Weeknotes 4 September, 2026

I’ve been thinking a lot about content standards. About getting the basics right – and finding ways to remind teams what brilliant basics look like. We have the usual written guidance, have trained AI on our standards and folks are using it – or are they? Because we’re seeing lots of content that’s skipping the simple stuff and that hurts the user experience and ultimately, users’ trust.

I get it. We’re all building fasssst. We’re using AI in new and evolutionary ways. I’m here for all of that. I’m also here for ensuring the people that use the things we build get clear, concise, usable experiences. People want more time. I want to help them get more of that good stuff back by making products straightforward to use. Get in. Get out. Get back to doing whatever you care about more. Writing a novel? Playing golf? Rest. Whatever it is.

So here are a few of the ways I’m thinking I can bring brilliant basics back to forefront of our teams minds.

Creating bite-size videos on content standards. We’re doing less practical workshops these days. That makes sense to me. The format no longer fits into how we’re working. Asking teams to give an hour of their day feels a large ask. Making a reusable resource available whenever suits the team is much more valuable.

I’ve been thinking a lot about content standards. About getting the basics right – and finding ways to remind teams what brilliant basics look like. We have the usual written guidance, have trained AI on our standards, and folks are using it – or are they? Or is it not working? Trixy AI is rather partial to fabricating nonsense. Reasons aside, we’re seeing content that’s skipping the simple stuff. That hurts the user experience and ultimately, users’ trust.

I get it. We’re all building fasssst. We’re using AI in new and evolutionary ways. I’m here for that. I’m also here to ensure the people using the things we build get clear, concise, usable experiences. People want more time. I want to help them get more of that good stuff back by making products straightforward to use. Get in. Get out. Get back to doing whatever you care about more. Like… writing a novel? Playing golf? Resting. Whatever your jam is.

Here are a few ways I’m exploring to bring brilliant basics back to the forefront of our team’s minds. (And retrain pesky AI).

Creating bite-sized videos on content standards. We’re doing fewer practical workshops these days. That makes sense to me. The format no longer fits into how we’re working. Asking teams to give an hour of their day feels a large ask. Making a reusable resource available whenever suits the team is much more valuable.

Harnessing our Slack channel with a series of “how to do it” posts. I’ve created a Brilliant basics series of posts. Intentionally keeping each post to one content standard (or “basic”). This isn’t about saying our standard is X. It’s more. It’s about: here’s the standard, here’s how to apply it, here’s what to avoid. Practical, real examples are the win here.

Retrain AI tools on brilliant basics and feed them the real examples I use in the Slack posts. Continue to catalogue good and bad examples and nourish AI with both. Sounds more like a Tamagotchi!