Writing archive

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

Textile 2023 week 51 note At Textile, designing how we design and develop is an ongoing process, which is how it should be. Just as we iterate and refine software, we do the same with how we work, constantly tweaking and adjusting how the parts of the organisation move with

Textile 2023 week 50 There are many ways to measure how well your product is doing. You can do what I do and go talk to people using them and you can do what is a lot easier and automatic which is use data to find out. Yet, this is

Textile 2023 week 49 note There is a funny thing that happens when designing an application. It’s now three months later and then it’s turned into another animal almost altogether. This is part and parcel of the process though but it leaves a number of side effects, the

Textile 2023 week 48 note When designing a user experience (UX), we designers often get deep into the weeds of the user interface (UI). We create screens, share them and then talk about them in meetings and keep on keeping on expanding and honing them till we feel we’ve

Textile 2023 week 47 note This past week as we begin designing and implementing findings from our most recent user research, we started talking about accessibility. As we move from prototypes to products, we also need to move conceptually from usable to accessible. Accessibility often means standards and guidelines (for

Textile 2023 week 45 note When preparing to speak to a large room full of developers, as a designer you need to think a lot different. But this is exactly the problem with the approach many designers take with this sort of thing. We talk about empathising with users and