Weeknotes 31 January, 2025

I saw someone describe how long this month has felt as the “Four years of January.” I robbed this depiction at speed and have sinced used it several times.

This week? Paaaaacked. I’m glad it’s Friyay, pay day, and time to wave a happy goodbye to the first month of the year. And, Spring… I see you peeking your lovely little self out here and there too. Good stuff is coming. The last 5 days went something like this…

The tiniest of copy tweaks. A.K.A. microcopy – to optimise the copy on some banking-ish screens. And jotting down some ominous terminology spotted on them to test with users.

Listening to user testing and note-taking. I always make time for this. I scream from the hilltops to remind people to invite me to the testing their running. (Not really, but I would!).

I found £20 in my garden! Yes really on this one. What an improvement on random cat shit and crisp packet construction-worker debris.

Auditing notifications. There’s 4 of us joining forces to do this. My manager and I are on the various banners and toasters and the other duo are looking at emails. We’ve now drafted principles for notifications. And we’ve slotted in a weekly working session for us to work on next steps.

Hosting a content crit. Something of an accidental one, but a very valuable session nonetheless. The content team reviewed the journey of connecting software. There were, of course, a few caveats – no dev time available to build something new. That old chestnut.

The proposed solution added in an extra modal (that’s build time annnnddd an extra step for the user). We solved it recommending revising the content hierarchy of the initial screen. This included adding a short ‘heads up’ style message about next steps. That removed the need for adding another click and the respective dev effort to build it. It was so rewarding to influence the design. And also to help others understand more about content strategy. As well as the importance of actionable content.

Facilitating an of year review. And learning for next time to encourage my team to book this in earlier. Our process is kinda complex. It meant we all wrote and submitted our self-evaluations at the end of last year. Then, the actual development conversations didn’t happen until almost a month later. I didn’t have the best experience with that. Things weren’t so fresh in my mind and we’d already done so much more that the examples in our reviews almost felt old. I’ll make sure there’s a shorter gap next time. Even if it means having conversations earlier than our official process.

I got my goals written up. I now have a rough plan of what I’ll do in 2025 and a documented strategy on how I’ll get there.

Joining a Design Jam. A regular session solving customer problems.

Oosh. That was a busy one. Time to go put my feet up. Over and out.