Managed to find some time to flick through my music and produce a new mix.
Tinged with autumn leaves, this mix brings together some of my favourite melodic house tracks featuring the likes of Guy J, Vincenzo, Radiohead and the very talented Dosem.
I’ve made it available for download so you can stick it on your phone for listening on that train journey // cold walk home =)
Yesterday I was in the market for some plughole unblocker. We’ve moved places recently and I forgot to put this useful little thing in our shower.
So I head into Tesco and — eventually — I find the section for bleaches and plughole unblockers.
I know that Mr. Muscle is a popular brand for this product, so I look for the logo.
Bingo. I find the Mr Muscle.
Just as I’m about to pick up a bottle, I notice the bottle next to it. It’s called Buster — a brand I've never heard of.
Here’s what happened:
Without realising it, this nifty bit of packaging had moved me right through the marketing funnel (Awareness > Consideration > Purchase) in around 10 seconds.
Of course, the irony here is that both of those brands probably come from the same company — be it, Procter & Gamble or Unilever et al. This is how the consumer packaged goods industry works.
That though shouldn’t take anything away from this being a nice example of how to package an alternative product, in a market that is largely dominated by recognised household brands.
Last month I spent some time updating my portfolio. As a product / user experience / web designer, it can be quite tricky to present your work to others.
The rock star visual designers of this world can get away with presenting screenshots of their stunning visual work — job done, money due.
But if your day-to-day consists of making user flows, interaction designs, napkin wireframes, trade-offs, A/B tests, and minimum viable products, then you — like me — need to do a bit more groundwork to do the show and tell properly.
It’s not so much the what, but the why and the how.
With this in mind, I decided to structure my portfolio around the questions I ask myself when looking at other products and services:
Was this a piece of work for a fast moving startup or a 100 year old family business? Setting the context lays some good foundations for answering the questions around what you did and why.
The cornerstone of successful design projects, is making sure you’re solving the right problems.
In this section of my portfolio pieces, I found it useful to pull apart the problem I was hired to solve.
Sometimes the problem definition is a bit blurry i.e: Do we really need to make the sign up process faster? Or - to convert more prospects - should we enable users to access features without committing to signing-up first?
Here we deep dive right into how you designed the product / interface / solution.
Unpack how you approached things. Show rather than tell. Let us see what you made.
Did new insights emerge as you moved through the project? If so, lay them out here — tell us how you responded.
The final section of the portfolio answers:
Arguably, the biggest thing you bring to the table as a designer is your ability to render an optimal solution — and answers to these questions go a long way in revealing how you do that.
Keeps the doctor away.
Just found this blog full of wonderful icons.
This was one of my favourites.
I’ve been planning a rebuild of my blog for a while now.
If I’ve learned one thing from product development, it’s know what problem you’re trying to solve.
So I sat down and actually thought about my goal: To write more frequently.
I wanted to worry less about maintaining a server, designing pixel-perfect user interfaces, performing backups and fiddly upgrade paths.
My previous blog was held together by an outdated version of Perch and a whole bunch of duct tape that was wearing thin.
So now that this blog is back on its feet again (not to mention its new identity), I’m hoping I’ll get into the rhythm of writing more frequently.