Slack picnic

Nothing says 'man of the people' quite like a politician calling a by-election at public expense on the issue of whether or not he should have the right to secretly take donations from Thai-based crypto billionaires and a convicted fraudster

🎉 - Off you f*ck. ... Wait what?

I'm still holding out hope for a resignation.

At the “a day off is more stress and worry than its worth” stage of not managing my life very well.

I've just realised who the current Alexa voice I have enabled reminds me of! 🫢 Kemi Badenoch.

This slide didn't make the cut but it was fun to make. Working in the NHS you get to suggest that the problem you and your teams are working on, is indeed, one of the hardest. :)

40 something very experienced user centred interaction designer. Thinking about changing country. New Zealand, Australia or Canada all seem appealing without much real insight. Sounds difficult. Is it?

Some of you might remember, a while back I wrote a blog post pulling apart a job advert for a UX Accessibility Specialist at JD Sports. It turns out I wasn't shouting into a void. They reached out! We worked together on it, and we got to a good outcome! www.craigabbott.co.uk/blog/2025/mi...

If AI image generation lent it self to anything, surely it is "Selleck, Waterfall , Sandwich"?

Train friend 🐶 ❤️

I bought this book the week I started at the NHS. Only just getting to reading it. A Paul Downey recommendation.

So it was his fault the ships weren’t getting through but just incase there was any doubt….. He probably wants to claim it’s part of the plan now.

I don’t know as much as I’d like but every snippet I’ve seen shows me this is a real leader. How they think, they talk/communicate and behave.

Just me with a constant feeling of being overwhelmed? I want to eliminate any unnecessary ‘noise’. Might crowd source a list. 1. Any ‘news’ said at me by a person in a suit on TV/YouTube/Etc.

Really enjoying the OHNO guide to Type Design.

Stop scrolling & post two characters who bring you happiness.

Interested to see whats happening over at data.gov.uk 👀

Back week-noting: paulsmith.site/weeknotes/20...

I always forget about Sunday trading laws and end up stood outside a shop in the cold.

Vibe coding is: being three hours into debugging something that took twenty minutes to build.

Can anybody recommend a place to buy good wholebean coffee? Ideally next day delivery. Medium-Dark and Dark roasted are my faves.

In Walmart test, traditional online shopping beat agentic commerce bigtime.

Basecamp do have some incredibly good interaction designers. www.fizzy.do is really jolly nice and well thought out. Remember Trello? That but better and modern. No AI (phew!). Free and self hosting is possible too.

Monzo’s loan/credit repayment design patterns are so sneakily evil and deceptive. I’m almost impressed. I get they’re seeking profit, I don’t begrudge them that, they’ve made a nice service/product but the very carefully crafted friction to a user reducing the interest payable is quite something.

Rate your 2025 out of 10 (1 being a festering pile of bullhonky, 10 being happy-happy-joy-joy)

The email I've been waiting over 20 years for. Openreach have rolled out their 'full fibre' to where I live. It's too little, too late. Profiteering sods have held me and this country back for decades. Addicted to metered copper lines they've had their knee on the throat of a vital service.

NX, pnpm, React, Webpack, Typescript, NPM, Node, Styled components, Storybooks, Jest, Git Hooks........ Off to the sea-bed you go.

"Developer convenience" often equates to "Doesn't care about the user".

Returning to User flow diagram you created a few months ago is a good test of how good a job you did. Give myself a solid 8/10 but always room for improvement.

💯

How to melt my brain quick time. Put me in a room with a bunch of smart software devs/engineers talking about APIs, security and infrastructure and then have their work be dependant on me. 😂

On my way to London for an NHS Hackday event with colleagues from across digital, clinical and telephony. Looking forward to learning more about natural language processing, data transfer and how UCD can play a role.

A slide-deck with lazily generated AI imagery is already akin to using WordArt.

Wish I had time and motivation to write week-notes or read other people’s regularly. Between work, life laundry, looking after the kids, trying to be healthy, to be active and all the other demands. It struggles to make it onto the day’s to-do list.

ChatGPT has changed the game when writing code. Asking it to write nunjucks filters with a basic prompt, converting chunks of html into consumable objects/dictionaries. Off-loading these tasks lets me get to the thing I'm trying to do much faster.

If you want to create completely free software for other people to use, the absolute best delivery mechanism right now is static HTML and JavaScript served from a free web host with an established reputation. Here's why think that in more detail: simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/28/...

I will go to extraordinary lengths to hide wires.

As somebody who had to fight hard for an EHCP for my step-daughter, this sort of bull is infuriating.

Used ChatGPT earlier to do the work of a 9 year old feature request to an open source templating language. Tests and all. Now thats useful and worked well with a handful of tweaks.

Absolutely. 💯- Nearly always means it’s hiding inequity somewhere.

Interesting post from CBP (@britishprogress.bsky.social): "Recruiting and retaining Civil Service Technologist" has some good observations and recommendations. Thoughts? cc: @tomski.com @andrewgreenway.bsky.social britishprogress.org/uk-day-one/r...

Gromit goes for a snack

I miss Trello. JIRA Raaaage!

Out of interest contractor friends…. “Inside IR35”… Anybody able to share how much a typical public sector Senior or Lead Interaction/Service Designer rate shakes out to be per day? DMs welcome.

By all accounts I got my current job ahead of over 150 applicants. It took an application form and two competency based interviews. Less than 12 months ago. Sounds like I might have to apply for it again soon as part of the abolition/subsuming of NHS England. Isn’t that a treat. 😞

What hosting service/platform do you use for your website or blog? I'm using Netlify at the moment but looking to save money and know if there is anything better out there.

uBlock Origin has itself been blocked by Google Chrome. Time to switch browser.

Finally!!! Colour picker automatically chooses picked colour by default. Affinity apps have needed this for so long. affinity.serif.com/en-gb/whats-...

Microsoft Teams recordings are good. AI summaries are usually decent but watching some back recently has made me realise that I still struggle to succinctly get a point across. I waffle, say 'err' a lot and generally sound like the imposter from a rough North Manchester estate with low GCSE grades 😬