Process on Afroleft

Using What You’ve Learned

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 17:05:06 +0000

A few years back I heard one of my music hero’s Jono Grant from Above & Beyond talk about their process in the studio.

He made a comment that stuck with me.

It went along the lines of “when we kick off a new project, we recite / talk through some of the hard-earned lessons and insights that we’ve made on previous projects.”

When the lights are on you and you’re under pressure, Jono said it’s all too easy to forget the things that you’ve learned from your previous experience.

Patchwork: Lessons Earned

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:43:00 +0000

A few months back I moved on from Patchwork—a health-tech startup that’s bringing flexible working to healthcare.

When I joined as its product lead, we were at 1 NHS Trust. Just shy of 2 years later and the company is fast approaching 20—double digit marketshare.

Stakeholders. What are we optimising for?

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 10:39:27 +0000

One of the things I’m piss poor at is stakeholder engagement—enabling everyone see tradeoffs the way I can. Sadly the problem exacerbates as your company scales.

Helpful to see Chris Thewell speaking at the UX Crunch last night.

On the dial ask

What are we optimising for?

Unpack the tradeoffs.
Involve the right people.
Optimise for the right thing.
Make your informed decision.

Keep peddling until you find the right problem

Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Back in August 1972, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced the late Massimo Vignelli’s new map of the subway system.

New Yorkers were furious.

Complaints came flooding in:

“Stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was coloured beige, not blue. As for Central Park, it appeared to be almost square, rather than an elongated rectangle.”

To Vignelli’s mind, that was the entire point (emphasis added):

The Other Side of the Sunset

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Admittedly it’s taken us longer than it should have, but here’s the story behind Fruitful and how we raised over £500,000 of venture funding, built and shipped a marketplace that attracted £1.8million of lending, captured the minds of recognised experts in the field as well as pitching some of the world’s leading venture capital firms, all before running — quite quicky — into a brick wall.

We spent 10 months building product…

We ran in to a trademark battle, so we went through two changes to our brand name.

We settled on Fruitful and drew it out on the beach just to make sure.

We worked all hours under the sun and probably contributed a fair bit in helping Pact Coffee secure their series A.

Questions to ask your design work

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 12:47:33 +0000

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.

You produce results: Learn from these

Sun, 04 Jan 2015 10:54:00 +0000

It’s nearly been a year since I joined Fruitful - a fintech startup that’s working to rethink how savers save and how borrowers borrow.

Since then we’ve been through a significant product redesign, a complete branding overhaul, a successful soft-launch and a customer response that has more than overwhelmed us. With customers investing with Fruitful from all over the globe, it’s clear that people are in search of an ‘alternative’ that offers fair interest rates, secured lending and the flexibility that we should expect from a modern investment product.

Shortcuts You Can’t Take

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 10:50:00 +0000

Last month Sage approached me asking if I could write an article on marketing for their small business community.

To narrow the context a bit, I concentrated on marketing websites. The outcome of which I’m really pleased with. The short post offers an insight into my past 5 years of researching, designing, building and iterating marketing websites for clients. What works / what doesn’t; all brought to life with three tiny case studies from a few of my longstanding clients.

Our Duty

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 10:48:00 +0000

Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it “work”.

For us wonderful folk who make websites, it’s our duty to read John Allsopp’s seminal A Dao of Web Design at least once a year. For an article that was written way over a decade ago, many of those points still offer so much significance today.

Product Design Process

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 08:05:00 +0000

When we have a new product idea (and are lucky enough to have the skills and tools to execute on it), it’s often more than tempting to jump in with two feet and start building the thing. Before we know it, we’re pitching the hows before whys and problem solving becomes a battlefield of miscommunication. As a result, our product concept becomes more complex and less focused.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been investing a lot of time and energy into a product design process that we’ll be using for an upcoming project.