The five talks on Friday morning were all excellent and well worth watching, and the great news is they’re available for free over on YouTube.

You can watch all 3 hours and 10 minutes in one go, start 17 minutes in to see the Introduction to UXBristol from @stuchurch, @chudders and @DaveEllender.

Or you can jump directly to the beginning of each 30 minute talk:

1. Sam Villis – Storytelling
   
   Sam read ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea’ to us live, using it to show us how we can use the narrative arc to tell the story of our project. Sam has also written a medium post about running a storytelling workshop at GovCamp.
   
   Sam is @stamanfar on Twitter.
   
   
2. Candi Williams – Great, they can find it. But can they understand it?
   
   Candi talked us through some great ways we can test if people understand our content.
   
   Candi is @candiwrites on Twitter.
   
   
3. Rita Cervetto – Service Design in Tech
   
   Retro style presentation covering the history, purpose and value of service design, what to expect if you’re thinking of being a service designer in the tech world, and a great use of video to include contributions from Rita’s industry colleagues.
   
   Rita is @ritacervetto on Twitter.
   
   
4. Joe Knowles – The Stoic Designer
   
   A very honest and personal story from Joe and how a book (The Daily Stoic Journal) from Ben (Joe’s brother) helped unlock the virtues of stoicism. Plus some practical advice on self care.
   
   Including a quote from Joe in the Q&A: “But stoicism isn’t like getting ripped. You don’t do it and go to the beach and show it off. It’s an ongoing practice.”
   
   Joe is @J_J_Knowles on Twitter.
   
   
5. Jon Fukuda – ‘Design-Integration’: Creating a Design-Integrated Business to Build Digital Products that Win and 6 Best Practices to Get You There
   
   Jon talked us through his company’s recent research findings on integrating design into organisations. Who does it well? What are the barriers, and what steps can we take right now?
   
   Jon is @jkooda on Twitter.
   

A big thank you to the speakers, volunteers and sponsors. And congratulations and thank you to Stu, James and Dave for another fantastic event.

Also don’t forget you can get your UXBristol merch over at redbubble.

• Task model with user needs: Complete an ONS survey on behalf of a business (with added service blueprint)

Feel free to make a copy and use it for your own work. Let me know if you do, either here in the comments or over via @nicprice on Twitter.

The background

Back in 2016 I started working with ONS (Office for National Statistics) over in Newport. I used to cycle from Newport Station out to the ONS office.

As we researched what it was like to take part in an ONS survey on behalf of a business, we wanted to plot out the user journey and show where the pain points and user needs feature along the way.

Task model. Now with added user needs!

In a task model we show someone’s goal (for example, book a holiday, in the original example), and then all the things that person has to either know or do (the tasks) to achieve the goal.

I first came across Task Models thanks to a talk by CX Partners co-founder Richard Caddick at the very first UXBristol in 2011.

A tasks model lets us explore the steps someone uses to reach their goal, and their patterns of behaviour.

In ONS we extended the task model by adding user needs to show where they are in the user journey.

We also used the task model to help us understand the front stage part of our service blueprint.

See also

• Ben (who I’d worked with at ONS) and I also used a task model to show what’s involved for a user research participant wanting to take part in research.

• The first week of February saw the start of a new discovery under the Future Farming and Countryside Programme umbrella. Despite my and other people’s efforts to avoid it, it did feel like jumping from one moving train to another.
• A weekend isn’t long enough to decompress after an intensive final few weeks wrapping up the old service for a future team. And Monday to Wednesday saw us immersed in all things new service, albeit with some of the same team members (a topic I want to return to).
• It was a good immersion, helpfully facilitated by one of our user-centred design colleagues.
• We also had a visit from a researcher and designer on a “sister service” which helped fill in more gaps in our understanding. We plan to work very closely together.
• Our discovery work covers England, so I went to Stanford’s to pick up a map of the UK for us to plot out our stakeholders on. I was just about to pay when there was a power cut across the centre of Bristol, which put paid to that plan temporarily. I had to got back the next day to pick it up.
• During the week I also put the finishing touches to the video I directed and edited. It’s every member of the previous team (as it was when we finished) talking through what they did, how they did it, and who with. At a Defra Bristol Design Community of Practice meet up on Thursday I was able to show some highlights and talk a bit about the ‘wrapping up’ experience for me and team.
• I took the Friday off from work completely, as last week I hit a milestone birthday which I wanted to celebrate with my family. Meditation, run, breakfast with the kids before they went to school, then massage, lunch at Marmo and after some walking, lots of sushi for supper. Perfect!
• Perhaps the significant birthday has encouraged me to be reflective, but I also took the opportunity to revisit, dust off and restart some side projects I’ve been talking about for a while. More on those soon  
• Oh and I also wrote a couple more blog posts, one of which – about storm names – I published on Monday!

“BBC News – Storm Ciara to bring severe gales to UK”

This headline got me wondering if there will ever be a Storm Gale. And what other names are and aren’t acceptable.

According to this Wired article, we’ve been naming storms since 2015, when the UK and Irish met offices used social media to crowdsource 10,000 suggestions. A name-storm, if you will.

Rejected storm names include:

• branch wobbler
• in a teacup
• Vader
• Voldemort
• Any name starting with Q, U, X, Y and Z (so no, no Storm Z then – pronounced the American way)

We name storms – like hurricanes – in alphabetical order, alternating female and male. Naming storms is designed to raise awareness and improve public safety.

There’s a list of 21 names for the 2019-2020 season on the Met Office Storm Centre website.

After Ciara there will be Dennis, then Ellen. If it gets really bad we’ll get to Noah.

If we’d had 10 more storms in 2015/2016 there would have been a windy Wendy.

For the full list of names for each year since they started, see the Winter storm naming in the United Kingdom and Ireland Wikipedia page.

In the meantime, some bullet points from work last week:

• Learning about the Future Farming and Countryside programme and the new discovery I’ll be part of (all about grants for farmers and land owners)
• Wrapping up the ivory service as a gift to a future team
• Editing team member interviews to make a “Welcome to the ivory team” video
• Tidying up the Design section of our Ivory Google Drive
• Wednesday included the Ivory team goodbye curry lunch at Badouk in one of those containers in Wapping Wharf
• Thursday we ran our final ivory show and tell
• Talking through the Whitehall publisher guidance page template I made for the Ivory Prototype. I’ll be making this publicly available for reuse soon
• Talking with Dan about possible input during the ‘Grants Discovery’

As I remember reasons to blog, I also remember I still haven’t found or fixed a couple things:

• One is a way to share a few bookmarks with my own added comments and tags – like we once did with Delicious. Simon suggested Dan Hon might have something. I’ll check. Maybe a weekly round up. But not necessarily #WeekNotes.
• Another is that sometimes I just want to share a thought, but here, not just on Twitter. The post is the title is the post. Available for commenting, linking etc.
• There are other things too

I’m still using WordPress, so will be looking for a suitable theme which might help me do these things. Alternatively I’ll move onto another platform.

While I’m in “Maintenance mode” I’ve copied Bright & Matt and am using Information Architect’s Alice theme for WordPress. 

This is the scenic cycling route from Newport Station to ONS (and IPO).

It runs alongside the River Usk and goes right past the Transporter Bridge.

I was lucky enough to work over at ONS for a couple of years which meant commuting from Bristol to Newport.

For the whole time I was there, a friend kindly leant me their Brompton folding bike. This meant I could guarantee getting the bike on the train and use it for the Bristol and Newport legs of the journey.

If you’re in a rush and don’t want to go over a steep hill, the quickest route is through the one-way system and along the Cardiff Road past the hospital.

One or two people I know – who didn’t want to risk not getting their full size bike on the train – left a ‘hack’ bike locked up at Newport Station.

(I tweeted this last week, and realised it’s the closest thing to a blog post I’ve written for a while, so I thought I’d turn it into one.)

We’re entering the twenties. The 2020s.

Will they be roaring like a century ago?

In Western society the Roaring Twenties was a time of possibility and progress, and in France was known as les années folles (the crazy years). In the US it ended with the Great Depression and the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

I’ve still no idea how to refer to 2010-1019 or 2000-2009.

“It’s the end of the 2010s. Do you remember the twenty tens?” It doesn’t sound right. I wonder if the twenty tens is more linguistically problematic that the nineteen tens.

The noughties – seriously? The 20 hundreds? At what point might it take over the moniker the turn of the century? Or has that been confused by the millennium?

What other decades have their own nickname? And I wonder whether blocks of time are given the same treatment in other cultures and languages.

Most eras seem to be defined by major events or by political leaders.

The 1890s are known as the Gay Nineties in the US, and the Naughty Nineties in the UK.

The London-centric term Swinging Sixties was apparently coined on 15th April 1966.

I recently made – and have been using – a Google Drawing version of the GOV Flow kit.

If you’re involved in designing government services and transactions you might find it useful for mapping out online user flows.

It’s based on the excellent Gov Flow kit for Sketch made by Charles Reynolds-Talbot.

It’s meant for anyone. For example, in my team, I wanted to ensure our business analyst – let’s call him John – would be able to work with it without needing to buy or learn specific design software. (Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of Sketch, recently Figma, and all the rest, but there’s a bit of a learning curve).

If you use it, let me know. I’m keen to iterate and improve it.

We’re calling it Participant Discovery.

We want to understand what it’s like to be a research participant.

We wonder if understanding this will help us design better research.

We’re blogging about it over on the People Thinking website.