Webinar, course update, bullet journaling, job update, Veganuary and Red January.

I did a webinar on form design patterns

Vitaly from Smashing Magazine invited me to do a webinar on my book Form Design Patterns.

I talked about why form design is so important and then I did a live redesign of the ASOS checkout flow.

It was really fun and I even though I was dreading the Q&A at the end, the audience asked a load of awesome questions which I think I managed to answer okay.

In fact, it went so well, that I might be doing another one.

Watch it here

(Note: FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. ‘Fire’, as in the hot stuff you shouldn’t touch, doesn’t play a significant role in my life :). You’ll understand why I mention this once you watch the webinar.)

Design course update

Some of you may know that I’m creating a course on interaction design.

But I’ve been worried about the amount of work it’s going to be—and I want to be sure that it’ll meet people’s expectations in terms of subject and content.

So my plan now is to create a couple of lessons and send it out to a few of my subscribers for some early feedback. Thanks to Amy for the idea.

Work is good

I’ve been working at the Department for Education recently and our mission is to get more people into teaching.

So far I’ve helped the team get the ‘Apply for teacher training’ service into private beta, conducted an internal accessibility audit and made a bunch of improvements to the user experience.

I’m now focusing on the training provider and service support side of things.

There’s lots to do but I’m really enjoying the mission and working with such a friendly, talented and productive team.

I started bullet journalling

I’ve started bullet journalling and so far I’m really enjoying it. It doesn’t take much effort and it’s helped me focus and get things out of my head.

I’m doing Veganuary and RED January

At the tail end of last year, I decided to try and reduce my meat intake and adopt a more plant-based diet.

I’ve been surprised by how easy I’ve found it, especially having gone from being a huge meat eater.

So now I’m doing Veganuary to see if I can go a whole month without meat. So far so good.

I’m also doing RED (Run Every Day) January which is where you run (or do some form of exercise) every day. It’s going well but I’ve missed 2 days already.

That’s it, short and sweet.