Weeknotes #1

I recently came across #weeknotes as a way of reflecting and looking back over your week. It’s an opportunity to write down, summarise, jot notes of what your week looked like, what went well, and maybe not so well. A mini retrospective and journal in one you may say. So here goes my first week note.

Review / planning

The start of the week began with out sprint review. We looked at some recent changes to drag and drop behaviour in the content type builder. Dan has introduced the ability to move fields around using the keyboard and added aria-live regions to give audible feedback of the action you are taking when using a screenreader.

We also took some time to watch some user testing videos on a new scheduling flow we’ve been working on, its always good to see assumptions tested with real users.

Planning for the UI team seemed to go smoothly, thankfully the backlog was groomed and ready to go. Jon shared how the behaviour of the tabs interface would behave in the content type builder, before the team embark on the development of the feature, we also ran through the acceptance criteria made some tweaks following feedback.

Professional services guild

I attended the professional services guild for the first time this week to share some of the progress I’ve been making with Productboard and collecting product insights from our users.

Hopefully we can get a smaller group together in the coming weeks to identify features that will aid professional services in delivering projects for our clients.

Digging into detail with Jack

Had a really helpful conversation with Jack one of the professional services team on how they are using Contensis in delivering client sites.

It was really interesting to see how they were using the product to deliver content and website components in unique ways, ways in which we hadn’t envisaged the product to be used.

There were definitely some things we could do to support these ideas and I’m looking forward to more conversations with people like Jack who seems to have a real passion for content and the user experience of authors.

User flows and interface inventory

I’ve been reviewing the entry editor this week, capturing hundreds of screenshots to document each of the flows within this area of the application.

It’s amazing to see the complexity of the different flows, but it’s also nice to see that the patterns we’ve put in place are consistent and familiar. But there are definitely some areas for improvement especially when content is in split view, or where complex composers and components are used. These are definitely areas we’d like to improve and this process is just the beginning.

Hopefully this documentation will aid discussion between the team in the coming weeks as we explore how we can make the experience more delightful.

Outside of work

I’ve started listening to The Biography of Leonardo Da Vinci on audible. I’ve found myself walking the dog longer as I listen to it as I can’t pull myself away from it. Audio books have become a new way for me to engage in topics I might not have previously considered, hopefully it’ll keep me engaged as there are 14 hours remaining.