It’s a super short week for me as I’m off camping 🏕
Draw the wrong service. It’s faster 🐆
Last week I joined our social housing data team at MHCLG. Our team is exploring ideas to reduce the burden of time and stress on housing officers who can supply social housing data. While also how to improve this information's accuracy and collection speed, to ultimately inform policy decisions.
We’ve been working to get a shared understanding of the future vision for the service. So Robert, Daniel, Mohammed and I drew the first version knowing it would be a bit wrong. We then had a session with the rest of the team to discuss it. Feeding back on how it was and wasn’t how the future service should be.
Creating a service or product vision from a blank document is hard and slow. It’s far quicker to have a starting point, even if it's mostly wrong. As long as it's right enough, it's something a team can begin to shape together.
All design starts with some guesswork. Service design is no different. I often think the job of a service designer is to make the first wrong decision and learn with teammates from there.
Proof of address proves nout 📮
My partner and I are applying for our first mortgage this week. As part of this, we had to prove our current address and address history. In either the form of a bank statement, utility bill or driving licence. We’ve moved address six times in the last year. And if I’m honest updating address records hasn’t been our top priority. Luckily Monzo makes it simple to update an address and generate an up-to-date bank statement.
It’s made me think:
A proof-of-address often only proves someone gave a service an address, not whether they live there or not
There must be a better unique identifier than an address for things like credit checks
Proof of address is biased towards people fortunate enough to have stable housing and the time to update dozens of services
I’d love a personal API that updates my address across multiple services
Open goals 🥅
Two weeks until our first permanent UCD people start. Part of them starting will be agreeing on goals for their first 90 days at Made Tech. It will be a conversation and joint decision. I’ve drafted some ideas to kick off one-to-one discussions.
I’ve been thinking how personal goals should cascade from UCD community goals for the coming months:
Settle in first UCD people at Made Tech
Spread good research and design habits
Define by doing how Made Tech focuses service design on outcomes
Sustainable UCD communities in our Bristol, London and Manchester offices
I want to make personal and community goals open by default. Hopefully, doing this makes clearer how we can support each other to grow individually and as a group.
These entries are super insightful and well-written, I'm learning a great deal from your thinking and your approach to service design. Please keep sharing, it's greatly appreciated.