Over the last 12 months, we’ve grown our 4 existing communities of practice and established 2 new ones, with 578 total members.

We now run 6 communities of practice:

Impact

This year we continued to grow our communities of practice and have run sessions on testing translated content, sustainability in communications, artificial intelligence in user research, digital inclusion and more.

We ran a webinar on building successful communities of practice, hosted by Emily Webber, who discussed the benefits and maturity stages of communities, tools, and strategies to impel communities through different phases and identified common challenges and successes of communities of practice across digital services in Wales.

Service Design Cymru community lead, Vic Smith, gives her highlights of the last 12 months:

“Since launching the community in January, we have set a regular monthly cadence for our meetings. We have spent time getting to know each other and understanding what everyone is hoping to get out of attending the community. In April, we welcomed our first external speaker who ran a session on ‘The role of emotions in design’ which was an engaging and well-attended session – we are looking forward to building on this in coming months.

Over the next 12 months, we plan to set up and meet with the official steering group with broader community members beyond CPDS members to decide the new direction for the next 6 months. We will continue to host guest speakers from a broad and relative background that inspire and drive innovation in our community.”
Vic Smith, Senior Service Designer, Centre for Digital Public Services

Designing Digital Experiences community lead, Liam Collins, gives his highlights of the last 12 months:

“We’ve seen the community grow from 7 members back in November, to 98 members in April. We are still learning what works for people and making tweaks as we go, but members are enjoying the sessions and the guest speakers we are organising each month.”
Liam Collins, Interaction Designer, Centre for Digital Public Services

Hear from our members

“The Centre for Digital Public Services is doing loads of cool, interesting stuff and deserves a shout out. Educating people, creating community and more.”
Priyanca, Service Design Cymru community member
“The particularly cool thing was that while the community is focused around user research for public services there were no qualms about private sector folks like myself, or non-user researchers, or even non-Wales based folks getting involved. The mix was good, and everyone got stuck in and really engaged with it which is exactly what you want.”
Dunk Chavis, User Research in Wales community member
“This month I conducted my first user research session with a Welsh speaker, entirely through the medium of Welsh! This was a first for me as a researcher, and a first for the Welsh Revenue Authority. As an intermediate Welsh speaker, this was well outside my comfort zone, but I'm really pleased to have done it despite my wobbly Welsh, and the user was delighted to have been able to give feedback in her chosen language. It reminded me of a nice quote I heard at a recent talk by Centre for Digital Public Services, along the lines of "Welsh speakers prefer imperfect Welsh to perfect English" – in other words, making an effort to be user-centred in what we do, even if it isn't perfect first time, is better than delivering something perfectly that doesn't meet their needs (a good lesson for research in general)!”
Cath Elms, User Research in Wales community member
“Ellie and I really enjoy attending the Communicating Digital sessions as it gives us a chance to compare and contrast what we are doing with what others are doing in a similar role. Over past sessions, we have been able to safely bring issues that we are experiencing to the table, and this is usually met with some useful changes that we may be able to implement. The group is very positive and forthcoming with ideas.

We have found most sessions very beneficial and have been fortunate to hear from some fantastic guest speakers who have inspired us to try different things, even if we’ve had to modify our approach as a local authority. We have implemented working in sprints, thanks to a demo given by your team and this has really helped us focus on our tasks, prioritise and organise our resources much better and are also looking at how we can use weeknotes in future.”
Kath Woods, Communicating Digital community member

Next steps

Several of our community leads share the same goals for the year ahead, which include sustaining and nurturing existing membership, increasing engagement and collaboration, developing presence on social media, organising guest speakers, and running some in-person events and encouraging members to contribute to growing the strength of the community.

Read more

Myth-busting barriers to Welsh language user research

User Research in Wales community has first meet-up

Launching a new community for user research in Wales

How we understood the need for a new community for user research in Wales

How it meets our objectives

CDPS’s objectives:

Objective 1: Supporting the leadership and culture amongst public service leaders to drive good digital policy making and support digital transformation.

Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs.

Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology.

Objective 6: Actions to help business in Wales better meet the digital transformation needs of public services.

The Five Ways of Working – Well-being of Future Generations Act

  • Long-term
  • Involvement
  • Collaboration

7 well-being goals – Well-being of Future Generations Act

  • A prosperous Wales
  • A Wales of more cohesive communities
  • A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language