Digital Potential Wales – Weeknotes from Rebecca, Empowering People’s Project

Design Cycle: Week 1 of Digital Potential has been a daunting one. I signed up to the course thinking we could do with a bit more help in finding a few ways to improve our digital… yes that vague! However, it has sparked all sorts of ideas and got me thinking about our Digital Strategy as a whole rather than in the piecemeal fashion we have so far. It’s great to be taking part in this journey with others in a similar position so here’s hoping for some clarity and focus going forward. The focus in Week 1 was on the Design Cycle which is something I’m familiar with already, I’m just not great at holding myself accountable for implementing it fully, always looking for shortcuts. I’m glad that this course will give me the space to take a step back and give our project the time it deserves.

Digital Strategy: Week 2 brings about a more in depth focus on Digital Strategy. It’s definitely made me realise how lucky we are to have a Board of Directors who are actively Digital 1st, we don’t have to fight to create a strategy that works alongside our organisational strategy, as our Organisational Strategy is Digital. This week has highlighted the importance of focussing on automation for our service. Currently our referral process seems to work well for everyone except us, it’s time consuming, which is a precious commodity for us. So now the ideas are flying around on how to automate as much as we can without losing the human touch.

User Research: Week 3 was focussed on User Research, something I know we don’t do a lot of. I’ll happily chat to people as I go along, see what they want out of a particular solution and then implement what I think is best. It’s been great to take a step back, create some meaningful questions to really dig down into what others think and feel when utilising our service and I plan to implement user research into everything we do, there has to be a way to create something that works for everyone, but we’ll only know what that is once we’ve spoken to every type of person that utilises us as a service.

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