An emotional experiment

weeknotes

12 Sept

Written By Christy Ho

Hola. Some busy bits, creative juicing, and back to writing.

Things I did

Finalised our GOV.UK demo, bringing to life the magic of AI-accessible technology
‘Day in the life’ interview to understand a different kind of journalistic experience
Planning a keynote at Beyond the Map, where I’ll be speaking to Growth through experience
Lots of admin, feedback, tool testing (including Figma Make, and a wonderful suite of in-house developments)
Finished reading A Simpler Life
Taking lots of Spanish lessons on Preply

Rapid delivery

4 weeks ago, I was pulled into a bid team to design, build and deploy a GDS-compliant, GOV.UK solution using Salesforce Experience Cloud. This was a first for me. In the times I’ve been a UX designer, I find that things tend to lean in one of the following domains:

Led by tech. Design sits in a sandbox, and the experience is guided by the future-state features and functionality.
Guided by business. Usually for more complex services (i.e. government). Lots of constraints, SMEs, and logical thinking required (sometimes known as service design).
Focused on experience. The front-end gets people aligned. Changes are made here first, and this trickles down elsewhere. This was what happened.

The aim of the service was to introduce AI to help users pre-populate a complicated form. That was how, but the real ambition was to realise 100% self service (or zero customer contact). Practical, in theory, but very difficult, given how politically charged the current process was.

An exceptional, emotional experience

In 3 weeks time, I’ll be speaking with two of our incredible leaders, on behalf of PwC, at a CX conference in Barcelona. A lot of time has gone into prep, and how to play our insights back this audience. A good experience is an emotional one, and people rarely talk about emotions. But people are unpredictable, and so is behaviour. This is what businesses (and even designers) often miss—numbers and research only tell you half the story, and this doesn’t always fit neatly in a journey map.