Finalising the discovery report, more running and my birthday

Round mission patch featuring an illustration Julie Andrews in Sound of Music standing in a field of grass surrounded by mountains. Text reads: UCD Discovery Report June 2025.

Finishing our discovery report

We've finally delivered our discovery report to wrap-up a big phase of work this week. In contains the results of 4 rounds of user research, and includes our recommended direction for the service.

In all honesty, it's been painful getting to this point. The design itself has hardly changed in weeks, since finishing the user research rounds. And it feels like we've been going round in circles trying to figure out how to get agreement from all the stakeholders.

I know that often, this kind of stakeholder management is the work. But this one almost finished me off. Hopefully when we look back, this will feel like a little blip.

(I'm trying to remind myself that this current version of the team has only been in place for about 4 months. And in that time we've been working on other things too.)

I imagine there will be plenty of "robust challenges" as they say. But I'm going to celebrate the win anyway. I think this marks a turning point in the team. Our new UCD lead has helped us get things across the line, and is setting the team up for much smoother ways of working in future.

We still have almost a month to refine and document the designs in order to ensure the devs are unblocked as they go into another program increment (PI).

It's clear we've been lacking leadership for a long time. I would normally expect a self-organising multi-disciplinary team to be able to do this for themselves. But we just haven't managed it for various reasons.

Our team is now pulling in the same direction, and this is leading to UCD having a stronger, more equal voice in the conversations with other groups.

Working more closely with technical teams

The next phase of work should offer up lots more opportunities to work more closely with developers and other technical roles to deliver something tangible.

I think this is the part of interaction design that I'm more comfortable in, but I will still have work to ensure I'm included in the right sprint meetings etc.

Birthday

It's also my birthday this week, so it's double celebrations. Nothing major planned as we have a holiday in Corfu on the horizon, so I'll be happy with a few beers and some nice food with the family.

Running a bit more

I've been keeping up my with running, after enrolling in Cardiff Half Marathon. My longest run ever is 7.5K, so I've got a way to go, but pleased with progress.

I'm running most days which is a huge change to my usual thing of just walking the dog for 20 mins. I'm noticing that no matter how bad I feel after a day's work, a run will lift my mood.

I'm fighting the middle-aged white man urge to join a running group. But, there's a cool looking local one that does trail running around the Gower coast so I might give that a go in future.

Also conscious that one big thing I like about running is time by myself, listening to music. My running playlist started off with lots of drum and bass, but I'm starting to prefer more ambient electronic music. Think it's more my speed, and better at getting into the right head space for longer runs.

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