Friday 16 August 2024 | weeknotes
3 min readAug 16, 2024
- Focusing on the positives today to try and put myself in a good mood for the weekend. (I’ve been a bit hung up on something which is making me doubt myself and my values. But that’s for another time.)
- There are blue skies over Cardiff, and Bluesky is buzzing. It’s so exciting to see. It felt pretty impostery logging in to find so many new followers after being included in a list of UX people to follow by the ever-wise Pavel Samsonov. In the spirit of things, I made a list of awesome content people to follow.
- Adri and I have finally started writing about an idea we’ve been discussing for about a year: communication debt. Like technical or design debt, the idea is that when we do not put in the time and effort to communicate clearly now, someone will have to pay for that in the future. We think it’s a more helpful framing to make the idea of content design more accessible to people. This will be in our next newsletter, but here’s a sample.
On a smaller scale, communication debt is the time and effort it takes to decipher a long-winded email or attend another agenda-less meeting. Scale that up, and it’s the cost of millions of calls to your support line because your website content is confusing or outdated.
- I’ve also started writing about what it was like working at an end-of-life charity in 2020, and it’s been quite therapeutic. A big part of the work was trying to interpret the covid lockdown rules for our audiences. Things like:
- could you still go into someone’s home to care for them?
- could you visit someone in hospital or a hospice?
- could funerals go ahead?
Through our support line, we saw people’s needs change in real time and tried to respond to help them. Blog post coming soon (ish). - Paul Smith, a lead interaction designer at NHS England has shared work openly on Bluesky and used feedback from the community to iterate a patient information leaflet. It’s about attending a breast cancer clinic (something figuratively and literally close to my heart), and it has made me truly happy.
- Last night, Adri and I went along to the UX Wales summer meetup. Martyn and the group were so welcoming, and I’ve never had such thorough responses to the question “chop sticks for hands or rollerblades for feet?” (This question was one thrown at Eddie the student on work experience who took over Southern Rail’s Twitter account for an afternoon back in 2017. It was joyful, and this question in particular stuck with me.)
- I enjoyed Lauren Pope’s use of the word ‘bumf’ in a content audit. A great word to finish on. Bumf.
