Serendipity, more writing, and starting again – Week Note 03/11/23

Published: 2023-11-03
Who this is for: • The curious

This week has been a fun one. Meeting interesting people, starting a new role and getting published.

Table of contents:

Writing stuff

I managed to keep my release schedule for articles, luckily I pulled a Blue Peter and found one I made earlier.

Blue Peter

Not only did I manage to keep up the pace of publishing three times this week, but got accepted by all the top Medium articles. And an article of mine was published by one of them.

Three things I’m doing to improve my design practice

Quite proud of that, considering I only started promoting these posts last week.

It might feel like longer because of the barrage of promotion I did on LinkedIn, but I’m working on different promotion strategies than bombarding LinkedIn, it’s not great for engagement anyway.

Based on the stuff I wrote in the [second week note] I’ve begun doing some covert guerilla research on Indiehackers, Reddit and Quora to identify the cross-section of topics that my target audience is interested in and I want to write about.

I started testing A/B testing different titles and mediums, website or Medium. Using the analytics of each to reveal what titles worked. But I think that flooding LinkedIn and having nowhere else to promote diluted the data.

Serendipity

I’m not one for networking. I even struggle with social networking apps. However, while sitting in a coffee shop on Tuesday, I unexpectedly struck up a conversation with a person named Baf. Now, we’re in discussions about collaborating together.

Networking can happen anywhere, I guess.

Starting my new role

This week I started my new role as Product Designer at RCN. I started Wednesday and it’s been a smooth onboarding process. I’m currently in the process of working with two different user research teams.

I’m taking my time to get to know the team and culture, but I’m hoping to propose some strategies to ensure collaboration, efficiency and productisation.

These are some of the initiatives I’m working on:

  • Productising: Moving away from websites as a resource for our product and leaning on familiar products that are proven solutions to help users complete their tasks.
  • Workshops instead of email: Whenever possible I’m going to push for a structured hour workshop over bouncing emails and chat messages back and forth.
  • UX Champions: A cross-department social held remotely, possibly bi-weekly, discussing everything UX. I have [Thoughtworks] to thank for this idea.
  • Team Learning chats, for dev, design and product.
  • Design system: Establishing how we are planning to manage the design system and create a source of truth of primitives for design and dev, to build components with
  • Stakeholder collaboration: I’m planning a workshop to discuss current ways of working and any improvements they would like to implement.
  • Developer handoff and desk check: I’m planning a workshop for me and the devs to establish a way of working that works for everyone.

Things inspiring me this week