Weeknotes 6 June, 2025

I’ve been thinking about communicating in ways to get what you want.

Someone shouting at me in the park about my dog (I know) got me thinking. Shouting is rarely productive for anyone. Let alone, successful for getting what you want. I tried to share explain kindly with the lady that her dog was part of the problem. There was zero active listening and only aggression in response.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no peace-keeper and I will always stand up for myself (and my dog). The difference is that I will never do so with an antagonistic approach. Perhaps it’s the UX-er in me, wanting to understand the problem, be empathetic, and not jump to solutions. To me, that’s not a bad way to tackle life’s obstacles either. Even if that didn’t work with this morning’s self-righteous, quite entitled dog walker.

Was that a rant too? Yes, I guess it was. Enough of that and on to what the working week’s been like.

I shared best practice for banners + upgrade content. One of the recurring things I find missing from content when it comes to my team for review is the “so what?”. It’s a common pitfall to describe a feature rather than explain its benefit. The other is most common piece of feedback I give is that the content is too long. To help with the latter, I created guidelines on real screens to share rough character counts. A banner, a modal, full screen content. Of course, this is always only a guideline.

I shared some terminology testing results. We’ve nailed how to launch these tests on our new platform, and worked out the best way to synthesise the results. Now, to launch about 10 more tests…

I led an audit workshop on our tooltips. We overuse these like crazy. There were no volunteers for our Design Crit so I suggested using the time to divide and concur on this audit. Each person added screengrabs of tooltips from their delivery teams. We then talked through them. We haven’t yet got firm next steps. What we have got is design file full of tooltips that otherwise would have taken our content team days to put together.

Tweaking settings copy. When we redesigned our 3 products into one, we spent a lot of time working out the best way to desigin settings. It was quite a project. (I’ve found settings often are).

With the work now done, we’re governing settings with our lives so they don’t become a dumping ground. We want to keep them organised, easy to use, and logical for users. This includes the small copy tweaks I made this week. This included rearranging the content hierarchy so we future-proof the space at the same time.