Usability testing a casework backlog view

A weeknote starting 10 November 2025.

Usability testing a casework backlog view

This week's highlight was a round of user research, and the first usability testing session I've been a part of since starting my new contract.

We were usability testing a new design for the first time, so I was quite nervous that we hadn't got it quite right, but the initial findings were positive and it certainly didn't fall flat.

We agreed that in the next round we need to do some user research with team leads too. The design is basically a new caseworking backlog view, but without doing user research with team leads, we're still unsure how much effort they will need to put into shaping the backlog for the caseworkers who then go on to pick up the work.

It was great to work closely with the user research team to plan and observe a research round together. It felt like we were acting as single UCD (user-centered design) team for the first time.

The work we did to review and iterate the design with user researchers and product managers before the research round paid off too, so I need to remember to keep doing this.

In the background I've also been getting the prototype ready to go up into a GitHub repo. This means that other designers can work on it with me, and we can get it deployed to Heroku for future usability testing sessions.

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