Thinking

For our 100th weeknotes edition, I consulted the oracle (in the form of the Elle Horoscopes website) to find out what has been going down at Clearleft HQ this week.

How did the UN Climate Change Conference reach consensus on tackling the worlds most serious challenge without a backlog of user stories?

This week we hosted the Agile SwapShop meet up at Clearleft, and had around 20 people come along to the session. With such a large group of people, and the emphasis being on discussion rather than presentations, it was important to find a method to allow everyone to get involved and provide a useful structure for the conversation.

We decided to try out the Lean Coffee method.

A couple of weeks ago we held the second in a series of Roundtable events, where we invited UX leads, product owners and creative technologists from organisations like The Guardian, Auto Trader, RBS and Pearson who are at varying points of the journey of going responsive; to share experiences, troubleshoot, debate and share ideas.

Or why you should be asking “What’s the point?” Design for objectives not for goals.

Objectives and Key Results—or OKRs for short—are all the rage in Silicon Valley at the moment. So we've decided to start a 6-month experiment to see if they'd work for Clearleft.

Andy’s been playing Devil’s Advocate again, defending the much-maligned hamburger button. Weirdly though, I think I’ve seen more blog posts, tweets, and presentations defending this supposed underdog than I’ve seen knocking it.

It's tempting to think of testing with screen-readers as being like testing with browsers. With browser testing, you're checking to see how a particular piece of software deals with the code you're throwing at it. A screen reader is a piece of software too, so it makes sense to approach it the same way, right?

don’t get up to London all that often—maybe once every few weeks; just long enough for the city’s skyline to have changed again. Yesterday was one of those days out in the big smoke.

The hamburger menu has gone from handy UI element to social pariah. In this article Andy Budd discusses why some of the criticism may be premature and ill-informed.

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.