Category: Digital
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Friction is dead. Deal with it.
The perpetual wisdom of Tom Loosemore continues: Plenty of services quietly rely on people giving up. Agents don’t give up. Making your service deliberately harder to use won’t save you. Agents chew through friction; the people without agents bear the cost… …If tireless agents reveal that your service has been depending on people abandoning valid…
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What a waste
Yesterday I saw Gavin Freeguard post/skeet on Bluesky about Ishmael Burdeau comparing data to plastic: “Too often, our data collection is single-use and disposable, with no regard to the environmental consequences” There is too much plastic around, so we try and recycle it, so it’s not a waste. This is a good idea But it…
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Roadmap what you’ll do, and sometimes what you won’t.
I’ve read two (unrelated) things about roadmaps in the last 24 hours, and they’re both great in different ways. Firstly, James Higgot posted some gratitude about a reference to the NHS app roadmap he is rightly proud of: And secondly, Dave Briggs shared a post linking to the Local Stuff for Local Gov People blog,…
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Saving webpages to notion.so on an iPhone
I use notion.so for a lot of things. It’s a great dumping ground for notes, links, lists and all sorts. There is an excellent webclipper for your browser of choice, which can save the contents of a web page into notion as a note/page to read and refer to later. But on a phone (or…
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If I blogged, it might look like this.
The demise of Twitter for digital people in the sector I work in has led to a mini resurgence of blogging (or publishing weeknotes if that structure works better for you), and using RSS feeds as method of collating and consuming content (Steve Messer offers a great pace to start). I’m currently trying out the…
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A problem with mapping a process
A lead designer at Made Tech, Vicky Houghton-Price has written about the relentless desire for process maps. She shares her frustration that the request is often disparate from the artifact’s true purpose and value, instead, it becomes something that only shows work has been done: Do you need another map? Probably not. An aspect of…
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What do you do if you don’t know why you’re doing it?
I enjoy recognising overlaps between different industries and careers. Here’s a quote from an unnamed TV show about the SAS (though I suspect it’s Rouge Heroes). “What happens when something goes wrong? (And something always goes wrong.) What do you do if you don’t know why you’re doing it? How do you find another way…
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You’re new, but the product isn’t.
UX collective published an article on effective habits for product managers. But it’s actually a checklist of activities for product managers to undertake when they start working with an established product. Of the ten “habits” there’s three common themes – do your research, get your hands dirty in the product and talk to people. Do…
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Order without authority
Charles Lambdin writes about the science of agile, using Jonathan Rauch’s book “Kindly Inquisitors” as a guide of the history of philosophy, politics, and science of agile’s evolutionary mindset: The thread running through all of this is the deemphasis of central planning and privileged positions, of pretending we can know the future or declare immutable…
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Accessibly whimsy
Elise Hein writes for uxdesign.cc about missing the fun in accessibility. Much of the whit and whimsy of the internet is restricted to those who have the pleasure of browsing with whatever browser they like, with no need for ever changing the default settings. Instead of keeping easter eggs and bonus content neatly tucked away…