Weeknotes  

Monday 23 Jan - Sunday 29 Jan 2023

Work happenings

• Presented to the MadeTech Design Community

  A few weeks ago I was contacted by Jon (lead interaction designer at MadeTech) and asked if I’d give a short informal talk about my work creating Figma flow diagrams.

  So on Thursday I prepared a short deck and spoke to a group of lovely, friendly designers. They seemed to enjoy my ramblings and asked some interesting questions.

  

  We talked about the struggle we’ve all had trying to make remote working a success when conveying complex information such as user journey maps or flow diagrams.

  If you’d like you can browse the slide deck.

• Longed for a map component

  I’m currently working on the problem of helping people to publish good data.

  One of the problems of working with the raw materials of data is that they are in machine readable formats, which are unfriendly to human eyes and comprehension.

  We humans need ways to ‘visualise’ the data and for geographic data, that means maps and for designers like me that means Javascript.

  So this week I longed for a ‘map component’. Something highly customisable, accessible, performant, usable and robust that I can quickly drop into my code.

  A map solution like that has been proposed in the design system backlog and Imran Hussain has been doing some amazing work co-ordinating the community with the ‘maps in services’ events.

  But as the saying goes, I need it yesterday! If I ever get time I’ll make something and share it, in the meantime I had to hack at some prototype code to get something working quickly.

Life happenings

• Went to court

  Monday I did my civic duty by attending Manchester Magistrates Court as a witness for the prosecution.

  Long story short: I witnessed an incident in my street where a neighbour (mid thirties large male) attacked another neighbour (early 20’s small female).

  My CCTV and eye witness account was called for in court and so I spent a long day at court waiting to be called.

  It was not very pleasant and I no longer live in a relatively safe street. I live in a street where I have to be careful that one of my neighbours doesn’t do me any harm. I don’t like humans sometimes.

• Ran 5K again

  Saturday I ran a Parkrun again for the first time in a few weeks. This was a slight breakthrough because I felt like my issues of Plantar fasciitis had returned.

  

  Thankfully despite my usual ‘delayed onset muscle soreness’ (DOMs) reaction to any physical exercise, I managed to get round reasonably OK without any major reaction. In a time of 32:41. 🥵

Things I read

• 25 Plans by Vicky Teinaki - Vicky writes one of my favourite newsletters covering lots of service and interaction design subjects I enjoy. This week I even got a name check!
• Product Vs Feature Teams - A post about the difference between a ‘feature team’ and a true empowered ‘product team’. Nice write up. This stuff is important and often the cause of tension and confusion in my experience.
• Evaluation as a Service - assessing stakeholder requests for agile teams by James Higgott.
• DFE UCD Manual - Some truly excellent design ops work documented by my friends in the Department for Education’s Digital Directorate.
• The loss of links on the web - Trevor Morris talks about the assumption that URLs and their data will still live indefinitely;