Poor unappreciated user research. Poor misunderstood discovery. These are really important activities to understand user problems, but sometimes (often? most times?) a team isn’t looking for new problems to solve and doesn’t see the value in such activities. They have to replace an aging system. They need to introduce some…

Note: I use the terms “job stories” and “job statements” interchangeably. Recently, I’ve been involved in a few workshops where people are brought together to generate a lot of job statements related to a particular topic. These are statements with the format

I haven’t posted since May???? Wow… Recently a discussion came up related to the use of gender-neutral language in our writing. Actually, the conversation initially was about ‘the use of they/them’ in our web content, as well as in the task scenarios we put in front of users in the…

There are a LOT of conversations around the Government of Canada about design systems right now. I love it! But for all the excitement about consolidation, consistency and efficiencies, I’m worried we’re missing something. The user experience. The fact that different people are trying to do different things at different…

Last week, I wrote about design systems, and there’s so much more to unpack, I don’t even know where to start. So, I’m going to list a few topics here for now, and then hopefully work my way through them in the future. If you want to engage in the…

I’ve been in a few cross-governmental discussions lately about design systems and shared component libraries (if you’re part of the GC, join us over in the design-gc-conception.slack.com group!). Some of my favourite conversations have been around the purpose and intended audience of a design system, which have been really interesting…

I’ve been thinking a lot about scaling UX. When I joined the CRA UX R&D team in October, we had a decent-sized team of about a dozen (four of us were hired within three months). We’ve more than doubled in size since then. When you have a small team, you…

Monthnotes? April 2021 :-) — It turns out that the work I’ve been most interested in since starting at the Canada Revenue Agency has been focused internally. They’re the projects that haven’t been really clearly defined. A request comes in, and then as we start to investigate, more layers reveal themselves. The scoping and framing…

Weeknotes: March 1–5, 2021 — I moved from Ottawa (Eastern time zone) to Penticton (Pacific time zone) at the end of 2020. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with coworkers across time zones — when I was in Denver I was on Mountain time while many of my co-workers were on Eastern time —…