HERE WE GO, a huge pile of work is being passed over to developers, we are good to go. It’s been a great 1-2 weeks in respect of burning through loads of tickets, handcrafted by myself to ensure we stick on track and deliver a dream - including the why’s, the whats and the hows.

User research was done, and it went well, by well I do not want all users to love the thing, I want iteration, feedback (honest feedback) and basically a workload from UR sessions, and guess what.. I got a workload which is my why, my why and I guess I best work out the how!

What have you all missed?
Before I dabble in work chat, let’s cut to the chase - how was Guiseley AFC? It was amazing, with a great stadium, really friendly fans and incredible food (and beer of course), kids loved it and the sun was blazing. It was the perfect first-time football match to watch - including my kids shouting “COME ON SON” whenever Guiseley got near to scoring (which they did.. scoring 3!). Will go back, and recommend it hugely, thanks to The Little Culture Vulture (on Instagram) who I follow for local recommendations (his mum is a legend!).

Work-wise, I’ve already discussed but it’s been a great week of delivering and doing - all the work I’ve been lining up since day one, minor improvements (echoed by feedback), huge accessibility improvements (echoed by feedback) and feature delivery are all coming together and I am leaning on experience to deliver these in handy bite-sized chunks to the developers to help the ease of build, without providing the world in one swoop. This has meant many little tickets, linking tickets and designing and handing over in themes, so for example - handing over “sidebar” designs, but this is broken down into 5-10 tickets as it affects quite a bit of other things (tough to explain without showing you Jira - but who the heck wants that!). This is where my previous career of development helped hugely!
Figma file is improving hourly, how we hand over designs is improving minute..ly and how we structure presentations and meetings are changing too, now I have a great sidekick (User Research - hi Christa), we can start to shape and almost control our workload without losing the end goal and vision of the delivery plan and purpose of “the thing”.

I am so pumped for this project, it’s unreal!

What am I looking forward to?
We have many features incoming within our delivery plan, and breaking these down and working back from the delivery date is helping me manage my workload, removing the anxiety of crunching design and how we prep the users, developers and presentations - there is a lot more that goes into User Interface design that anyone ever things (standard saying for ALL job titles)…

On the Bobbin and Bumble front, it’s time to start thinking about summer… autumn overhaul and evaluating what is happening on the site, this ranges from a complete SEO review (which I do weekly), a usability review and marketing plans (think around emailers, banner images on homepage, socials etc) and making sure all things line up correctly, and it doesn’t give myself or the boss burnout.

Listen of the week
Long-time fan, but unsure I’ve shared their work, but don’t sleep on this one, Blair Davie is the real deal. The latest single Prague is a masterpiece, but following Instagram there are tons more incoming!

My music tastes vary often, I’m either knee-deep bopping my head to “ beatdown”, which is apparently a cross between deathcore and hardcore - I Google’d this.. god knows, switching gears to listen to Smooth radio and finishing off at building my dream gig which is mostly acoustic “one person and their piano/guitar” vibes.