How to prepare for and run a Design Thinking / Gamestorming / Creative workshop. And what to do with the outputs, too.

Time to read: 9 minutes In June 2017, I was hired for a few days by a consultancy to help with a design thinking workshop they were running for a client. They needed to run it with 80 participants, and to make it work they’d split them up into cabaret tables of 8, each with a facilitator… who needed to […] continue reading »

Google Home or Amazon Echo?

Time to read: 4 minutes In our house, we have six little conversational interface audio boxes.  What do we use them for, and which one is better? Here’s what I’ve discovered about Google’s Google home mini, and Amazon’s Echo (standard and dot, we have both kinds). Jokes I think that nine out of ten requests we make of all the […] continue reading »

Don’t panic, this is an agile experiment!

Diagram of the process

Time to read: < 1 minute After many months of requests from multiple product owners who never talk to each other (and I am including marketing in that group), we (the design team with me as Head of UX / sole UX person) are finally beginning an experiment with the blessing of our Head of Product! As of this Friday, all […] continue reading »

Wireflows for product status 

Time to read: < 1 minute We launched our Free Credit Report product earlier this month, so I can finally share this!! I was reviewing the backlog with our product owner, and instinctively started drawing the signin/up flow and mapping story codes to it. It looked ok, but needed some tidying up, so I cleaned it up in Balsamiq and added […] continue reading »

Losing my faith in Apple…

Time to read: 3 minutes I have been evangelising for Apple since the second iPad hit the shelves in Spring 2011. (A camera! Reading! Doodling! Watching stuff!! Big screen!! Photo-notes!!!)  Today, this ends. It’s not my fault that I will no longer be praising the advantages of Apple hardware. It’s Apple’s. One small choice they made is a direct insult […] continue reading »

Scripted copy paste in LaTeX – A (dirty?) content reuse trick

Time to read: 3 minutes I had a report to write, and in that report I had sections on topics, each of which had action points. And it would have been useful to have one big fat list of all the action points in one place, rather than all over the sections. My boss specifically requested this, as it would […] continue reading »

Weekend project: Digitising weather reports!

Time to read: 2 minutes Weekend project. Digitising #weather reports so I can have LEDs helping me dress every day (instead of the cognitive load of numbers & remembering what yesterday was like) #UX #design #electronics #informationDesign #watercolourpencils Image first posted on instagram. It all started with the London weather being a little bit nuts. One day was summer, the […] continue reading »

A diagram of the UX Architecture / Design process 

Time to read: 3 minutes Some months ago, I was working at a lovely software development place that specialises in the hospitality industry. Over there, I was part of a development team that worked on a series of mobile-first web-based task-centred apps. And I was the only person who “did” UX… This is a short-ish story of why I now […] continue reading »

Should developers think for themselves?

Time to read: 3 minutes I just had a weird conversation with a colleague in our standup meeting. We have a new developer who joined recently and is specialised in working on a particular platform. My colleague argues that if we send the dev my UX wireframes for the improvements, which are made in the sketchy style of balsamiq, he […] continue reading »