Weeknote: From “here’s our documents” to “here’s the service”
It’s been another interesting week with a few challenges, but also some really inspiring and motivating conversations that made me feel genuinely needed as a content designer.
A workshop on lived experience and service design
This week I facilitated a content review with a working group who have spent the last year creating guidance, frameworks and assessment tools to help organisations embed people with lived experience into their services.
A typical approach could have been to create a webpage called “Lived experience”, add a short blurb, and upload a collection of documents. But that doesn’t create a usable service.
This is when being a content designer is most valuable. We start asking things like:
What is this actually trying to achieve?
What doe users need to do here?
Where are the touch points?
What actions are we asking people to take?
How does this connect to wider services?
Turning documents into service content
Before the session, I grouped the resources, assessment and evaluation tools into clearer pathways and started to reshape the language to feel more actionable.
What I found was that while there was valuable information, it lacked practical usage and there were still gaps in the content. I needed to understand more about the intention behind it all.
As we started discussing things in the workshop, it became much clearer what they were trying to achieve and where they were getting stuck.
As a content designer, you naturally start connecting dots. I could immediately see the opportunity for a more guided, step-by-step journey that joined together the different resources, guidance and assessments they’d already created.
It shifted the conversation from: “Here are all our resources” to: “How do organisations actually use this in practice?”
Running the workshop
I brought all of this into a Miro board so we could work through it collaboratively.
We used post-it notes, prompts and questions to challenge assumptions and think more holistically about how people would actually use the service.
Questions like:
What does success look like?
Would users know what to do next?
Where could someone feel overwhelmed?
How does this fit alongside wider services?
At one point, members of the group said they finally felt like they could see what this could become. That really stayed with me because content design can sometimes be difficult to explain until people experience it in practice.
You don’t need to solve everything before launch
One of the most useful conversations we had was around not trying to solve everything before launch.
This is a huge area touching multiple services and user groups, so instead of endlessly creating more content in isolation, we discussed:
creating clearer pathways with the content they already have
building a usable first version
gathering feedback
collecting case studies from organisations
evolving the service from real user experience
That feels like a much healthier and more realistic approach to service development.
Intranet workshop
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’d been planning an intranet governance workshop. We actually didn’t get much further than the first discussion point which was: “What are the current challenges?” but honestly, that opened up some really useful conversations around priorities, next steps and where we should focus our efforts.
We had a useful discussion around how intranets differ from corporate websites. Accessibility and usability standards still matter, but intranets also need to support communication, collaboration and service-led content more flexibly. I think there’s an interesting opportunity to keep exploring what that means as the intranet evolves.
We’re also going to explore using subsites for individual services where it makes sense.
Looking ahead
Well, it’s bank holiday weekend and I’ve got a weekend full of sport.
England vs New Zealand T20 on Saturday, and then watching Tottenham’s final game of the season at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (I know… what am I thinking?!).
Workwise, I’ll be continuing conversations around form templates, intranet governance and improvements to content across different councils.
