Welsh service patterns, paddle boarding and prepping for user research

A weeknote starting 28 April 2025.

Patterns for Welsh public services

This week I took a day off to travel to Cardiff to attend a CDPS (Centre for Digital Public Services) workshop: Co-Design Workshop on Service Patterns for Welsh Public Services. I really enjoyed the day, thanks to Liam and the team for running it and inviting me.

It was also nice to catch up with Jo, and meet a few people face-to-face for the first time (Nia, Liam, Adrián, Loubna, Louise and others).

I really liked how Liam broke down service patterns into chunks and this really helped me to zoom in/out to the right level…

  • services
  • journeys
  • steps
  • actions
  • components

As a user of Welsh services, it's really exciting to see this work develop.

Read more in about the service patterns work in Liam's weeknotes.

Related, I haven't been very good at prioritising things like meet-ups, conferences or training since going to contracting. I felt energised after the workshop, so I'll definitely try and attend more events like this.

Paddle boarding

I spent an evening this week paddle boarding along the river Tawe in Swansea. We went from the old Hafod Copperworks down to the marina. We stopped off at the best pub in Swansea afterwards. Need to do more of this!

Old red brick buildings and new office blocks, cranes and a foot bridge viewed from the water.
The River House restaurant from the River Tawe

Prepping for user research

In work we've been prepping for user research, it's been the most productive and least frustrating week for about 2 months. Probably having something concrete to aim for has helped. But I also think that all the effort the team has been putting in to restructure ourselves is starting to pay off.

Pressure is easing up a bit

I think more and more people working on the wider service are realising that we are not ready for beta, and I also think (hope) they are not all pointing the fingers at the UCD (user centered design) team as the blocker.

I'd like to think that our robust push backs (read: constant moaning) have helped other people to realise that there are many product decisions and technical dependencies that just aren't ready yet.

The upshot is we no longer have any big dependencies on the UCD team going into the next PI (program increment).

But, I do think we need to be much more intentional about how we're going to spend the next couple of months. I want to spend some serious time planning and agreeing what to focus on when we get back from user research, I think we'll end up with a long list of the following things…

  • stakeholder questions
  • business requirements
  • user research objectives
  • assumptions
  • user journeys

It'll be good to reflect on how many we might consider are done, to do next or to do later.

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