Its Friday already, yes we had some snow, no its not around anymore, yes its still a bit chilly, thank you for asking 🙂

This week I sent (what I thought was) a particularly witty chat message during a meeting that I’m still unreasonably proud of…but I don’t think I’m allowed to have that as my week highlight! A few good things definitely beat that!

• We offered the content design role(s) I’ve been talking about the past few weeks! We shared the news with the successful candidates this week, who are really pleased…as am I. Even better, one of them was an internal candidate who very much had the support of their existing team. I nearly welled up reading the level of support from their current team lead (edited for anonymity of course):
  • It’s amazing news to hear about X. They’ve worked really hard over the last few years and definitely deserve this. Thank you for this new opportunity, they’ll be brilliant.  I’m very sad to be losing them from my team, the value they brings to our team is irreplaceable, and after working with them for 5 years, they’re a great friend too. 
• Just a shoutout to supportive team mates and managers out there. Thank you.
• A few thoughts on hiring, and the fact that its really important.
  • I mentioned to someone earlier today that when I’m hiring it has to be no1 priority…otherwise its slow and everyone gets fed up. It takes a lot of time, but you have to commit to it otherwise its not worth doing in my opinion.
  • The Co-op content team have high standards, which is great and is why they’re really good! It was a helpful reminder that there’s a reason we have a really strong design team, and its because standards are high in recruitment. Sometimes this can feel harsh, but the end result shows.
• This week I also commited to making some progress on the sustainability work that has been a bit quiet recently. That, combined with some good timing has meant we’ve now got some time with the technology leadership team to share work done so far and push for change across more teams too. All credit to many others involved, especially Siobhan for kicking it all off. Most of my role has been pulling threads together into something vaguely coherant, more to do!
• Related to this I caught up with one of our front end developers around a new performance dashboard being developed. Its good to join the dots between performance, accessibility, sustainability, and ultimately cost when it comes to how we build and serve our websites to people.
• It was also encouraging to see some of the design team’s work come to life on self serve tills – we’ve had to pull designers way from the work (for the time being) but there is still a developer making progress using the work so far. He shared a video recently of a demo of software he’d built, which has now moved onto an actual piece of hardware. There’s still a long way to go before anything gets to stores, and it’ll need a lot more design and research input, but positive signs.
• We also accepted an offer on our house this week! I probably should feel really happy, but I mostly feel a mix of relief and anticipation. We put a lot of effort into getting the house ready for photos and viewings, whilst also weathering the kids having chickenpox. Shoutout to grandparents for all the support. But we got an offer over asking price on the Monday after the Saturday open house – so now I guess we need to find somewhere to move…oh and fill in that paperwork sat in my emails.
• In other news, daughters parents evening was amazing, she’s a good kid, we love her lots (we would even if the parents evening was amazing…).

More a series of links this week around sustainable digital design:
IBM Sustainable design principles

Sustainable cheat sheet – design

And a plug for a video covering one of my fav books ‘How to make sense of any mess‘

Information architecture is for everybody