Another step forward

Time flies when you’re having fun — so much so that you can forget to write about what’s been going on.

A quick summary of the first half of this year:

• Re-joined CareerFoundry as a tutor — it was a noticeable void in my output
• Became certain that I’ve got ADHD (still waiting for an official diagnosis — 2 years to go?)
• Got involved with another STA project that I touched upon when I first started volunteering with them
• Spent a lot of time investigating UX Engineering, mixing design & development to do good things
• Left Civica
• Joined Capgemini Invent as a UX Design Consultant
• Looking forward to getting an office to go to each week
• VERY happy to be working on a Mac once again 🙌🏽

Mental health awareness

Given my self-diagnosed ADHD, I’ve been analysing myself and how I’ve been doing.

With this new lens, so much has become so much clearer — one of the biggest things being my need to get back into an office regularly.

This was the driving factor in seeking my latest position. I loved my trips to London & Bristol to see the team at Civica, but I was left feeling jealous each time. Those that lived near enough to the office to be in regularly had such deeper relationships that I realised just how much I was missing out on by being remote most of the time.

It’s also made me realise that my work is one of the things that can really pull my focus — which is handy!

This also means that my conventional view of the work/life balance doesn’t really work for me. So much of my NEEDS to do the work that if I don’t get the fulfilment from it that I want/need, then it starts to take it’s toll on my wider life — which is not so great.

Mixing design & development

UX Engineering is a discipline/role that I’ve toyed with in the past, but I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to define what it could be and how it could provide value to product teams where the designer-developer handoff is a bit of a passing of the baton.

The overlap within this area is my own personal sweet spot, engineering the UX — actually building it in a way that still has users at the centre of it, even if those users are sometimes development teams or support staff rather than the intended users of the service.

A number of the deliverables from UX design can feed really well into development and inform some of the fundamental decisions like folder structure, URL naming conventions, UI components etc.

Both of these areas of thought are ones that will continue as the year rolls on.

Originally published at https://lifeinux.com on June 19, 2023.