User eXperience and Design. Tips, tricks, or just snippets of my online finds, both praise for a job well done and gripes for shameful behaviour.
I discovered UX (User eXperience) as a discipline in 2002. I had been working with its principles in mind for more than ten years already, and it was a revelation to be told “look, there are books for how you think!”. Since then, I have been constantly learning, working, and expanding on the topic of UX in every aspect of work and life
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 »
Time to read: 2 minutes I’m at a startup, as Head of UX, shaping a product that’s launching next week, and helping the team find ways of working that make them be more productive and feel more empowered. One of the challenges with the otherwise small and jovial company, is that there is already a silo: Marketing. What’s wrong with […] continue reading »
Time to read: 5 minutes UX is trendy, and we should all rejoice… Except UXers often work to unrealistic expectations, (“make this product user-friendly in 8 weeks”) try to solve non-existent problems (“build that team a dashboard with metrics XYZ”), and are seldom allowed time to do real research or work as a team (“we don’t have time for that, […] continue reading »
Time to read: 9 minutes The UX industry suffers from a delusion: that the take-home task is a good way to understand what each candidate for a job is capable of. This isn’t 100% wrong, but it sure as hell is flawed!! I’ve written about why I think this is flawed, included some examples of – REAL – good and […] continue reading »
Time to read: 5 minutes I’ve been on FOUR BA flights since 27th December 2016. This only matters because the last one was a VERY different experience from the first three. The first two were First Class (we used avios, sit back down), and awesome. On my last and fourth one, however, I discovered BA’s new policy of not serving […] continue reading »
Time to read: 2 minutes One of the problems I’ve always had is that I my hands are hyper-sensitive to heat. In itself this is small, but in 2017, I decided to stop having milky coffees. I’ve never digested milk very well, and it was time to stop it again. So it would be mostly americanos for me in 2017! […] continue reading »
Time to read: 4 minutes I’ve just spent six weeks on a completely insane project. The aspect I want to write about is how this insane project had no scope for (or understanding of) user testing, even though we needed to do some. And this article is about three “hacks” I devised to get some user feedback regardless of what […] continue reading »
Time to read: 6 minutes I’ve been working with someone. This is note-worthy, because I have mostly worked alone. Most companies today think that one UX Architect is enough to fix All The Things going wrong in a project. We are UX co-leads on a Big Fat Software Rewrite project. On our first day, a Monday, we were told that […] continue reading »
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 »
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 »