Weeknotes: The newbie edition 9–19 December 2019
I’ve been stalking other people’s weeknotes for a year now, and have finally decided to post my own. I’ve just started a new job at NHS Digital as a user researcher, so it feels like a good time to try another new thing.
Week 1: Hello, I’m new
I started my new job with a horrendous cold. I decided that it’s bad form to call in sick on the first day so I dosed up and nervously headed in to Skipton House. I was immediately given a lovely warm welcome by Nancy, the user research lead for NHS.UK, and Dominic, the delivery manager on my team. I also attended a user researcher community meeting, which was a great way to hello to my fellow URs.
Dominic had put together a detailed induction Trello board for me of things I need to do, know and read. It’s a thing of beauty and definitely something I’m stealing for future hires. In fact, the whole onboarding process has been excellent, starting with Nancy emailing me before I started to ask me what my pronouns are, what tech I’d like and asking me to fill in a “manual of me”. I then got sent Nancy and Dominic’s manuals, which made me feel like I knew them a little bit even before my first day. (Making sure a new starter has a good induction is so important and this was one of the best I’ve had.)
I’m working in one of the mission teams for NHS.UK. A mission lasts for 3 months and the team picks up prioritised pieces of work to concentrate on for that period of time. For this mission, the work (or “features”) I’ll be involved with is transforming the content on certain mental health pages and vaccination pages on NHS.UK. This to improve the quality and relevance of the content so that people can get the right support and information they need.
Half my team is based in London, where I am, and the other half is based in Leeds. It’s the first distributed team I’ve worked in and it’s interesting to see how they make it work. Collaborative tools, like Slack, are crucial. I’m already thinking of ways I can involve the whole team in research activities when we are not co-located.
I joined two stakeholder calls to kick off the features. It was a bit tricky for me to follow because there were so many stakeholders involved, but it was expertly chaired by Stromi, our product manager.
On Wednesday I got stuck in with some research at a children’s centre in North London with Josefeen, the lovely user researcher currently on the mission team. Josefeen is a registered nurse and midwife, and I just love her journey of how she came to be a user researcher at NHS Digital through the Digital Academy. She arranged for us to be at a baby group and speak to people there about the existing MMR vaccination content on the website. The session ended with the staff inviting us to attend their Christmas lunch, which was such a kind and unexpected gesture.
On Thursday it was the NHS.UK (London) Christmas party, so I got to join my new colleagues for a meal and drinks at a pub near the office. It was a great opportunity to meet new people in a social setting and show off my Christmas jumper.
Friday is my non-working day and unfortunately my two small humans didn’t care about my previous night’s festivities so I got on with the morning chaos (AKA the school run).
Week 2: Reading all of the things
I went in on Monday feeling so much healthier than the previous week! I started the week exploring all the previous research that the team had done over the last few missions. I felt a bit overwhelmed at times because it’s scary and exciting at the start of a new job, and I often feel there’s a need to prove myself and add value immediately. I had to give myself a bit of a talking to about the only one putting pressure on me to know everything by week 2 is me.
I had a coffee with one of the long-standing researchers on NHS.UK, and she gave me some excellent advice and the benefit of her wisdom. I love having one to ones with people and I feel like I always come away having learned something, or an idea to try something new.
There was also a Christmas lunch for the user researchers, so I got to eat a lot of pizza and chat to some people I hadn’t spoken to before.
I attended my first NHS.UK show and tell, and it was great to get a sense of the massive amount of work that is happening across all the team.
Tuesday was sprint planning day and the team did an emoji retro via Slack, which I enjoyed immensely. (Pick 5 emojis to explain how you felt about the previous sprint, post them on Slack and talk through them.)
I held a research objectives session with some of the team to start planning for research on the mental health feature. It went well and made me feel more grounded in what I need to do. The analyst in the team also shared the work she is doing, which helped a lot with formulating assumptions to test later.
I arranged a time to go up to Leeds after Christmas to meet the rest of the team in person, and started organising some coffees with people before diaries fill up.
So many things inspired me, but I particularly liked: The meeting I attended about ways to look after the mental wellbeing of user researchers, I love that stuff. And Matt Edgar’s blog post series on his reflections after 2.5 years at NHS Digital. It made me excited to be here at the start of my own journey and I’m looking forward to all the work coming my way.
Finally, my week and my last working day of 2019 will shortly close with some pizza and mince pies. If only all weeks ended on such a high. Merry Christmas, everyone!
