Weeknotes 30 May, 2025

There are times in our lives when everything can feel it’s going wrong. I’m in one of those right now. What’s important, at least to me, is that rather than wade in despair, that I take action. A catalogue of things are not turning out as planned. Weirdly, I’m okay with that. After all, I know that through discomfort comes growth. Growing pains are real!

Aside from some major things going pear-shaped, I’ve still worked through the following:

Strengthening my leadership skills. If ever there was a week for tough conversations, this has been it. A lot of them have been in my personal life. There have also been a few conversations I’ve had to dig deep and get creative for at work. It’s been a pleasure in a lot of ways. I embrace change and the challenges it presents us. And as I said earlier, I know this is part of the process of unfolding my butterfly wings post crusty pupa.

Iterating on some UX Writing training. This batch of training leans on sharing tons of examples. That and demonstrating practical tips on how even the smallest change can make a huge difference. And, because I need to find examples and write up the rationale, I’ve decided to do this a bit each day. I’ve learned from experience that I don’t work so well if I give myself a dollop of time to do something from start to finish. Consistent portions of progress work better for me.

Updating our guidelines for error content. One of our designers is working on a big profile project that’ll launch later in the year. He’s capturing error states so I made sure our content guidance on this is ship-shape to help.

Struggling, but persevering, with labour-intensive user research synthesis. Before switching research platforms we had finessed an easy rinse-and-repeat process. This was for sythesizing terminology test results.

Fast-forward to now and it doesn’t yet feel we’ve worked out how to do this on with our new platform. At the moment, it’s looking like it could take hours of manual work, with real risk of error, to analyse the data. There’s got to be a more efficient way to do this – and I’m determined to find it.

Completing compliance train. Yawn. But it is essential. And it exists to protect us all so it’s got to done and it is.

That’s it for this week. The day is already starting to look brighter in more ways than one.