A lovely bit of real-time data visualisation from Robin:
It’s a personal project created at home in Wales with an aim to explore and visualise renewable energy systems. Specifically, it aims to visualise live generation from renewable energy systems around Great Britain and to show where that generation is physically coming from.
I’d like to play it cool when I announce the latest speakers for UX London 2023, like I could be all nonchalant and say, “oh yeah, did I not mention these people are also speaking…?”
But I wouldn’t be able to keep up that façade for longer than a second. The truth is I am excited to the point of skittish gigglyness about this line-up.
Look, I’ll let you explore these speakers for yourself while I try to remain calm and simply enumerate the latest additions…
The line-up is almost complete now! Just one more speaker to announce.
I highly recommend you get your UX London ticket if you haven’t already. You won’t want to miss this!
I know I’m being tease, doling out these UX London speaker announcements in batches rather than one big reveal. Indulge me in my suspense-ratcheting behaviour.
Today I’d like to unveil three speakers whose surnames start with the letter H…
Just look at how that line-up is coming together! There’ll be just one more announcement and then the roster will be complete.
But don’t wait for that. Grab your ticket now and I’ll see you in London on June 22nd and 23rd!
I am positively giddy with excitement to tell you about some more speakers you can look forward to at UX London 2023:
I have more confirmed speakers but I’m going to be a tease and save them for a separate announcement soon. You can expect more of the same: smart, fabulous people with all kinds of design experience that they’re going to share with you at UX London.
But why wait for another speaker announcement? Get your ticket to UX London 2023 now!
This describes how I iterate on The Session:
It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will.
This whole post reminded of the episode of the Clearleft podcast on measuring design.
The problem underlying all this is that when it comes to building a product, all data is garbage, a lie, or measuring the wrong thing. Folks will be obsessed with clicks and charts and NPS scores—the NFTs of product management—and in this sea of noise they believe they can see the product clearly. There are courses and books and talks all about measuring happiness and growth—surveys! surveys! surveys!—with everyone in the field believing that they’ve built a science when they’ve really built a cult.
Please put your fingers on the desk in front of you and move them up and down rapidly in the manner of a snare drum…
I’m very happy to announce the first four speakers for UX London 2023:
This is shaping up nicely! You can expect some more speaker announcements before too long.
But don’t wait too long to get your ticket—early-bird pricing ends this month on Friday, February 24th. Then the price goes up by £200. If you need to convince your boss, here are some reasons to attend.
I very much look forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd this year!
There’s a broader point here about declarative design:
Setting very specific values may feel like you’re in more control, but you’re actually rescinding control by introducing fragility in the form of overly-specific CSS.
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
Mastodon is not a platform. Mastodon is just a tiny part of a concept many have been dreaming about and working on for years. Social media started on the wrong foot. The idea for the read/write web has always been different. Our digital identities weren’t supposed to end up in something like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Decentralisation, Federation, The Indie Web: There were many groups silently working on solving the broken architecture of our digital social networks and communication channels – long, long before the “web 3” dudes tried to reframe it as their genius new idea.
I’ve been a part of this for many years until I gave up hope. How would you compete against the VC money, the technical and economical benefits of centralised platforms? It was a fight between David and Gloiath. But now Mastodon could be the stone.
The first thirty years of the web may have been an orgy of unregulated expansion, but that era is over. The EU has been a leader with the GDPR, but there’s more coming. And I’m glad. The big players have had plenty of time to get their shit together and they haven’t. It’s time to regulate them as much as we regulate a shot of bourbon.
My upcoming appearance at An Event Apart next week to talk about declarative design isn’t the only upcoming trip to San Francisco in my calendar.
Two months from today I’ll be back in San Francisco for Leading Design. It’s on February 7th and 8th.
This event is long overdue. We’ve never had Leading Design in San Francisco before, but we were all set to go ahead with the inaugural SF gathering …in March 2020. We all know what happened next.
So this event will be three years in the making.
Rebacca is doing amazing work, as usual, putting together a fantastic line-up of speakers:
They’ll be sharing their insights, their stories and their ideas — as well as some of their pain from past challenges. It’s all designed to help you navigate your own leadership journey.
I’ll be there to MC the event, which is a great honour for me. And I reckon I’ll be up to the challenge, having just done the double whammy of hosting Leading Design London and Clarity back-to-back.
I would love to see you in San Francisco! If you’ve attended a Leading Design event before, then you know how transformational it can be. If you haven’t, then now is your chance.
Early bird tickets are still available until mid December, so if you’re thinking about coming, I suggest making that decision now.
If you know anyone in the bay area who’s in a design leadership position, be sure to tell them about Leading Design San Francisco—they don’t want to miss this!
I am very excited to announce that UX London will be back in 2023!
We’re returning to Tobacco Dock. Save the dates: June 22nd and 23rd.
Wait …that’s only two days. Previously UX London was a three-day event and you could either go for all three days or get a ticket for just one day.
Well, that’s changing. UX London 2023 will be condensed into a two-day event. You get a ticket for both days and everyone shares the experience.
I’m very excited about this! I’m planning to make some other tweaks to the format, but the basic structure of each day remains roughly the same: inspirational talks in the morning followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon.
As for the who’ll be giving those talks and running those workshops …well, that’s what I’m currently putting together. For the second year in row, I’m curating the line-up. It’s exciting—like a planning a heist, assembling a team of supersmart people with specialised skillsets.
I can’t wait to reveal more. For now though, you can trust me when I say that the line-up is going to be stellar.
If you do trust me, you can get your super early-bird ticket, you’ve got until this Friday, December 2nd.
The super early-bird tickets are an absolute steal at £695 plus VAT. After Friday, you’ll be able to get early-bird tickets for the more reasonable price of £995 plus VAT.
Keep an eye on the UX London website for speaker announcements. I’ll also be revealing those updates here too because, as you can probably tell, I’m positively gleeful about UX London 2023.
See you there!
This is a genuinely lovely use of machine learning models: provide a prompt for an illustration to print out and colour in.
Mike explains his motivation for building this:
My son’s super into colouring at the moment and I’ve been struggling to find new stuff for him.
In order to thoroughly attend to every pertinent aspect of the spec, fantasai asked us each to read one sentence aloud to the group. At which point we were all asked whether we thought the sentence made sense, and to speak up if we didn’t understand any of it or if it wasn’t clear.
Rich documents the excellent and fascinating process used in a recent W3C workshop (though what he describes is the very opposite of groupthink, so don’t let the title mislead you):
I’d never come across the person-by-person, sentence-by-sentence approach before. I found it particularly effective as a way of engaging a group of people, ensuring collective understanding, and gathering structured feedback on a shared document.
This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.
There are two JavaScripts.
One for the server - where you can go wild.
One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.
Yes! This! I’m always astounded to see devs apply the same mindset to backend and frontend development, just because it happens to be in the same language. I don’t care what you use on your own machine or your own web server, but once you’re sending something down the wire to end users, you need to prioritise their needs over your own.
It’s the JavaScript on the client side that’s the problem. What’s given to the visitor.
I’d ask you, if you’re still reading, that you consider a separation of JavaScript between client and server. If you’re a dev, consider the payload, your bundle and work to reduce the cost to your visitor. Heck, think progressive enhancement.
This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:
Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.
Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.
It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.
This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!
Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.
An account of the mother of all demos, written by Steven Johnson.