Link tags: exercise

Prioritising Requirements | Trys Mudford

Over the past few years, I’ve given quite a few workshops and talks on evaluating technology. This methodical approach to evaluation and prioritisation from Trys is right up my alley!

In any development project, there is a point at which one must decide on the tech stack. For some, that may feel like a foregone conclusion, dictated by team appetite and experience.

Even if the decision seems obvious, it’s always worth sense-checking your thought process. Along with experience and gut-feelings, we also have blind-spots and biases.

I feel like there’s a connection here to having good design principles—the kind that explicitly value one facet over another.

Getting your priorities right | Clearleft

A ludicrously useful grab-bag of prioritisation techniques from Chris—so, so handy for workshops and sprint planning.

Methods - 18F Methods

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:

1. Discover
2. Decide
3. Make
4. Validate
5. Fundamentals

UX Workshop | Trys Mudford

I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!

Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.

Homework I Gave Web Designers - Cloud Four

This is such a great excercise for teaching the separation of structure and presentation—I could imagine using something like this at Codebar.

New Adventures 2019 | Part Two: Progressive Web | Abstrakt

Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:

Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.

Learn Vanilla JS

Chris Ferdinandi is a machine!

A vanilla JS roadmap, along with learning resources and project ideas to help you get started.

designhumandesign

Refresh for a new design challenge.

Daily CSS Design

There are some lovely animations in this year-long challenge.

The idea behind Daily CSS Design is to create one responsive design every day for a whole year. All shapes, patterns and colors are made by coding.

What’s in a pattern name? — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan emphasises the importance of making a shared language the heart of any design system. I heartily agree!

This isn’t new thinking, mind: folks like Alla Kholmatova and Charlotte Jackson have been talking about this for ages. (And in doing so, they’ve massively influenced how I think about modular, pattern-driven design.)

“The Only-ness Statement,” an article by Dan Mall

A useful design strategy exercise from Marty Neumeier.

Think like it’s 1995; code like it’s 2035 - Grayscale

This is such a great write-up of the workshop I did in Hong Kong!

Jeremy, it was a pleasure to work with you and you are always welcome here in Hong Kong!

If you fancy having this one-day workshop at your company, get in touch.

Really Bad Design Exercises || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

This is a fun—and useful—way of improving the interview process. The Rubik’s Cube examples brought a smile to my face.

Tips for Running Workshops - TimKadlec.com

I’ve just come back from running a workshop at Webstock in New Zealand, followed by another one in Hong Kong. I heartily concur with Tim’s advice here. I’ve certainly migrated to having a more modular approach to workshops. In fact, these days I have little to no slides. Instead, it’s all about being flexible.

You can spend forever carefully crafting and refining your workshop and coming up with solid exercises but at the end of the day, you need to be ready to go with the flow.

Some sections you wanted to cover you may not get to. Some topics you hadn’t allotted a lot of time to may need to become more detailed. That’s all fine because the workshop is about helping them, not yourself.

Another Lens - News Deeply x Airbnb.Design

Little interventions for designers in the form of questions designed to challenge assumptions. Kind of like Brian Eno’s oblique strategies.

Relative Requirements – CSS Wizardry

I really like this exercise by Harry. I’ve done similar kinds of grading using dot-voting in the past. It feels like an early step to establishing design principles: “this over that.”

By deciding what we value up-front, we have an agreement that we can look back on in order to help us settle these conflicts and get us back on track again.

Relative Requirements remove the personal aspect of these disagreements and instead focuses on more objective agreements that we made as a team.

Despicable Design — When “Going Evil” is the Perfect Technique

I really like this “evil” design exercise that Jared has documented on Ev’s blog.

I broke them up into small groups of three, spreading each role across separate groups. I then asked each person to grab a sheet of paper and make their own list of ways they imagined the product’s user experience could be made worse.

Grid Garden - A game for learning CSS grid

Its the sequel to Flexbox Froggy—this time it’s grid!

I’m a sucker for CSS gamification.

From Pages to Patterns – Charlotte Jackson - btconfBER2016 on Vimeo

The video of Charlotte’s excellent pattern library talk that she presented yesterday in Berlin.

Flexbox Froggy - A game for learning CSS flexbox

This is superb!

Flexbox can be tricky to get your head around, but this exercise does a great job of walking you through each step in a fun way. I highly recommend trying all 24 levels.