Linear Calendar Jan 2018 – Feb 2019

Time to read: 2 minutes How often do you get to see strips of time that span nearly FOURTEEN months?! Ok, so all calendars do that. The only difference with this one is that you read it left to right, like you do text. I’ve been making it for three years, because it’s handy. If you stand back from 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 »

heuristics of giving and receiving gifts

Time to read: 6 minutes I love giving gifts. I also love receiving them. Over the years, I have discovered a few basic rules about gifts. Good gifts. Both the giving and receiving. December is upon us, so I am sharing them in case someone finds them helpful. Getting the right thing, seeing the reaction of surprise, delight and happiness. […] continue reading »

first 4 things I do on a temporary work mac

Time to read: 3 minutes easy-lock my screen I am not an expert mac user. I am, however, a pretty damn good windows user, having even administered large user networks in the past. So when I step away from a windows machine, I always press (Windows + L), which locks the computer. Try it. It’s excellent. [WARNING] A friend of […] continue reading »

going off-topic in a blog post doesn’t have to be a problem. A (short) evernote story.

Time to read: 2 minutes Contracting is a busy life choice. Since I started, I have had significantly less time to write on my blog, and it makes me very sad. So whenever I have some quiet time when I am not drained, or when I’ve had an idea, I try to immediately write something that I could turn into […] continue reading »

in praise of mindmaps, for parties, requirements, and xmas

Time to read: 4 minutes When was the last time you were thinking (and thinking, and thinking) about a project that needed doing, and you had several ideas, things to progress, things to read up on, people to talk to about certain topics, and functions you wanted your system to perform… except… there was no rhyme or reason to how […] continue reading »

my ideal todo list would have 4 dimensions

Time to read: 2 minutes I wrote recently about time-boxing, and that got me to thinking that productivity isn’t just about shoving things into a calendar. It’s also about making the most of the time you’ve got, limiting context-switching, and remembering what needs to get done. After quite a bit of pondering, I concluded that my ideal todo list would […] continue reading »

timeboxing tomatoes – or what is timeboxing and why is it good?

Time to read: 3 minutes timeboxing tomatoes The pomodoro “italian for tomato” technique had me giggling for a bit, before I read on – thank you wikipedia :Pomodoro technique – and found out it was a desperate student cramming for exams who decided to focus his attention using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. “Let the first stone be cast…”. So we’ve […] continue reading »