Goal progress
Beth Granter and I have made some great headway with the website evaluation we’re working on. As I mentioned last week, I love working with Beth. She’s brought so many great insights to the project so far. This is convincing me that an evaluation should ideally be a two-person job. It’s great to have two people looking at something from two different critical perspectives.
The evaluation process has prompted some interesting reflections for me on the idea of best practice. I try to look at best practices with a critical eye — they’re helpful, but I think they can block progress and innovation too. I can remember seeing someone publicly criticising a former employer’s new team for making changes that they felt went against the best practice they had established. I got it, but I also wondered: What if the new team knows something that you don’t? Things change. New insights appear. Best practice has to evolve sometimes. In this evaluation, I’ve seen a few design choices that — because of best practice thinking — I’ve adopted as pet peeves:
- Huge hero images taking up the whole area above ‘the fold’
- Hamburger menus
- Carousels
I approached this with an open mind, but in this case, the data backs up the best practice. So I’m going to drop a rare blanket rule: Don’t design webpages with a giant hero image and only an H1 heading for context. Unless you want to see a fall in engagement and a rise in your bounce rate, in which case, be my guest. The words are important. Put some intro text on that sucker.
I hit another big progress marker last week – 7 years of La Pope Ltd. I’ve said this in the past, but going self-employed is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. I love the work I do, how much it challenges me, and how much I’ve learnt and grown in both my personal and professional life.
Blockers
Despite loving self-employment and my work, I also have some low-level concerns/high-level curiosity about the future, on several fronts:
- Ageing. Discrimination against older people is rife, especially older women. I wonder a lot about how this’ll affect me as time goes on.
- Charity sector shifts. The sector is under so much pressure. There are mass redundancies, charities closing, fundraising challenges, and I’m thinking a lot about how I and my work fit into this landscape.
- Money. I have to be able to increase my income. I don’t own a home. I barely have a pension. We’re a single income household. Money and growth aren’t my focus — in fact I’d love to ignore them completely — but it’s a reality that my income needs to keep pace with rising prices. I’ve put up my day rate for the first time in a few years, but I need to find some other levers to pull too.
- Rest. The dream when I started the business was a 4-day work week. But I’m not there after 7 years. I want to do creative things, help others, and be more involved in my community. But I can’t do that if I only work, even though I love it.
The other blocker for me this week is fraud. Someone got hold of my business card details and had a Roblox, Argos, and pub-based spending fee. The money side of things is frustrating, especially as cancelling the card means I have lots of payments bouncing. Hopefully I’ll get the money back. But it’s the security side of things that’s bothering me — I have no idea how this happened.
Coming this week
- I have A LOT of workshops this week, 9 hours and counting
- Lots of website evaluation work, which is the perfect antidote to all the workshops
- I’m conducting some stakeholder interviews
- Helping a client to analyse card sort results
Source
- Behind the curve as always, I’ve recently started watching Severance. The final episode of the first season is some of the best TV I’ve seen in a long time.
- I enjoyed this Search Engine episode about the challenges of trying to manufacture a 100% US-made BBQ scrubber. A great example of storytelling that can illuminate wider issues.
- I also really enjoyed this episode of Pod Save the UK and the conversation with Professor Tim Lang about UK food security. Working with Global Alliance for the Future of Food got me thinking about this issue a lot, and I loved Professor Lang’s community-rooted solutions to a potential food crisis.
