I was halfway through a design deep dive. I became uncomfortable. I was nervous. I was hot. I started breathing heavily. My heart started racing. But — I was not presenting. I was in the audience. An audience that was not doing it right. An audience that was criticising. An illustration of a head in empty space Nobody benefits from criticism. Crit(ique) vs Crit(icism) These two words are too similar in form to appreciate their difference in definition.| charlesrt.uk
Job-seekers and employers need a better experience Update 29 Feb 2016: Edited to make a clearer distinction between the goal of this open standard and the role of an existing schema. I’m currently working as a designer with a team looking at ways to improve how we help job-seekers find work and employers fill vacancies in their local job markets. Understanding employer needs by Charles Reynolds-Talbot Matching the right candidate to the right job is the intended goal of recruitment, but thi...| charlesrt.uk
Lately, I’ve been following the white rabbit relentlessly in the hope that if I keep going I’ll eventually stumble upon some life-changing Trinity. Follow the white rabbit. This Matrix Metaphor is representative of both the unpaid work I’ve been doing on the redesign of my own website and the paid work I do for UK government. I’ve spent time worrying about why certain things aren’t working properly and investing too much in trying to find solutions.| charlesrt.uk
YouTube videos are embedded in iframes. You can give them a fixed height and width which ensures they display correctly but then they overflow the screen on a smaller viewport.| charlesrt.uk
I have been stumped as to how to make my url over dat:// friendly, because dat://59278ae8cc9d27492b4a0a5d4392ff3c913aebd8fa079760ce732f26b70c4eef (open in BeakerBrowser) is just mean.| charlesrt.uk
I'm mostly relying on train journeys to make updates so progress has been slow but I'm getting somewhere.| charlesrt.uk
No style here Right now, things are looking a little basic. Style Attribute { 🤷♂️ } The plan was to get the website up and running and let your default browser styles do the work, then carefully layer on top the bare minimum required to achieve the design goals I set. You’d think I would have done more research into Hugo before choosing it as the framework to rebuild my website.| charlesrt.uk
Design decisions will be based on a combination of the assumptions I make on what people might want, and the message and flow I want to get across. I also want to achieving the following goals: move away from Jekyll and build my site with Hugo which I’ve had my eye on ✅ use only contextual navigation; no “I don’t know what I want” menu focus on typography; include emoji (the universal language of the future) at every opportunity 😉 allow for long and short form posts create an own...| charlesrt.uk
A screenshot of my zero dawn refresh served over the peer-to-peer web via Beaker Browser. It works! I have been meaning to redesign my website for a long time. I want to do more than just another re:skin so I am starting from scratch and designing the site live; partly to open my process to others who want to see and learn, partly to hold myself accountable so I do it properly.| charlesrt.uk
This morning I wrote a response to Jake Knapps article on going fast to stay authentic. He was so right! I’d been writing all wrong. The message is to not overthink your writing. The majority of the time, the thing you write first time—in the moment—is good enough. Spend too long deliberating and you run the risk of watering it down. After sharing this to Twitter, I realised you run another risk—you never publish at all.| charlesrt.uk
As a lead designer, it’s my goal is to help shape the user centred delivery of projects by raising the quality of interaction design—the work we do and the part we play in multidisciplinary teams. I’ve noticed confusion about what interaction design is, what interaction designers do and when’s the right time to get them involved. Design is a good idea Design exists under many guises; policy design, organisation design, process design, infrastructure design, security design and so on.| charlesrt.uk
In a week the team framed the problem and prototyped a solution to test their assumptions with real users. I’m a senior interaction designer working with a multi-disciplinary team to help people prove things to government using APIs. This is a story about a design sprint I ran. The focus is on what happened, rather than the problem we worked on. Sensitive projects are a reality of working in government, but we’re taking positive steps to make things open: it makes things better.| charlesrt.uk
Principles for sane working in insane times. CEOs, directors, leaders, managers, etc, need to put the self-created work-machine to one side and remember that everyone they work with is a human being.| charlesrt.uk
I'm throwing caution to the wind and forgetting about global CSS resets like normalize.css and Eric Meyer's reset.css because...| charlesrt.uk
Jake Knapp used to work at Google Ventures. During that time Jake developed a process to help teams test their ideas and get market feedback early, rather than spend years designing and building a thing before getting any data on whether it works. The process that came to be, was a Design Sprint. (Left to right) Charles Reynolds-Talbot, Chris Taylor and Jake Knapp Since that time Jake has run over 150 Design Sprints with teams in a variety of companies, from Slack to Blue Bottle Coffee, and p...| charlesrt.uk
This is part 2 in a series about why we need dark modes to be an inclusive design consideration. Molly Watt Apple need a dark mode The dark web rises Last year, I met Molly Watt. Molly has Usher Syndrome; a condition that has left her deaf with 5–degree vision in one eye. Laptop glare in a dark setting by Jay Wennington on Unsplash Molly is still a visual person.| charlesrt.uk
We need to stop talking about the needs of government; it doesn’t have any. People protesting to government The words we use — often unconsciously — affect our mental model, the decisions we make, the way we design and the services we deliver. I gave a lightning talk at a digital, data and technology event in government, to get people thinking about three things we’re doing wrong: First, stop saying customer, start saying user.| charlesrt.uk
This is part 1 in a series about why we need dark modes to be an inclusive design consideration. Molly Watt Apple need a dark mode The dark web rises Molly Watt has Usher Syndrome. A photo of Molly Watt Molly was born deaf and at the age of 12 began to lose her sight through retinitis pigmentosa, leaving her registered blind at 14.| charlesrt.uk
Normally, we don’t pay attention to change — we live busy lives — and the changes taking place around us are not worthy of a second thought. A butterfly on a leaf Occasionally, we allow our perceptions to determine a particular change as having a higher effect on us. That change could be work related; a project cancelled, close team members leaving, organisational change, starting a new job, or it could be personal; having a baby, or moving home.| charlesrt.uk
Part 3 in a series about why we need Dark Mode to be an inclusive design consideration. Using CSS media query to detect if a user has set system-level preferences to use a light or dark colour theme.| charlesrt.uk