“Too often, our data collection is single-use and disposable, with no regard to the environmental consequences”

There is too much plastic around, so we try and recycle it, so it’s not a waste. This is a good idea

But it would be much better to not create as much in the first place. That’s a better idea.

And it got me thinking – Is data more like the stuff we put in recycling bins?

We hope that most of it could be put to good use, but that takes considerable time and effort.

Perhaps we shouldn’t produce so much stuff that needs recycling in the first place?

We have digital mountains of data piled up from all the things we do. But instead of trying to reduce the data we create, we try and recycle it – find some purpose for it – surely it must be useful somehow?! It’s often interesting, all that data, but is it really useful?

The latest way to recycle data is by using AI. We can analyse mountains of data, find patterns, learn trends. We have machines that throw petabytes of data-mud at a digital wall to see what sticks.

But that just creates more data.

Because you can’t really recycle data, that idea is a lie. You can just use it to create more data.

We need to nurture a world with less plastic. When plastic was created, it was such a versatile and exciting material. But did anyone guess that it would infiltrate the oceans and delicate ecosystems the way it has?

The creation of data is like a pyramid scheme. We need to nurture a world with less data. When online services. personal devices and IoT technology was created, they were such versatile and exciting technologies. And people did guess how it would influence and become integral to our daily lives.

But how do we create less data?

We focus on quality, not quantity. (This is the Product Manager bit of my thinking).

When we build an online service, we collect only the data essential to deliver that service, and we define the true measures of how that service delivers value. Just because we can measure something, should we? Hoarding data just because it might be useful one day is just creating problems for future teams. Building a data efficient service is about maximising the data not collected.

How many photos fill your cloud storage that will never be seen? How many apps can track your location, personal interests and activities? Pretty soon we’ll need a digital Stacey Solomon (or Curtis, Joanna & Marianne – h/t to Andy Parker) to visualise our data warehouses in a horrendous VR reality TV show where every photo, email, WhatsApp message, Google maps directions, step count, wordle score, news article, car park space, spotify tune. Netflix show, amazon purchase, Alexa command and facebook post is laid out for all to see.

And then a grand purge annihilates the lot, only leaving a thumb drive of meaningful content that’s really worth keeping.

Firstly, James Higgot posted some gratitude about a reference to the NHS app roadmap he is rightly proud of:

And secondly, Dave Briggs shared a post linking to the Local Stuff for Local Gov People blog, which is powered by minimalist blogging platform bearblog.dev.

Bearblog have a roadmap of their own, which is driven by its users who can suggest and vote on what features they want to see. As well as publicly sharing what is ‘under consideration’, ‘planned’, ‘in progress’ and ‘completed’, it goes a step further and shows what blearblog won’t do. As a group of people once said, agile software development is “the art of maximizing the amount of work not done“.

It is easy for product managers to add features to their backlog. It can be tricky to prioritise those features. And it can be very difficult to publicly justify things you’re not going to do (and not just kick it down the backlog for Future You to deal with.

More of this transparency please!

There is an excellent webclipper for your browser of choice, which can save the contents of a web page into notion as a note/page to read and refer to later.

But on a phone (or other iOS device), sharing a web page to notion only saves the URL, not the web content. And that’s disappointing.

I had tried to use Apple Shortcuts to get the contents of a web page and save it as a page in Notion, but i couldn’t get it working properly. Until I found Christian’s post “How to clip website content to Apple Notes on MacOS and iOS” which finally showed the way.

Using his screenshot as a guide, I successfully recreated the Shortcut. Success! Sharing a URL using the shortcut created a new page in notion filled with the web content.

Now I had a working version, I went back over my previous attempts and made some adjustments as I was having two issues.

1. The new page in notion didn’t include the URL of the web page – it was important to me to know where the content came from
2. The page content was messy, and included headers, navigation and other superfluous content which made it hard to read.

So I iterated the shortcut (and in the process found the Undo feature very useful).

• I used the Safari Reader action to get a simplified version of the web page, free of unnecessary clutter

• I used the URL of the web page as the title of may page in Notion, so i knew where the content came from

• I then used the Combine action to combine the Web page title with the URL into a single variable which i could use for the Notion page title

Get the shortcut for yourself

I’ve exported the shortcut as a Shortcut file which you should be able to import yourself.

I’m currently trying out the RSS reader Feeder.co as it has a web client and app, and it kinda makes it easy to subscribe and identify feeds from sites using a browser extension.

Amongst these feeds I found this post from Luke Mitchell which linked to this post from Christopher Butler, and which articulated my own thinking around my own drive/apathy/cause/value of blogging.

Christopher’s thoughts on sharing, and engaging online are really close to my own feelings. Doing this type of stuff is definitely an activity or a task for me, especially when it’s work related. I also feel like I need to break down this type of task into something, small, repeatable

What will you blog? Make it better than this.

An aspect of the article stood out in particular – the comparison of how digital maps (such as Google Maps) are interacted.

Through the magic of Google maps, you need to zoom out and see that it sits in the Peak District and Derbyshire, or maybe even the UK before things start to become clear, and I finally know where I’m going on holiday. Exciting.

Vicky Houghton-Price

Visual hirachy

Often when a map is built using a tool such as Mural, Miro or FreeForm, the interactive versatility of the tool is often ignored. The artifact is created to be viewed in one particualr way. This is most evident in the lack of a visual hirachy in the design.

Google Maps understands that people need different maps for different tasks (and this is well known by cartographers – see “4. Generalisation” at the Ordnance Survey blog).

A simple example is planning a journey from your home to a new destination. Initially, you need to know where the destiantion is in broad relation to where you are now – will it take days, hours or minutes? You need to see the start and end points in context against a country or county.

When that is established and you plan you route, you need more information. And when you leave, you need precise details about road names and distances.

Interactive maps

It would be completely overwhelming to present all the information at once – instead, interactive maps allow a person to zoom in and out to see the amount of detail needed to fullfil their needs. Many levels of visual hierarchy can be identified when reviewing the different needs of someone planning a journey (=Alex Parlato describes this well in the Mapbox blog “Maps for navigation Better visual hierarchy of features and a cleaner, lighter map“.)

Process maps

When a user/journey/proces map is created, it is often designed just with the detail in mind. As you zoom out of Miro, the information becomes ambiguous shapes and the value is lost. Miro have written a guide to creating a dynamic visual hirachy to help resolve this problem for their users.

By thinking about how the map could be viewed as one full illustration, AND as a detailed process description, more value can be created from the effort spent creating it.

Tips to improve a process map

• Have large bold headings for sections which can read when the whole process is viewed.
• Group parts of the process within a background shape so the overal progress can be detirmined when zoomed out.
• Use high contrast colours for the large headings to help them stand out, and lower contrast colours for the detailed information when a user zooms in.
• Link between headings and grouped sections to aid navigation
• Take a look at “12 Visual Hierarchy Principles Every Non-Designer Needs to Know” from visme.co for more inspiration, particularly their summary infographic.

Thanks to Vicky for the inspiration for this post, you can follow her at twitter.com/vhoughtonp and read more of their thoughts at medium.com/@vhoughtonp

“What happens when something goes wrong? (And something always goes wrong.) What do you do if you don’t know why you’re doing it?

How do you find another way to achieve the objective if you don’t know what the objective is?”

This question often needs asking in digital delivery teams, where people get too focused on the what and forget the why. It’s the reason behind the danger of jumping to solutions before experimenting with disposable theories.

Taken from Dave Trott’s blog davetrott.co.uk/2022/12/how-real-strategists-think/

Of the ten “habits” there’s three common themes – do your research, get your hands dirty in the product and talk to people.

Do your research

Study the precedents that have been set. Learn how product requirement documents (PRDs) have been written. Study how problem statements are crafted and the level of detail you should expect to have in product requirement documents. Understand the processes and governance of the organisation

Get your hands dirty

Use the product as much as you can in your first 30 days. Try to become an expert on the product. Go through the whole end-to-end flow and understand the user journey. You can start to pick up on what works well, what does not work well, and start gaining empathy for your customers.

Talk to people

Meet With Your Stakeholders; Learn about their goals, Learn about who they are and find common ground, and understand the specific goals of your designers, engineers, and business teams.

Read the full peice at https://uxdesign.cc/10-powerful-habits-for-product-managers-your-first-30-days-and-beyond-5738eed5a1a3

The thread running through all of this is the deemphasis of central planning and privileged positions, of pretending we can know the future or declare immutable truths, and replacing it with a humbler, more skeptical, and social approach focused on systems and not personalities.

Sound familiar? How about:

No idea gets special privilege because of who had it. No one’s work is above being checked or improved by others. Instead, increase the diversity of ideas and then let the system improve them. Throw all claims into the fire of public empirical scrutiny. Observe which turn to ash and which are forged and fortified.

Read the full article at charleslambdin.com/2022/07/22/agile-and-science-and-politics/, found through twitter.com/allenholub/status/155058047683377561.

Instead of keeping easter eggs and bonus content neatly tucked away so that they don’t break when assistive technology is involved, how often are these elements added with inclusivity in mind from the start?

Event he most common outlet for a website’s cheeky side is often dismissed when accessibility is considered.

Let’s look at error pages, a quintessential outlet for playfulness in design. When you interrupt your users with an unexpected error, you probably want to do so with friendly humility. Any chuckle you can elicit with a creative illustration will soften the message more.

It’s an example of a deeper ignorance of how user needs change for different users. Consuming content or a service through a different medium can require a different way to approach the way a user need is met.

Instead of making a feature merely accessible via different mediums, consider whether it’s actually useful at all in those mediums, and provide alternatives or configuration options where appropriate… …An example Jakob gave of a product that gets it right is Slack. In its onboarding flow, Slack asks screen reader users which order they would like to hear content presented in.

Read the full article at https://uxdesign.cc/wheres-the-fun-in-accessibility-b78c6b9d280d. Found thanks to https://twitter.com/sidebario/status/1550406503764561920 .

1. Generation and Capture (Discovery)
2. Organisation and Development (Alpha)
3. Refinement and Formalisation (Beta)

Just as Matt has specialist tools for each phase (GoodNotes, MindNode and Ulysses), my own processes and ways of working have led me to specialist tools for regular activities, but all contained within one application – Notion.so. Crucial to me is the avoidance of friction in doing work:

Conversely, friction does matter. Stress does matter. Annoyance while working does matter. Constant papercuts of suboptimality do matter, because they will lengthen every creative session and they’ll deplete the resources you need in order to think well.

Notes

I use a database of pages for all my notes. Each note has a minimum of a title, date and some tags. This lets me quickly organise and find notes, by either a filtered table of notes based on their tags, or by a calendar view based on the date the note was created.

Resources

I identified a need for recording resources – links to files, website, slack or teams conversations. This is done in a database list where items are tagged and titled to enable me to find them quickly in the future.

Tasks

Tasks are managed in a Kanban board to keep track of things that need doing. The comments provide and audit trail of activity, and the flexibility of statuses and tags give filtering and focus.

Occasionally I use a timeline to give a visual overview of many tasks so I can roadmap work in a more ordered way.

Something I’m keen to explore in the near future is the use of relationships and rollups to consistently tag content across my notes, resources and tasks.

Inspired by mattgemmell.com/use-the-right-tools/, found thanks to twitter.com/davebriggs/status/1516764636523208709.