Resources from the content design and user research meetup at ConCon 10 – the cross-government content conference – on 19 May 2021. Including slides, links and contact details.
We used Mentimeter and Teams to run the session. Mentimeter lets you ask questions, do polls and get feedback from the audience. During each lightning talk, we asked for people’s thoughts and ideas, then spent 5 minutes discussing them after each talk. We also used Mentimeter for a retro at the end.
See the live results playback on Mentimeter.
We had 4 lightning talks on how user researchers and content designers can work together better.
Imran is ResearchOps manager at the Department for Education (DfE), part of the UK government. Imran’s lightning talk was about why content design is making his work better.
Venetia is a user researcher at HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), part of the UK government. Her lightning talk was a user researcher’s take on how content designers and user researchers can work together.
Dan is a senior content designer at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), part of the UK government. His talk was about hypothesis-driven design, and how we might use it as a framework for doing design work and talking about what we learn.
Useful resources about hypothesis-driven design:
- ‘Hypothesis driven design, blog post by Andrew Duckworth (2017)
- ‘Everything is hypothesis driven design’, blog post by Ben Holliday (2015)
- ‘Outcomes Over Outputs’ (2019) by Josh Seiden, Sense and Respond Press
- ‘Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience’ (2013) by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, O’Reilly
Ariana is a senior user researcher at the Central Digital & Data Office, part of the UK government. Her talk was on card sorting, a powerful user research technique for creating taxonomies. Ariana did a similar session for the cross-government content community in March, which was recorded. You can see the recording on YouTube.
Useful resources about card sorting:
- ‘Card sorting’ (2009) by Donna Spencer, available from Rosenfeld Media
- Article on ‘Card Sort Analysis Best Practices’ by Carol Righi and Janice James et al in the Journal of Usability Studies (2013), available online
Following her lightning talk on card sorting, Ariana showed us how to analyse a card sort activity, using Optimal Workshop. We’re not going to post the outputs here. But we are thinking about how to summarise it, and we’ll update this page when we do.
- Damien Middleditch (head of content design, HMCTS) – @devilmaycare666 on Twitter
- Dan Howarth (senior content designer, DWP) – @danhowarth on Twitter
Contact us on Twitter or find us on the UK cross-government Slack.