Writing archive

Textile 2024 week 15 note This past week has been a lot of making web prototypes, namely in Framer, a tool that allows designer to design and publish web sites without coding. I learned how to make websites a long time ago, longer than most could imagine or want to

Textile 2024 week 14 note Colour can count for a lot. Recently with Tableland Studio we’ve been piloting a dark mode colour scheme. This is a bigger deal than you probably think and the history of dark mode is an interesting one. We’ve been working with the idea

Textile 2024 week 12 note Part of being a design at Textile means doing a bit of everything. This means not just the user experience, but also visual design. This is great for me as a user experience designer, because my first degree is actually in graphic design, and that

Textile 2024 week 11 note Users. Participants. People. The fact is that you always have to be thinking about them when you’re designing and building software. How to understand what potential users might be thinking is key to building software. Everyone knows this. There’s many ways into people’

Textile 2024 week 10 note As designers generally work on things that don’t yet exist, how design fits into a company often times depends on the product strategy. There are many ways to discover and adapt product strategy and one of these is the often unjustly maligned market research

Textile 2024 week 09 note Product design strategy is a funny thing. You can start in a lot of different places. You can start at the beginning, looking at where you’re at and then where you want to go. Or you can do it the other way around, where

Textile 2024 week 07 note There are many ways to work, and even more ways to build software. Some times this is done with people all in the same place, and sometimes, like it is for Textile, it’s with people physically nowhere near each other. This situation means that

Textile 2024 week 06 Part of the process I try to work with as much as possible with organisations is consensus building. A lot of times this means workshops which all too often translates to post-its on walls, whether virtual or otherwise. At this moment in time, while slightly cliched,

Textile 2024 week 05 For the past week or so I’ve begun digging into measuring design. This isn’t something that a designer typically thinks of. Sure, we talk about evidence a lot, and we assume something is being measure and the right person is going to tell us

Textile 2024 week 04 note Much of product design is knowing that it won’t necessarily ever finish. Finish, that is, in the sense that the non-software world understand the word. When you ship software, as we’re due to with the public release of Tableland Studio which I’ve

Textile 2024 week 03 note A lot of interaction design is not just figuring out where a user is going to go, but how they know where they’re at. Much of the practice of designing the user experience is about this, about navigation and sense of where actions sit.

Textile 2024 week 02 Design, especially that of software and services, is generally thought of as a visual craft. Whilst a fair observation, it is nuanced in many ways. Software is more a set of processes rather than screens, making sequence and situational understanding paramount. This requires an additional tool