Weeknotes 20 September, 2024

The world is weird. Last week I wrote about the temperature dropping. Today it’s roasting. This is wreaking havoc with all manners of thing for me. Anyway, this isn’t Weather Watch, on to how this week has gone…

Editing upsell content. And feeding back on content formats. I see why we’re trying to use existing components in our design system – urgency to deliver. But, the content container used isn’t right for the content we need to show users. I’ve done what I can for now and scheduled in a review call.

I finished reading another content book. Immersive Content and Usability by Preston So.

Card-sorting exercise to try and pin down our brand personality better. I did this last week with my team. This week I got our brand and content team to do the same card sort to help us unpick who our company is to users.

Attending UXup’s autumn meet up. Ellen de Vries had us tackling taxonomies using our hobbies. Mine is boxing. In pairs, we had to write down all the “thing” words e.g. gloves, wraps, water bottle, people, partners. We then had to group them. We also created a simple flow diagram with what goes in, what our stock was, and what goes out. This bit was a bit tricky, but we worked out that energy goes in and feeling good comes out. “Stock” is the moves (or combinations) done in the class to get there.

Heidi Swigon spoke about narratives. She kicked things off with getting each table to do a drawing exercise. I never knew “Exquisite Corpse” was the name for this drawing game. It’s the one when you draw part of something, fold the paper over and pass it on. (Nor did I know it dates back to the 1920s!). I used to do this as a kid with words and short paragraphs. I’m sure I drew too. The game was a clever way of illustrating how important it is to have a common thread through your content. which she went on to share how she’s doing this with a current project.