Weeknotes 26 October, 2023

Blink and you’ll miss the weeks – they’re going so fast. Here’s how this one has gone:

Learning about ethics in AI workshop. I spend Monday evening bolstering my knowledge around using ChatGPT and other tools responsibly.

Patrick Stafford, from UX Content Collective took attendees through best practices. He also shared some awesome cheat sheets we can adopt to make our own.

Thanks to Patrick’s explainer on how Large Language Models (LLMs) work I’ve a much better understanding them. And also, their limitations. I’m looking forward to putting what I’ve learned in to practice. And kudos, Patrick, not only was the workshop ace but you also handled tricky participants with grace.

The massive takeaway? It’s amazing how easy it is to be irresponsible with AI tools. We all have a part to play in making sure we don’t fall into that trap. I recommend you do the workshop too – money very well spent.

Demo-ing how we use Ditto Words and ticking off a sprint deliverable at the same time. I’m working on some improvements to our sign up flows and I also needed to demo how we’re using Ditto to our VP. It made sense to do both at once. I caught up with our UI Design Manager and took him through it, recording it at the same time so I could use that as my demo. Reminder to self: this multi-tasking is a great example of ‘work smarter, not harder’.

Content strategy for alerts and notifications.

We have multiple products. There are different teams for each product. Each team is planning to work on alerts and notifications. I’m working with the team whom are first to do this – they will carve the path for the other product teams to follow.

We’re sketching, we’re writing, and we figured out some content strategy was missing. User research is happening too so I want to look at that with the designers. It’s all a bit chicken and egg at the minute, but we’re making progress.

Keeping to reading (and skipping) goals. I’m almost finished reading Empowered. My goal was to finish it by the end of October and I’m on track. I’m also on track with my 100 skips a day for Cancer Research. (Donate, go on). This also wraps up at the end of October. I’ve loved skipping, I’m much better at it, and I’m going to try sticking to 100 skips a day, every day.

Every week we get asked at work to share an update. This takes the form of achievement, progress, things you’re proud of, and challenges. Here’s mine:

• Achievement: getting decent focus time! 
• Progress: building out and re-organising copy library in Ditto Words, demo-ing how it works using the Sign Up flow, MON tasks, ONB onboarding pairing, Precision alerts pairing. Attending Ethics in AI workshop.
• Proud of: carving out focus time and actually getting it.
• Challenges: email request from Marketing (sorted, but was tricky to navigate the stakeholders).