Weeknotes #3

Monday kicked off with review and retrospective, Pang our intern shared some work she’d been doing implementing a new validation panel. This panel will be used in conjunction with tabs in the entry editor to summarise any problems with an entry prior to publishing. Whilst not complete, it did highlight some inconsistencies in our UI validation that have now been resolved.

Dan demonstrated the new tabs behaviour in the entry editor. Unfortunately some of the drag and drop work carried out in the previous sprint had to be reworked. I need to find ways of breaking down this work more appropriately, ideally these tasks would have been done together with a team delivering the whole feature rather than in smaller pieces.

I’ve been involved with a variety of meetings and discussions this week around the redesign of Contensis and contensis.com.

Design inspiration

There are a number of features that we’d like to see developed in Contensis:

A writing experience to aid the creation of long form content such as blog posts, news articles and support documentation. This type of content doesn’t normally follow a ‘structure’ but may contain elements of structured content. Our authors need a better canvas to work on.

Better collaboration and tools for reviewing content as well as improved workflows for multilingual content.

To do this well we need to look at the underlying design system, and we’re aware that some key aspects of the current design won’t support these features in a delightful way.

A few of us took some time to research other design systems, products and sites to bring together a set of examples that included, typographic hierarchy, delightful interactions, whitespace, app flows as well as different design aesthetics.

We each shared a mood board explaining the reasons for our choices, there was a lot of synergy to the boards that we created. It’s an exciting part of the process and will feed into the design principles sessions we have planned for next week.

Preparing foundations

I got involved in some discussions around the early stages of restructuring our web properties, separating Contensis into its own domain.

This involved in-depth conversations about our current support site ZenHub, API documentation and the transition of customers from on premise to cloud, I’m sure there will be plenty of other conversations in the coming weeks.

I’m keen for the workflow of producing this content to be improved as part of the project.

I had a few tasks following the discussions, to review the information architecture and an initial audit of the content that has been proposed to be migrated.

Paired writing

I’m involved in all sorts of writing at Zengenti, microcopy in the app, documentation, tender responses, reviewing API documentation as well as writing release notes and various blog posts.

However Ryan and I have been pair writing as a way to improve the quality of our posts, address our understanding of a topic and to improve what we publish for our customers.

This week Ryan and I finished off a blog post about site view, the new site structuring feature we’ve built to work alongside content types and entries.

Family

This week was my Friday off and an opportunity to down tools and spend some time with the girls. I dropped E to nursery, she’s such a blessing, excited to learn and spend time with others. She’s beginning to pick up welsh already, definitely a bright cookie. I really need to spend some time getting back to learning welsh.

It was great to spend some time with M at the park on the way home from drop off, she’s much more physical than E ever was, loves lots of rough and tumble. She’s such a confident climber and loves to spin fast on the roundabout. It was a beautiful morning, sun shining and blue skies. Love days like this. Joy seemed to enjoy the brief break

Once E had finished for the day we headed to Victoria Park in Cardiff to enjoy the last of this weather, we were hoping to get into the splash park, much to our disappointment it was closed.

We still enjoyed our picnic tough, and the girls expelled some energy in the park. We finished off with our first trip to Bloc coffee, a great addition to a stunning park, I’m not a big fan of cities, but could happily live in an area with green spaces like this.