Thinking

Happy New Year

Here at the Clearleft towers we use DigitalOcean and our servers run Ubuntu 14.04 and Nginx 1.8.0.

Don't be afraid of emotion in the workplace, it's not weakness in fact it can be an infectious attribute which can benefit you and an entire team.

Following our very jolly Christmas dinner, I thought it would be merry to gather intel on the Clearlefties' 1) favourite Christmas song, and 2) what they received from their Secret Santa. And here's what they said...

The 20 Second Gut Test is a workshop which can help you discover an initial visual design direction. It helps you identify general design aesthetics and is a good technique to help you get started.

When I found out that I was building the new UX London website, I was really excited. My first attendance was when I was at University, and it was my first ever conference experience. I remember discovering a whole world of user experience that I didn't get to see from the classroom. I left with a notebook full of scribbles and I met lots of friendly and inspiring people. It's amazing that a few years on, I am writing about building the new UX London website.

Some thoughts on 'When Agile's not creative'.

Agile as a methodology tends to focus so quickly on the details of a product that it's hard to get a sense of the bigger picture.

We’re getting festive here at Clearleft Towers. Today marks the first day we’ve had Christmas music on (very exciting, especially as I’ve been trying to sneak The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping onto the playlist since the end of November…). Mark has been baking some delicious Stollen. A very tall tree arrived, courtesy of Anna C. And there’s been some festive jumper action…

A lot of the talks at this year’s Chrome Dev Summit were about progressive web apps. This makes me happy. But I think the focus is perhaps a bit too much on the “app” part on not enough on “progressive”.

It’s been another busy week at Clearleft towers, as evidenced by the fact that we’re writing last weeks weeknotes on a Tuesday. The eagle eyed amongst you may also have noticed that our weeknotes suddenly jumped from the beginning of November to the beginning of December. Basically we’ve been so busy helping new clients get projects kicked off before Christmas that we accidentally skipped a whole month without noticing! Fortunately we’re back on the ball now, and looking forward to sharing what the studio has been up to.

We're recruiting for users to participate in a user research project in December and January. We're looking for prospective undergraduates at A level/BTEC college/6th form who are either going through the UCAS process, or will be going through the UCAS process. Participants will be paid for their time.

An anniversary occurred last week that I don’t want to let pass by unremarked. On November 24th of last year, I made this note...

This year’s Clearleft conferences may be over, but does that mean we’re resting on our laurels (eating mince pies)? No, it certainly does not. We’re already beavering away, preparing for next year’s UX London, and are very excited to say that tickets are now on sale.

Moving towards consent based decision making builds an environment of trust, saves time and empowers teams.

We’ve started to use a very simple system of 'Checking in' for each of our meetings. By taking the plunge and doing it, we’ve discovered quite a few unexpected benefits.