Looking back: CDPS year in review 2023 to 2024

“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.”

“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.”

“The Centre for Digital Public Services is doing loads of cool, interesting stuff and deserves a shout out. Educating people, creating community and more.”

“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.”

“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)!”

“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.”