Why I think it could be useful and how it could be used

First, a disclaimer.

People can and do spend lifetimes working in this area. I have not done so. I am almost certainly cutting corners or just flat out being wrong on the internet . But I think that what I’m turning out is useful for the things I am intending them for. I may be doing a disservice to the techniques by dumbing them down or removing some rigour that would be present in a more proper application within the context from which they originate.  For this application, this is acceptable.  For other applications – particularly those relating to Health Psychology, you should seek better advice .

If you’re after a UX research technique to help you understand subjectivity and viewpoint, this might be helpful or interesting to you. If it is, then we’re good – but you might benefit from reading a little more about it.

What is Q-Methodology?

It’s a qualitative research technique, originally from psychology (particularly health psychology) which is used for understanding subjectivity . While it is a qualitative method, it produces numerical data, leading to it sometimes being referred to as a qual-quant methodology.

It helps reveal both consensus and divergence from consensus within a group of subjects. It characterises both that consensus and the divergence from it.

What is subjectivity ?

Consider subjectivity as an opposite of objectivity .  If you are objective , you have taken your viewpoint out of the equation.  If you have not taken your viewpoint out of the equation, then you are exhibiting subjectivity .  Objectivity is an absolute, but subjectivity is not – it is individual to a person.  Understanding subjectivity means understanding a user’s attitude regarding a topic.

Why is understanding subjectivity useful to us?

When we are talking to users, we want to be objective, but we want them to be subjective .  We want to understand what their subjectivity is, what it means to them and what it should mean to us.

Consider where you have sent out a survey and two users have returned almost identical responses but when you interview them you discover that their identical responses are hiding wildly different concerns, interests or goals.  They might be doing the same things with different motivations, or they might have encountered the same problems but have felt wildly different impacts from them. They might both say that one flow is bad, but have very different reasons for thinking so.

The difference in these situations is often not in what they needed to do or how they achieved it (or failed to), but in their subjectivity – their attitude and viewpoint.

Terminology

Because I heard of this approach from a Health Psychology professor – albeit in an ad-hoc, unofficial fashion – I’ve researched it using sources arising from that field.  I’m using (or perhaps abusing) Health Psychology practices and terminology, which is not always the same as is used in UX or software related fields.  So, here’s a bit of a glossary:

Cohort – The body of individuals being interviewed.

Concourse – The wider body of discussion – this could be made up of notes, recordings and quotes from interviews, excerpts from online communities, support tickets or any other body of user-created statements.

Statements (aka. Q-Statements) – A representative sample set of short phrases, drawn from the concourse.  The subjective true-ness or right-ness of these are compared via a Q-Sort to understand subjectivity.

Subjectivity – see the  introduction.

Q-Sort – A specific form of card-sort exercise, using the statements and performed individually with some or all of the cohort .  This is not the same as a QSort in software development terms, which makes googling a little bit harder.

How an interview series works

A quick summary

• Build a concourse or find a pre-existing one


• Prepare statement cards


• Prepare the q-sort matrix


• Run the interviews


• Analyse the data

Step one – build a concourse or find a pre-existing one

If there is no pre-existing concourse, then a two-part session is possible – the first part should be a group discussion with several subjects about the matter under discussion, from which a set of representative statements can be drawn.

If interviews have been conducted on this subject in the past, notes or recordings from those may be used, although it is entirely possible that the subjectivity of your new interviewees may not match that of those interviewed previously.

Step two – prepare statement cards

The facilitator should prepare a set of statement cards, which should be drawn directly from the concourse.  The number of statements can vary a lot – a smaller set of statements will lead to a faster interview process, but you also may not gain as much insight.  You should aim somewhere between 10 and 100 cards.

• Statements should be phrased as declarative statements . Some examples:
  
  
  
  • “It is the case that…”
  
  
  • “I must be able to…”
  
  
  • “I can…”
  
  
  • “It is important that…”
  
  
  • “It is good when…”
  
  
  • “It is bad when…”
  
  
  
  


• One statement per card, one card per statement


• The cards should all be uniquely numbered.


• The same cards should be used in each session in a series

When creating statements, it is better to start fresh, but you could take typical “As a [p] , I can do [x] to achieve [y] ” story titles and rephrase them as “I can do [x] to achieve [y] ” or even two statements – “I can do [x] ” and “I can do [y] ” separately.

The rephrase to remove the role is important, as including the role would affect how the statements are sorted.  This would provide a better-than-nothing set of statements to work with.

Likewise, separating the reason or end goal from the specific actions taken towards it lets you understand where subjects differing viewpoints may result in different actions for the same goal, or the same action for different goals.

Step three – prepare the Q-Sort matrix

At the start of each interview session, the facilitator should prepare a Q-sort grid.  The configuration may vary, but the following will usually be true:

• It is a funnel-shaped symmetrical grid able to accommodate all the statement cards


• There will usually be more than three columns – typically five, seven or nine.


• The columns will have different heights to accomodate different numbers of cards each.


• The central column will accomodate the most cards, outer columns the least, with a steady decline moving outwards. Often modelled on a normal distribution .


• The columns will be labelled across the top and given a value.

Step four – run the q-sort interview sessions

1. Run a one-on-one q-sort interview for each subject in the cohort


2. The facilitator should explain that the exercise is about understanding viewpoint , and as such there are no right or wrong answers. The statement cards are also a talking point and may be discussed or talked around. These sessions can be recorded as if they were any other interview – the cards and sorting exercise provide a framework for the interview as well as being an act of research on their own.


3. The participant should sort the cards into the matrix, depending on how well the cards fit their understanding, interests or needs. If the session is being recorded with audio-only, the facilitator should ensure that the cards being discussed are each read aloud, and their eventual placement is made clear for the recording.


4. After each session, the facilitator should document which cards were placed into which columns. They should do this by creating a record for each participant. That record should be a list of card number, column score pairs.

Step five – analyse the data

After the interviews, the facilitator can perform some simple analysis with (for example) excel.  There are several useful things which can be produced:

Heatmap – consensus

• create a square grid with card numbers on one axis and column values on the other.


• Fill each cell with the percentage of users who placed that card in that column.


• Convert numerical values to a colour shade to produce a heat-map.


• Use the heatmap to spot commonality or difference of viewpoints, and therefore identify consensus or an absence of consensus.

Fingerprint – individual viewpoint

• For each participant, create a rectangular grid with card numbers on one axis and column values on the other.


• Fill any cells where a participant matched card number and column number.


• Overlay one fingerprint over another to identify commonality/difference of viewpoint.

Heatmap / Fingerprint comparison

Overlay a Fingerprint over the overall heatmap to identify where it varies or matches any consensus.

Fingerprint grouping

Identify similar fingerprints within the cohort and use these groups as a basis for persona creation – similar fingerprints imply a similar viewpoint.

• Treat each fingerprint as a vector, determine the “distance” between fingerprints by subtracting one from the other.
  
  
  
  • The shorter the distance, the closer the subjectivities.
  
  
  • The greater the distance, the more different the subjectivities, and the greater likelihood that they should be different personas.
  
  
  
  


• Two users might have same goals, same day-to-day activities, but have different subjectivities. This would indicate they are a different persona who happens to be in a similar role, but who operates in a very different way with different priorities or in a very different space.

Further analysis?

Data scientists and statisticians can then apply tools like Principal Component Analysis or other Factor Analysis to the results if they feel the need to do so. This may help with further definition of the most significant differences between uncovered subjectivities.

Limits of Horror

I had mistakenly included this in my Saturday sketchnotes before.  I’ve moved it from there and placed it here instead, so if it looks familiar, that would be why!

I confess this is one of my less readable sketchnotes.  But I like it because I picked a thematic layout and managed to largely stick with it all the way through.

Ed (a friend and the moderator of this panel) gently prodded the panellists enough that they could have a discussion in which he was also a participant without taking over… feeding in a few examples or cues along the way to keep things rolling, and also being a walking encyclopedia of film – always useful on this kind of panel!

Unsurprisingly, the general opinion of the panel seemed to be that there isn’t really a hard line between Horror and Thriller… and a lot of where that fuzzy line sits doesn’t come down to the majority of the work, but instead to how much it leaves hanging.

3D Printing Gets Smart

I nearly didn’t go to this panel, as I’ve heard a lot of talk about 3d printing over the years and it’s all got rather repetitive…  but I ended up attending due to either a gap or a full panel elsewhere (I forget which). I’m glad I did, as it managed to cover new ground whilst remaining grounded in reality. I’m not able to add much beyond what’s in the sketchnotes, so here they are!

Watching a Galaxy Far, Far away

I wasn’t sure what to go to after the 3d printing session either.  I’d halfway assumed that anything star-wars focussed would be packed out (it often is) and that it might be a bit of slow or tedious listen – being a single-person presentation about that person’s personal experience of star wars.  But I wanted to go to something in this slot, and in the end, this was the least unlikely looking for me (the others didn’t look bad, to be clear, just not for me at that point in time, or involving a speaker or moderator I’d decided I’d heard enough of for the time being).

How wrong could I be!

Heartfelt, personal and loaded with interesting bits and pieces about both the star wars films and the times and culture the speaker grew up in – I think I’d say this was one of my high points of the con.  It’s certainly stuck with me more than some of the panel discussions did – and they were generally to a pretty high standard.

So, Marta Maria Casetti, well done!

It’s also stuck in my head pretty well as I planned to do a single page of notes, and so settled on a layout and theme with that in mind… and then had to repeat it in a hurry as the notes flew out onto the pages!  In fact, I was too slow with the pen to get a fourth page set in time to cover Rogue One – which was also discussed in the same manner.

Making Horror – Hacking the Player’s Brain

A panel on techniques for making players experience horror in computer games, LARPs and beyond?  It’s like they saw me coming!

I’m going to let the sketchnotes speak for themselves here…

End of the Con

At that point, there were more things we could have gone to, but Katrina and I were both tired and had both just come out of panels we really enjoyed… so we decided to say a few goodbyes to folk around the con and start our journey home.

Going out on a high note was a better plan than trying to cling on the to the very end, especially as the next slot looked slightly sparse for both of us.  We’d both have been able to find something to hold our attention in the remaining few slots, but felt it was better to call it a day and brave public transport whilst still able to function.

Thus ended Nine Worlds 2017 for us. We’re already looking forward to Nine Worlds 2018, even if it makes the mooted move to Birmingham!

It’s that time of year again.  Nine Worlds, aka London Geekfest has just concluded, so I fire up the scanner and scan in all my scribbled sketchnotes… whilst also using them as a prosthetic memory to help me blog about this event.

I’ve been trying a slightly different style this year, which is slower at chewing through sketchbook pages, and more useful for me as an aide-memoire… but, as it turns out, looks slightly less cool when scanned in.  Ah well.  I’m learning this new style as I go.

About Sketchnotes…

Throughout the convention I had several people say “I wish I could do that” .  To which, in almost all cases, I have to say “you can” .

I’m far from the best at sketchnoting, and I’m largely making it up as I go along. If you look at my notes, you’ll see that I’m not especially skilled as an artist – particularly not when I’m powering through scribbling whilst trying to keep up with people’s speech.

There’s very little technical skill involved.  I mostly do it as it helps me stay focused on what’s being said, and helps me remember it afterwards far more than just writing down words does. Treating words and scribbles as pictures probably shoves it through some different bit of my brain, and doing that helps me remember it all.

I’m not going to say that your first few sketchnotes will look any good. Many of mine look pretty awful – and I’m fine with that.  They still serve their purpose, and I share them because people seem interested in them. I do sometimes “forget” to share the really bad ones, but mostly I even put up the ones which didn’t work out.  Sometimes with some edits.

That said, I did go to a half-day workshop on doing this a few years ago. So I did get some advice and was given some confidence.  I’ve forgotten most of it, and I’m yet to try using some of the advice I got from it.  I’m still learning as I go.

So – if you wish you could do sketchnotes… my advice is to start doing sketchnotes.  It’s not the most helpful advice, but it’s the best I can do right now.

Maybe I should run a sketchnoting workshop sometime, or at least write a post about the things I pay attention to while doing it.

Meanwhile, on to the con report and sketchnotes…

Access:LARP

Accessibility is a topic I care about.  Usually in terms of software, and largely as part of my day job.  LARP is also a topic I care about, although rarely as a part of my day job.

As somebody with an anxiety disorder and some memory issues, it’s also a personally relevant topic and something I tend to pay some attention to – and in a way that many people don’t.  It’s very easy in web accessibility to focus on blindness and screen-readers, for instance.  All well and good, but doesn’t help somebody with motor control issues or cognitive concerns.

So, this workshop was totally up my street. It began with a short talk on what accessibility is, and how it can be applied in a LARP context, and then lead on to a workshop where we had a bit of an idea-jam and stepped through a design process with steps focusing on accessibility.

It’s not a process I’d particularly thought about before, but I will start to think about in future. If you’re interested, the folks running the session have a website .

For reference, the off-the-cuff LARP idea we came up with was a doctors surgery with multiple rival doctors… each of whom was a [blank] punk doctor.  So, one steampunk, one cyberpunk, one dieselpunk, etc… each of whom had their own specialities and skills. The PCs would largely be the staff of the surgery, having to determine deal with a stream of patients with ailments. Their challenge would come from trying to balance how well suited each patient was to each doctor against each doctor’s need to see more patients to earn their keep. We would use documentation to allow doctors to diagnose based on symptoms.

The process we went through began with some basic LARP design steps – who has what role in the game, how does the plot reach the players, and so on. From there, we moved on to the accessibility part – thinking about what difficulties our plot and theoretical gamespace could pose, and ways to avoid, ameliorate or recify those diffculties.  Not to make things easier for those with specific access needs, but to make them no more difficult .

Police and the Supernatural – Law Enforcement Professionals’ View of Urban Fantasy

This was a panel discussion about how well (or badly) law enforcement roles are presented in Ben Aaronovitch’s and Paul Cornell’s respective London Supernatural police series.

In general, I think it can be summarised as both series having their ups and downs.  Paul Cornell’s Hidden London series was praised for having the byzantine organisational landscape and interactions of law enforcement very well portrayed, versus Ben Aaronovitch’s River’s of London getting recognised for having the copper’s attitude and mindset pretty much bang on… although Peter Grant himself (the main character in the series) was singled out as not being a particularly good copper (an a “gobby probby”) – which I think is fair, as that’s the impression I get from the books, too.  I think that latter part is intentional, though. Lesley May was always depicted as being better at the job in the earlier books, and Peter was always just-about-good-enough.

Deeds Not Words

At a previous Nine Worlds, there was a session on silent comics – comics either without dialogue or without words at all. At that session, there was mention from a creator about a work they were creating with a deaf protagonist and which used real sign language (BSL) in the artwork.

That comic is “Deeds Not Words”, and the first part of it is out now.  This session was delivered by the creators, and talked about the comic, the process by which it was created, the techniques they used and so on.

In particular, it included snippets of the reference videos used for the artwork, and discussion of the process of translating from those dynamic videos into static artwork in a way that works visually whilst retaining accurate and useful signed content… given that writing a series of signs in a single panel of artwork to convey speech is not exactly viable.

We picked up the first part of Deeds Not Words after the session. Having read it, we’re now eagerly awaiting part two.

Visions of an Interstellar Human Future

This was an interesting panel which didn’t quite go where I wanted.

We heard from the panellists about their views of  interstellar futures .  We also heard about how they thought there might be interstellar humans and a bit about about possible human futures …  but the three key words in the title only ever joined the conversation in pairs.  It never really felt like it put all three together to discuss  interstellar human futures .

I understand entirely why – it’s a tough topic to keep realistic, but with the panel that was present, I’d have liked them to try a little more on that front.  But after a slightly slow start, it did pick up to being an interesting panel, even if it stopped a little short of where I wanted it to go.

It also suffered slightly from being largely populated by authors with a vested interest in one of the three sub-combinations that did get discussed.

Not a bad panel, but seemed oddly pessimistic for the con and the topic. If I go to a panel titled “Visions of an Interstellar Human Future”, I don’t expect the theme of the panel to be “there won’t be one”.  Towards the end, they did start discussing what conceits you could employ, or which physical laws you could choose to ignore to make it possible, which I think would have lead to what I wanted, but time limits meant it stopped there.

Grey Members of a Congregation of Nightmare

I nearly skipped this talk as it was getting on in the day and I was tired… but I’m glad I didn’t as it was excellent . It was a single speaker delivering a trimmed down presentation from an academic paper. When she read from the paper things were a little dry, but when her enthusiasm kicked in and she spoke more extemporaneously, her knoweldge and enthusiasm for the topic came through and carried her on.

The crux of the talk seemed to be on the difference between how heavy metal musicians and performances use the wolf howl to how horror films do.  In particular, how heavy metal uses it to draw a crowd together whilst horror uses it to invoke fear – and how the heavy metal usage is closer to what wolves actually use their howls for.

End of day one…

At that point, con self-care needs kicked in.  I spent a little more time chatting and socialising and then retired for the day.

I will follow up with Saturday and Sunday notes when I have the brain capacity to do so.

Recently, I had the honour and privilege of being Best Man for a friend’s wedding. Which meant, amongst several other things, I was required to provide a stag do.

Easy, you might think. Piss up in a brewery level of ease.

But no.  Not unless breweries come in teetotaller friendly form.

Low Tea and Mocktails

Yes, a stag do for a non-drinking groom. So we went for low-tea at the luggage room , followed by returning to my place for an evening of mocktails – and it’s that last bit that I’m going to post about here.  I have, at various times, for extended periods, been off the booze .  I’m just embarking on another of those right now, in fact, so this was particularly timely for me also.

But mocktails have an annoying tendency to become a load of different fruit juices in a bucket with some ice and a pole.  They tend to lack the punch and the fun of their more boozy siblings.  I wasn’t going to have that, so I found a few weird and wonderful ingredients as well as the basics, and threw them into the mix.  I also pulled together a bit of a guide for the event:   The Mocktail Guide (created for the stag do)  (.pdf download)

There were remarkably few failed mocktails, and I think the approach taken of everyone taking turns (a couple at a time) trying to come up with something, and everyone else then getting to try it out. With a bit of guidance, people really did start to experiment.

The only real crash-and-burn of the evening was the cocktail which became known as the “Toilet Block”, a new legend in it’s lifetime, able to reproduce the scent of urinal cakes as a taste  in beverage form.  It will live forever in infamy.

We experimented again with Seedlip Spice 94 (which still, despite sounding amazing, lacks a punch) and for the first time with Seedlip Garden 108… which was somehow delicious despite tasting very much like peas.

But mostly, we experimented with various ratios of the following flavours:

• Sweet


• Sour


• Strong

…with a touch of something else to add a bit of oomph.  With cocktails, the strong would normally be alcohol, but with that off the table, you have to get your strong somewhere else… and that sometimes comes in a bundle with the sweet.

I’d started out making some extra “sweet” ingredients ahead of time – sugar syrup and a few flavoured syrups as well – mostly one-to-two parts sugar dissolved in one part boiling water until invisible.

One of those was a chipotle chilli syrup, which turned out to make a pretty decent “strong” component for cocktail purposes, whilst also being a “sweet”.  I’m still working on how to make a dry “strong” component that works well in mocktails without being full of sugar, but I’m sure ideas will happen.

As it turns out, the chipotle syrup was a star ingredient… and I had some luck with using strong-brewed and cooled Lapsang Suchong tea as a whisky alternative – it has the smokeyness needed, anyway.

Ratios, mixes & Cocktail Families

With cocktails, things tend to boil down to the ratios and flavour combinations. The ratio tends to determine the kind of cocktail you’re making. Ratios vary massively, but I’ve seen all of the following

For a Sour:

• 2 part strong flavour  : 1 part sweet flavour : 1 part sour flavour is traditional


• 8 : 3 : 3 (aka: 2 : 3/4 : 3/4) is more common these days

For an Ancestral:

• 1 cube Sugar and 1 dash of aromatic bitters of some form (enough to soak through sugar cube), with enough water to dissolve it – this makes up 1 part sweet and 1 part sour


• 2 parts Strong – build up the drink with a stronger flavour

For what would be a “spirit forward” if it was boozy:

As Ancestral, but with 2 parts strong : 1 part different  strong: 1 part sweet : 1 part sour

…and more.

There are meany, many more.  But because non-alcoholic “strong” doesn’t have quite the same kick to it as booze does, you need a little extra to give the kick. That’s why the Chipotle syrup worked so well – it added the oomph missing from other non-alcoholic ingredients

Take a look at other cocktail recipes, and look at how they’re assembled.  Swap out the “strong” for alternatives, and try to sneak some extra punch in via variations on one or two of the other ingredients.

An example…

Tea & Chipotle Sour

Make as if making a whisky sour, but swap out the whisky for lapsang suchong tea which has been strong brewed and then cooled.  Also swap out the simple syrup for chipotle syrup to give it the kick that the whisky would have had, but the tea lacks.

1. Combine:

• 60ml Lapsang Suchong tea – strong brewed & cooled – 3 parts strong (ish)


• 30ml Lemon Juice – fresh squeezed – 2 parts sharp/sour


• 30ml Chipotle syrup –   2 part sweet (with a hint of strong to bolster the tea by being strong as well as sweet)

2. Shake with ice, then strain to remove the ice.

3. Add some egg white – I’d go with a tablespoon or so.

4. Shake again to get a bit of foam, strain & serve with a dash of bitters on the foam.

Other Ideas for Mocktail Bolsters or boosters

The chipotle syrup was a good way to add some kick back into mocktails, to get the away from the “bucket of fruit juice” flavours…  but it can’t be the only one.

Here are some ideas – I’ve not tried them yet, but think they’d be worth a look. Let me know if you try them.

Syrups

Other chilli syrups – There are a surprising variety of chilli flavours out there. I’m tempted to try with Kashmiri Chillis (for indian fire), De Arbol (for clean mexican heat) or Habanero (slightly fruity spice).

Peppercorn syrup – I’ve not tried this but I could see it working

Ginger syrup – I really want to try this with fresh root ginger

Cinnamon syrup – You know how strong cinnamon has a kind of burn?  I’d like to try that in a cocktail.

Tinctures

So far, most of the non-alcohol based tinctures I’ve encountered have been quite mild, and the flavours have been easily lost, but I’m sure it must be possible to make stronger ones without using alcohol…

I’d be interested in herb or spice tinctures from things like rosemary or cinnamon.

Others ideas?

Let me know by commenting!

Originally published at Eggwhite's Eggbox. You can comment here or there.

After listening to the ” What is Wrong With UX? ” podcast (from Kate Rutter and Laura Klein ) for a while, I recently picked up the book the hosts have been relentlessly shilling (and writing or contributing to) since the dawn of time  start of the podcast.

But to start with, before I get onto the book ( Build Better Products by Laura Klein), I’ll mention the podcast a bit more.

They introduce it every time as “The podcast where two old ladies yell at each other about how to make products suck slightly less”, and typically conclude by complaining about how they’ve run out of booze.

If you’re a UXer who likes talking about UX a) in a frank, open manner and b) in a pub, this might be a podcast for you.  They have a cynicism which is oddly refreshing in this particularly shiny and glossy field, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been to workshops presented by one or both of them at some point.  One of them probably helped me get into sketchnoting… which you might have noticed included in some of my other posts.

So.  The book.

It’s a no-nonsense, clear and straightforward guide to UX processes, which (for a nice change) acknowledges that some of us are in-house UXers working in the enterprise space, and so have to live with our work for years (decades!) in a way that just doesn’t happen the same way in the consumer world.

There are parts of if which I’d describe as leaning towards “my first UX” or “teaching grandmother to suck eggs”, but they’re wrapped in a mountain of useful advice and sane ways to make some fairly weird and wonderful UX practices actually make sense to business users and developers .

Really, I ought to wait until I’ve finished reading the book before blathering on about it, but this time I decided not to.  Why?  Because it’s that good.  Because not only does it make sense to me in the UX field, but it’s also written in a clear and concise way that  managers,   directors and developers will understand and find useful as well.

It’s not about putting some UX next to your product, or trying to smear it on at the end.  It’s about baking UX design thinking in throughout the life-cycle of the product.  From identifying user needs, through promoting behaviour that supports and addresses them and on to validating assumptions, measuring outcomes and then iterating based on what you find .

I’ll be making sure a copy gets added to our office library, and quite possibly demanding that our product management team, senior developers and architects get locked in a room until they’ve read it.  If you’re a UXer who works with other human, read it.  It’s a breath of fresh air. Written with the same combination of capability, realism, pride and self-effacing humour that the podcast has, it manages something that most UX books have utterly failed at: It provides an enjoyable and memorable reading experience .

If you work with a UXer and don’t really know what they actually do or why they keep asking weird questions and going off sideways from problems, you could do a lot worse than picking this up.

Originally published at Eggwhite's Eggbox. You can comment here or there.

After my recent(ish) post about  Ninefox Gambit , I mentioned I’d be back to write about some other books. It’s taken a while to actually get back to the “add new post” screen of my blog, but I’m here now.

Slightly awkwardly, before I had a chance to write about Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff , they squeezed the sequel out of their brains and into mine via the publishing industry.  So I’m going to write about Illuminae and Gemina at the same time.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

• Tue, 17:50: RT @msdwrites: If you're not reading @newscientist, you're missing gems like this: https://t.co/EoRiLHYiys
• Tue, 22:54: RT @Strange_Animals: Tardigrades can survive temps of -270 up to 150C, survive for 10 years without water & can survive in space! https://t…
• Wed, 10:19: Okay... I'm working from home today after a few days off ill, but I'm seriously pining for the office aircon. #melty

Originally published at Eggwhite's Eggbox. You can comment here or there.

A few days ago, I returned from Nine Worlds 2016, aka: London Geekfest.

This was the third Nine Worlds convention I’ve been to, and true to form I enjoyed it a great deal.  That I enjoyed it in spite of a spot of sub-optimal health says a lot about the quality of the event.

Sketch-notes

As has become my habit at these things, I made some sketch-notes at pretty much every panel I went to.  I say “pretty much every…” because there were a couple that were either too dark or too crowded, and because I spent a couple of sessions lounging on beanbags watching…  well, I’ll come to that.

Some of the sketch-notes aren’t up to my usual standards.  In my defence, I wasn’t well and I was a bit out of practice.  But all the same, I’m uploading them here so you can see them.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

• Tue, 17:15: This is actually kind of cool - a quick RPG character generator: https://t.co/l4bRozMz2G
• Wed, 08:46: @London_Geekfest The person who ran the Fanvid Show said they'd put the recs list online somewhere - do you know if that's happened?
• Wed, 14:42: Okay, this is kind of an awesome retelling :) https://t.co/OaymEBKmKX
• Wed, 15:39: Spent a while this fixing defects only visible in MS Edge. It'd be easier if I could get Edge and my Dev VM on the same network somehow!

• Tue, 09:15: Bah. Inexplicably feeling a bit "side-effect"-ish today. Queasy, drowsy, wobbly & unfocussed. Bleurgh. Hopefully it'll improve.
• Tue, 10:30: Spent most of yesterday and today thinking a design change I was making wasn't going to be enough. Purely a cosmetic change, IxD unchanged.
• Tue, 10:31: I'd planned to do more extensive changes today. It was enough, no more needed. Not sure what to do, now...
• Tue, 16:45: Still have the UXer's equivalent of writer's block. Come back ideas, I don't REALLY want to eat you and digest you into designs, honest!