Weeknotes 102

Incredibly cold weather didn’t stop me this week, starting a new phase of my project, looking towards the speculative next contract and enjoying some long (and cold) dog walks.

The big thing this week has been started a new phase of ecosyte.ms, focusing on a new part of the service – giving open source fund managers information and data to explain what affect their funding has had on the ecosystem and projects they’ve funded. It’s quite a step change from the previous phase, which was more marketing and informational. It involves making sense of a huge amount of data, then working out which data points (or combination of data points) are important to who, when, and why.

This is much more on theme with my work in the recent decade – chunky datasets combined with UX and interaction design. I did this in the past with in MHCLG’s funding service, medical patents for MSF, medical trial data for Ben Goldacre, and time and time again at mySociety, where democratic data is the foundation of the whole organisation. That said, with all that experience I’m finding the desk research element quite challenging, trying to balance knowing just enough without breaking the golden rule of knowing too much and that compromising my position as a user centred designer by forming too many opinions of my own.

We’re going to go back out to users soon for interviews, I’m hoping this helps answer some questions so we can get to a workable MVP pretty quickly. One of the best things about working on a small team again has been the fast pace of decision making and shipping, and I’m reluctant to compromise our pace for some unachievable design certainty. I’ve worked on teams where shipping is too slow, and vice-versa, and I think I’d always choose speed, if pushed. I’d love to dig into this more actually, so onto the blog post backlog it goes.

On the other side of the freelance business life, I’ve started working on a new CV to start reaching out to a few agencies to get on their ‘trusted collaborators’ lists. My current contract will end before the end of this quarter and it would help my sleep to know I’ve got something solid lined up next, even if it’s not straight away. I’ve also started adding some more projects to my portfolio, and smartening up some of the ones already there.

Watching

We’ve been cracking on with Silo, which ends soon, this season has been brilliant, split between two major plots (trying really hard to avoid spoilers) which has continued to build out the universe and the history of the world, hopefully it continues in the next two seasons. Knowing it’s going to end after four really gets my hopes up that the standard can continue. I’ve had the books on my kindle for over a year now but I’ve resisted reading them until the TV show ends.

Listening

The weather has been very cold and very dry, so I’ve been really enjoying some long walks with the dog and for some reason Radiohead has soundtracked those walks more often than not, particularly Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows.