Yorkshire has sun, this is not a false alarm, YORKSHIRE HAS SUN.

A trip to Drayton Manor where I got incredibly soaked by a silly broken hose, a dry chicken burger that cost me £17 and a hangover that lost me a day = it’s great to be this age.

Launching a client’s website, making a list of work-items and owning my space is on the menu for this week.

What did I enjoy?
During this sunshine, a close friend visited from Australia and we went to Drayton Manor with her and the family - I went on rides that seemed to be only designed to make me super soaked, but everyone else enjoyed that. We also finally got to tackling the garden, it looks a world away from what it did and it was only 3 hours of work (my back hasn’t recovered).
Caught up with a good friend, went out and talked till the early hours in the sun - the day after I felt about 105 years old, but it was fun until that bit.

Work: It’s still fun, it’s really entertaining, really challenging and really “on me” to be good - which is great. We’ve got in place a good set-up so far, regular stand-ups, a fully functioning JIRA board, a well-laid-out Figma board, and the team is pretty damn good too!
Things I need to start kicking up a notch, the time has come to influence and speak out about UX and start leading and owning that area with the core and wider teams, really nail down the process on how UX works within the team, from idea, ideation, UR, iteration and so on (the usual).
As discussed in my past post, the backlog items that I came up with from previous User Research rounds, feedback from the team, or just “gut” feelings has been signed off and I’m running away with it all - time to load up Figma and wrestle with its silly auto-layout.

We launched www.edwardsandwalker.com, a WordPress website which I am very happy with, I even dusted down some CSS like the old days. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been doing tutorials with the client, ensuring they are happy with it and also understand how to use and add content which they do now - job done!

What am I looking forward to next week?
Aligning UX-delivery plan to the DELIVERY plan and working in complete harmony together of course! I love a plan and a list, and I’ve had a list prepped for a while that I’m excited to work on with the team.

Listen of the week
I have possibly mentioned this before, but my kids fall asleep to Smooth radio every night, and I end up spending at least an hour after stories and random conversations to avoid sleep listening to some incredible bangers, waking the kids up as I go for the harmonies in Commodores - Nightshift or any Chicago song, that I never knew I knew, but here we are.
In case you do, I started a playlist on Spotify.