive in, but that made things logistically difficult. I had to cycle to the station early in the morning, then get 2 trains and a bus to get to the office.

I'm glad I did it, but it took a lot of effort, so I don't know how often I'll do it in future. Luckily I only have to go into the office once a month.

Cate Le Bon at Llais festival

The main reason I didn't want to drive in was so that I could go out in Cardiff later on that day to see Cate Le Bon play at the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) as part of the Llais festival. (Llais is Welsh for voice). I loved the gig, Cate is an amazing artist and seeing her in a grand setting like the WMC made it really special.

User acceptance testing

At the office I got a chance to observe some user acceptance testing (UAT) that my team were doing. User acceptance testing is a good method for testing software, but it isn't a typical user research activity. But I thought it was incredibly valuable proxy for user research this time.

We are doing more typical user research (UR) too, but the UR sessions so far have been observing the as-is service, but the UAT session was a good way observe users trying out new features.

I got to see our model office, and meet some more of our operational staff in person. I could see (and hear) from them how usability issues were eroding the benefits of the new feature.

Part of my job as a designer is to reduce the risk of usability issues being found too late in the software delivery cycle, so I felt like I needed to help the team change approach a little. I think that introducing some co-design sessions with the operational team and starting to create a prototype that can be usability tested are a couple of things we can try.

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