Writing by Justin Stach.
A collection of twelve watercolour paints feels like a lot until you sit down and start to work on painting a specific thing. “Do I have the right set of paints for the kind of paintings I want to create?” is something I often see asked about. A visualisation of the colours a palette of 18 colours can reach I wanted to see whether I could help to answer that question, and do it in a way that a…
I got tired of paying a subscription for a clipboard manager, so I went looking for a good-enough one. I found ClipHistory by Weiyuan Kong: it’s fast, native Swift, encrypted, no telemetry, and small enough that it fits on a floppy . It’s really a lovely piece of work. The engine, the capture, the AES-256-GCM encryption, the per-app exclusions, all theirs and all untouched. But of course, I’m a…
Turning a photo into paint recipes You’ve spotted a colour you want to paint: the blue-grey of a shadow on a wall, the warm green of a particular leaf, the exact dusty-white on the cake your youngest daughter just baked. You can see it but translating it into a mix from the tubes on your desk is the hard bit, and getting it wrong by even a little is the difference between a painting that sings and…
I’ve had a growing list of these in Notes rounding-up the rules I try and live by. I’ll add more as I find them (last updated 2023.04.15) Spend more time really understanding the present and making it better than you do predicting or designing the future (the now is undervalued) Make things better - always leave things in a better state than you found them Decentralise the decisions, centralise…
The purpose of writing-up this recipe is that I wanted to share a simple, no-nonsense daily bake that tastes great and doesn’t require a ridiculous amount of process or effort. I reckon there’s not much more than 15 minutes of working time required, and the final results are great. Example output The crumb of the output Ingredients Starter (at 100% hydration) - 100g Water at room temperature -…
Note: this is the second part of my notes about how I offset my family’s expected CO2 footprint for 2020. The first part describes how we calculated the footprint . I decided to use the UN Carbon Offset Platform because I’d seen it referenced a few times on other sites when I was looking at calculators. It allows you to look through lots of projects and select ones based on various criteria such…
Short version: I used 4 different calculators to try and get an understanding of how big my family’s carbon footprint is so that I can buy some carbon offsets. I got wildly differing results ranging from 14.1 tonnes of CO2 for my family up to 32.4 tonnes for just me. WWF carbon calculator Calculator 1: WWF - https://footprint.wwf.org.uk This is a personal carbon calculator rather than a…
Doctrine Grid Tool Updated 2020.09.04: Purkis Layout added. I wanted to use Simon Wardley’s very helpful set of universally useful patterns (aka Wardley’s Doctrine) in some forthcoming research I’m planning to do with a large organisation. When I’ve used it in the past it’s been pretty much as described in this tweet. X : Any strategy tips? Me : Yes ... Don't. a) Get 10-15 ppl in your org to…
You’re a small team who are trying to change culture and practice within a large org. You’ve been set up well (like many other digital transformational teams) with strong, capable people who have done this shit before. You know through experience that showing results, and showing a clear, detailed vision of what the ambition might look like gets attention and builds trust with the high-ups. Build…
I’ve had a problem with the use of authentic when it comes to describing some sort of aspired behaviour or way of being, but hadn’t quite got around to pinning it down until this tweet from the estimable John Cutler , who if you don’t already follow should do. Often at work we sabotage our own goals/credibility by letting people get under our skin. You can be authentic without falling into the…
Previously I’ve outlined why we needed to create a more systemic approach to building our digital UI and described how brand and identity play a role in this, in this final part I’ll talk about the design system that we built, which we called Tesco’s Digital Design Language and of course immediately gave the three letter acronym of DDL. We created the DDL as a visual design system to address the…
This was intended to be about a talk design systems and how they relate to Tesco’s brand and identity. So let me start defining some terms: Brand Our brand is what people believe about us. It’s how our customers think about us, and how they talk to other people about us on the other side it’s about how we present our organisation to the world: are we a plucky underdog you want to win, a ball of…
Here is the issue Our digital estate grew very quickly and tactically: when Tesco saw an opportunity to meet its customers in a new channel we went for it - groceries, sofas, kitchens, GM, carpets, wine by the case, media streaming, and so on. Every time we did this we followed the same pattern, we set up something small and we rolled it into something bigger and better, or we closed it down. This…
Feedback we live for Getting buy-in Make a compelling business case showing the large underserved market of customers to which no supermarket is making any attempt to capture Show how inclusive design and accessibility make the product better for everyone regardless of disability or impairment Let your leadership teams hear from customers who are being excluded from your services and how…
I’ve been thinking about value creation for the last week or so. I had beers with a friend and he made the crazily provocative statement that he felt like in his career there were only a couple of times where he felt that he was actually putting new value into the world, rather than just moving it around. Hmm… His line of thinking was that most of our working activity is spent moving value from…
When a company as large as Tesco creates digital products and services, they’re used by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. As a brand we’re unashamedly mass market and aim to meet the needs and support the lives of the whole country. Designing for such a broad range of customers creates a fairly unique set of constraints and considerations on our product design teams including…
We’re in the process of creating an alpha for the store locator on Tesco.com, and we’re getting pretty close to the point where we’re ready to move into beta. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been building a prototype in the browser that allows us to test the decisions we’ve been making about the UI and to make sure we’re reducing the risk around moving into beta and production code. Early last…
We’re used to using market research in Tesco, which is a powerful tool for building insight about large groups of customers or target markets. With our service design approach, we use customer research from the bottom-up and look closely at how representative customers interact with our existing or our possible products and services. As a team, our purpose is to improve the way Tesco designs…
Before and after Customers using Tesco online probably aren’t aware that our digital estate includes over 100 different websites and dozens of apps. But they do notice when something blocks them from getting what they need. They’ve been telling us they often find it difficult to move between different Tesco sites, and struggle with having to do things differently on each different platform. So…
Digital Design Language phases and why we have an iterative design process We’re building Tesco’s Digital Design Language (the DDL) like a product, using iterative design to continually optimise the guidance on the toolkit. This means that we’re open to hearing how the toolkit, which is where we publish the specification can be improved. DDL is a collaborative project with teams across Tesco…
Why design for emotion? It’s no longer enough for an interface to be usable, it needs to be an expression of the personality of the business behind it. Today’s audiences are not just more sophisticated, more social and more expectant of a human face to their technology, they want nothing less than pleasure from their digital services. The careful use of emotion in our interfaces can make them more…