Monday
Started the week by finalising a date for our internal consultation about the CABmoney website. We've managed to get together a selection of advisers with a good range of experience using the site and their input will be valuable. Amazingly, there was a time slot that everybody could make so we're just two weeks away from putting some of the methods learnt in our discovery phase in practice to "rediscover" against our new focus.
Tuesday
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| Zombie Garden by Visual Thinkery is licenced under CC-BY-ND |
Other than sounding like a Netflix TV series that I would definitely binge watch, Zombie Gadens are effectively a way to put ideas to one side until a better time. Something we'll definitely be utilising!
The rest of Tuesday's session focussed on personas and persona spectrums. Unfortunately, we didn't cover personas during our Discovery phase, so felt a little left behind. Fortunately, the team at We Are Open (WAO) covered this by splitting the cohort into two groups to catch us up. Being honest, it was the first time in the project that it felt like things were slipping as we were at a bit of a disadvantage due to different groups running the Discovery phase differently. It's certainly salvageable though, with video guides offered by WAO and the open invite to Office Hours most likely being useful to us going forward.
We also started working on our Architecture of Participation, to lay out how people in our organisation can get involved and where they can find information about the project. With the consultation group already set up, and this blog already available we have a good head start on this and we can continue promoting the work through our internal newsletters and meetings.
The work from Tuesday is all very much a work in progress, with the personas and architecture of participation working documents with a lot of refining to do. They'll all be up on this blog when we're happier with them, but we are moving forward. Back at the "office" (virtually) I asked some colleagues to put together some personas for our clients, and we will be looking at covering other user groups soon with people. Not quite in the Zombie Garden, but at least on the borders!
Thursday
With a bit of a clash of sessions today, WAO swapped around the tech session and the office hours, so a few members of the cohort were able to attend "Designing Human Connection in Digital Services with Deepr".
A number of people didn't get the memo about bringing a hot drink, so didn't get involved with holding onto a hot mug and looking at everyone else in the meeting to create a sense of warmth!
There were a LOT of ideas in this 90 minutes, most of which I need time to digest and look through again. While I can see the reasons behind a lot of them under the right circumstances, a number of charities were quick to dismiss "showing your room" or "lighting a candle" due to either a risk of confidentiality or burning the house down!
I did pick out a few ideas though that could be applied to the new CABmoney, particularly Lo-fi Hi and Mirroring which I think we can utilise to make a better human connection with people using the site.
That was soon followed by the WAO "Tech Session", much like last week's tech session there were a few things we already knew about as ways to acquire software and new technology but also a few others that sound like being well worth a look through.
Lots more to go through, so for now, they're in the Zombie Garden (just beside the tomato plants) but definitely useful resources.
Friday
Onto Friday, and it's blog writing (which if you're reading this was a success), another tweak of our personas (now with added wonky drawings) and an outline plan for the staff consultation session which is now just over a week away - how time flies!
