February 2026

Really fun work month with good progress made on new things. Tempered by being peppered with viruses incubated in our child’s nursery.

Showing prototypes in discovery

I’ve been working on a discovery team looking at how people manage the various forms of communication they receive from government. We’re looking at communications about services rather than marketing ‘comms‘’. Like letters telling you to do something or text message updates on a process.

Although it’s a discovery, we’ve been showing a few rough design concepts to user research participants. I was a bit unsure about doing this but it’s been really useful to have a visual provocation to help ask questions and learn about people’s expectations. It’s also helped clarify what the biggest design challenges are likely to be in alpha.

Managing government communications

It’s already clear from the research we’ve done that government services’ communications are fragmented, and that people spend a lot of time and energy keeping on top of things. That’s not a huge surprise. But it’s been really interesting to see all the different ways people manage that, and that even with a system in place, many people still feel that they might have missed something.

So it’s clearly a problem we could help people by intervening in. The complicated part is, of course, the government side of it. There is a reason these communications are so fragmented. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of this so far and are going to need more user researchers/BAs to really get into it.