Writing archive

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

Textile 2023 week 44 note Platform Design is not a term that comes up often in user experience design or in conversations around developer tools, yet should be in both. While crafting a presentation to be made during IPFS Connect Istanbul, and thinking about design and what it means for

Textile 2023 week 43 We’ve concluded our first round trip research, which means we began with an audit of the Studio software as it was, and then designed out based on assumptions of what would work for users, tested that, revised the designs based on those testing insights and

Textile 2023 week 42 note User-centred design at Textile and for the decentralised internet world at large requires quite a bit of nuance in understanding the user. This is because the user is often times a developer working on bleeding edge technologies and requires complex tools to navigate the space.

Textile 2023 week 41 note Textile is a data tools company and I’m the designer here. Until beginning work here, I’d not thought much about the actual handling of data in general. Whilst always being interested in and aware of how companies might be using our data in

Textile 2023 week 40 note This past week I’ve put together what could be considered the alpha version of the design system. A design system can take many forms, with some notable example being Google’s Material and IBM’s Carbon. What they are can vary in taxonomy and