Weeknotes 23 June, 2023

I’ve had a banger of a week. Loads and loads of good stuff (unfortunately, while having a throbbing, lingering headache). Never mind. Let’s focus on the banging progress. (I know how happy my colleague Soph will be at me using the word “banging”). My bangtastic week (eurghh) has gone something like this:

Sketching. And sketching some more. A former manager of mine at a well-known travel brand was a huge advocate for grabbing paper and a pen(cil). It’s something I’ve been trying to do more of as well as developing my Figma skills. I’m really enjoying it, despite my handwriting being illegible. Ovetta Patrice Sampson, Director of UX Machine Learning at Google, also recommends you get your pencils and paper out. This was at her Config talk yesterday. It was incredible and I may now be a fan girl.

Running a collaborative content audit. Urgh, this did not go as planned and there were LOADS of learns for me. I see that as a win really.

This idea was to help me speed through a product (software) audit. I’d split the 6 of us into teams of two, gave each team an area of the product to review, and wrote out the steps to follow.

The first fail was, embarrassingly, people not being able to access the airtable I’d created. Doh. The second? Not clarifying which environment we would be screen-grabbing content from. Staging, production, a sales environment, and something called a “demo scene” makes it confusing for just about everyone. Nonetheless, these are easy obstacles to overcome.

When I sorted that out, we managed to capture and audit about 50 different parts of our software in less than 30 mins. That level of progress would be impossible with just me, or me and my content design counterpart.

Watching Config. I’m about to run an alignment session on how we’re setting up our files in Figma. This’ll be a two-parter and the next session will be focusing on how we’re handing over work to developers. So, it was a timely announcement at Config yesterday that they announced Developer Mode. More about it in this talk from Kris Rasmussen, Figma’s CTO.