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Week 9: Changing lightbulbs

Frankie RobertoPosted on

Photo of a lightbulb recessed into ceiling

A good week, with good weather at last.

I missed out on a day in the Leeds office due to family scheduling logistics, but made up for it with some good chats in the London office.

We are reducing the gap between design and development in my team, with some better kick-offs and collaborative ticket-writing.

Rules

One of the ongoing challenges for our team is working out which rules need to be enforced technically within the service, and which ones don’t.

Enforcing rules can mean a lot of extra design and development time and lead to more complicated code and interfaces to maintain. On the other hand, it can help prevent mistakes or bad practice.

The balance between these two is also different on a service like ours which is used daily by staff members verses one used by the public in a one-off transaction.

Deciding this is tricky, and means asking a bunch of questions about what the consequences are, and double checking whether it’s a cast iron rule or more of a guideline.

Learning Figma

I’ve been slowly learning how to use Figma, alongside also using the NHS Prototype Kit.

Figma is similar in many ways to apps like Sketch or Illustrator which I’ve used in the past, but also different enough that learning all of its user interface quirks and keyboard shortcuts takes some time.

I’m also unsure how much effort should be put into organising Figma files (naming layers, creating re-usable components and so on), verses treating them as a quick way to sketch ideas.

Changing lightbulbs

At home our flat has an internal corridor with lots of recessed halogen bulbs. Over the past several months (ok, maybe longer) it’s slowly gotten darker as the bulbs have failed. I’m not sure I even noticed at first, but it got to the point where it was hard to really see anything at night time.

Something finally snapped and I ordered a bunch of replacement LED bulbs, installed them and, wow, it’s so bright that it’s taken some getting used to. Why didn’t I do this earlier?

This would make some kind of good metaphor.

NHS acronyms of the week

This feature is back!

Acronyms learnt this week:

Enjoy the football!