Open sourcing the Product Planning Prompt Pack
This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.
This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feeds
page?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.
A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.
These methods are categorised by:
- Discover
- Decide
- Make
- Validate
- Fundamentals
Mark describes the process he favours for creating (discovering?) design principles, like the ones for EMBL (I must remember to add those to the collection).
All you do is be mindful of when the team repeats design desires. This could be several members of the team say the same thing in a slightly different way, or that you keep circling around and around a problem but struggle to articulate it. By being mindful at all times to this a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work. An important difference.
Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”
The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.
It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.
A lovely piece of mainstream news reporting on Galaxy Zoo and the other Zooniverse projects, and the broader role of Citizen Science.
A great explanation of how open technologies like microformats and OpenID enable greater discovery of data.
In the future, all great scientific discoveries will be conveyed in 140 characters.
I’ve always been a space geek. Therefore, I’ve always wanted to go to the Kennedy Space Center. There’s a museum there and a bus tour you can go on. The tour stops five miles away from the launch area and while you can’t go into any buildings, the activities within are explained to you.
I fulfilled a fantasy this week. Not only did I go to Cape Canerval but I managed to get an “access all areas” look around the place.
It’s all thanks to an engineer called Benny who listens to Paul Boag’s podcast. In a startling revelation, it turns out that Paul’s listeners are in fact rocket scientists. The NASA “friends and family” day just happened to fall right at the end of Refresh Orlando. Benny invited Paul along. Andy and myself invited ourselves along.
As it turned out, there hadn’t been one of these open days since 2001. We were very, very fortunate and privileged to be allowed behind the scenes at NASA.
In contrast to the regular tour, we drove right up to the launch pads, including launch pad B, which had Discovery rolled out and ready for launch on December 7th. We also got to go inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, something that is normally not allowed. It’s incredibly huge. I mean this is seriously big. Imagine a really big building and then imagine it being bigger.
Best of all, we went inside the orbiter hanger. Endeavour was inside. A space shuttle… a freakin’ space shuttle! That was just so incredibly cool, I can’t even begin to describe it.
I hope I’m not coming across as gloating here: I really just want to share my excitement. It was quite an experience to get so close to the ultimate geek toys. The only way it could have been any better was if Jessica could have been there. Soulmate that she is, I think she might be an even bigger space geek than me.
Clearly, my descriptive powers aren’t up to the task of cataloguing the day’s sights, so I’ll just point you to this photoset on Flickr.
Thanks, Benny!