Latest blog posts
To build or not to build
Breaking the Figma addiction
Yesterday I ended with the question: Does it always make sense to do Lean UX, and implement straight from wireframes?
Are we lean enough?
Today's #NaBloPoMo post is going to be less hands-on, and more philosophical. It's a reflection on yesterday's post:
Breaking down a design
Thanks to Amy Hupe, I learned that there's such a thing as National Blog Posting Month (#NaBloPoMo for short), and it starts today. So here we go with post number 1.
Learning product design
If you're learning Product Design, it can be overwhelming to know where to start and what should be in scope.
The elements of product design
Explaining product design as a stack of decisions built on top of a stack of knowledge. With apologies to Jesse James Garrett.
Work backwards
Any time you’re planning, spend some time working backwards. Ask “what’s the key state I’m aiming for?”, then ask “what unlocks or enables that?”. And repeat.
Talks
Working on the Real Thing
A talk on design/dev pairing and how tools might change in the future.
The Elements of Product Design
or... if there's no ideal design process, how can I know what to do?
Event storming
An intro and discussion of event storming and how it applied to our context
Conceptual modelling
Why conceptual modelling should be part of every designer's toolkit, and three ways to do it
Milkshakes, Jobs to be Done and Job Stories
Now ancient (2016) lightning talk about Jobs to be Done theory and practice, and the benefit of Job Stories over User Stories.
Work
Yorkshire Wolds Heritage Trust website and visual identity
Rebrand and website design/build.
Relive — Kick-starting communities
Leading a tribe to explore a brand new opportunity space
Relive — Rearchitecting the post module
Rethinking a module that had grown unwieldy
Farfetch — Understanding the jobs-to-be-done of luxury fashion merchants
Discovering and communicating the primary user needs when selling luxury fashion online
Marketplace tax and duty management
Designing a simple tool for a complicated mission-critical problem
TIM — Redesigning a legacy tool
A ground-up redesign, founded on user research.
TIM — Creating a new product from scratch
A new product with an innovative stock screener.
Design Mentor at Visa Beyond Plastic Design Jam
I coached a team designing the future of retail payments.
Other Stuff
Design Team Wrapped for Figma
An experiment with the Figma API to generate end-of-year stats for your team. Try it here.
Whitelist
Product design and frontend Development for this record label A&R secret weapon, since acquired by a major record label.
2D/3D Motion Graphics
Motion graphics, 3D modelling & compositing. Contains some title sequences and infographics for TV. Also a 3D island intended to be explored in a choose-your-own-adventure style.
d3.js FX data visualisations
Some experimental interactive visualisations showing the positive/negative sentiment implied by buy/sell recommendations of a selection of currency pairs over time.
CNN Tonight
An animated, interactive carousel showcasing the anchors of the Tonight slot. Simulated 3D in 2D with scaling, mathematical positioning on an ellipse, and depth swapping.
Safety in Numbers
Infographics for a documentary following a cycle ride through the alps. These were accurate terrain maps modelled and animated in Cinema 4D.
Corinne Day
Website for legendary Vogue photographer Corinne Day. It's a large archive of thousands of images. I used Google Sheets as a database for maintainability, and ImageMagick and Gatsby.js for image post-processing.
Wallboardr - a virtual card wall for Agile development
Conceived as a less opinionated card wall than Pivotal Tracker. It was based on the idea you could create cards in lanes and #hashtag them for filtering, and then view them either grouped by iteration (for scrum) or by status (for kanban). About 80 people signed up to try it, but soon after this Trello was released, which was similar and more comprehensive. So I stopped development.