Hidden Gems

Hidden Gems is about the things that I know and care about, which mostly means user experience design, my favourite tools and passing thoughts.

Wondering where to begin? Start with Solve Any Problem (most popular) or My Name Is A Geolocation (most personal).

User Experience Design

• Designers Don’t Like UCD
  Why UX designers are still facing problems we knew about in 1985.
• Solve Any Problem
  How to use the KJ Method as “a technique to solve any problem”.
• We Made Mistakes
  How building a website taught me valuable lessons about life and IA.
• 3D Dot Voting
  A technique for reaching consensus when dot voting doesn’t work.
• Becoming A UX Designer
  How I switched from web editor to UX designer in 2011.
• Open UX University
  Why you don’t have to pay fees to get a UX education in London. 
• The Hidden Business of UX
  Why user experience designers need to consider business processes too. 
• My First Design Jam
  Creating a service to help visitors to London feel more like locals.
• Improve Your Web Writing
  The quickest way to improve your web writing is to focus on structure.
• UX By Numbers
  Web analytics can offer great insight to UX designers.
• Design Tenets (And Their Opposites)
  Design principles can keep your team involved throughout the design process.

My Favourite Tools

• The Hidden Powers of SurveyMonkey
  My guide to the lesser-known features of SurveyMonkey.
• My Huffduffer UX Tag Bundle
  Find new podcasts about user experience and information architecture.
• PureText
  My favourite tool lets you paste unformatted text in any application.
• Triple Clicking
  A workflow improvement that will save you hours, days or maybe even weeks.
• Concatenate Rules
  If you work with text in Excel you need to know about Concatenate.

Passing Thoughts

• Escaping The Vacuum
  Information sources are out to crush you - and you are your only hope.
• The Alternative Vote System Explained 
  My simple explanation of how the Alternative Vote system works.
• Coasthopper Service Design
  The Coasthopper bus proves you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great service design. 
• Why Can’t I Shop By Meal?
  What improvements to online grocery shopping in the UK might look like.
• Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible
  Familiar ideas wrapped up into a useful article with examples to follow up on.
• None of us knows anything
  The History of Philosophy With No Gaps podcast throws amazing quotes.

Reviews

• Radiolab and Other Podcasts
  Try listening to these, my all time favourite podcasts.  
• The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
  A perfect introduction to branding for user experience designers.

Personal Stuff

• My Name Is A Geolocation
  My surname, Myddelton, isn’t the same as either of my parents’ names.

Government Web Work

• Tactics For Government Websites
  My top 5 tactics for running better government websites.
• Archiving the CABE Website
  How I archived the CABE website after funding was cut.
• Content Challenges in the CABE Archive
  Archiving the CABE website by reviewing 5,000 pages in 6 weeks.
• Technical Drawbacks in the CABE Archive
  The two areas that fail - internal search and links to external sites.