Blog
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What Undertint is, and why it exists
You've spotted a colour you want to paint. The blue-grey of a shadow on a wall. The warm green of a particular leaf. The exact dusty-white on the cake your youngest daughter made. You can see it. Translating it into a mix from the tube…
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Operating principles
I've had a growing list of these in Notes rounding-up the rules I try and live by. I'll add more as I find them (last updated 2023.04.15) Spend more time really understanding the present and making it better than you…
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My standard sourdough bread recipe
The purpose of writing-up this recipe is that I wanted to share a simple, no-nonsense daily bake that tastes great and doesn't require a ridiculous amount of process or effort. I reckon there's not much more than 15 minutes of…
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Offsetting our carbon dioxide
Note: this is the second part of my notes about how I offset my family’s expected CO2 footprint for 2020. The first part describes how we calculated the footprint. I decided to use the UN Carbon Offset Platform because I’d…
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Calculating my family’s carbon footprint
Short version: I used 4 different calculators to try and get an understanding of how big my family’s carbon footprint is so that I can buy some carbon offsets. I got wildly differing results ranging from 14.1 tonnes of CO2…
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A tool to help get your organisation into shape
Updated 2020.09.04: Purkis Layout added. I wanted to use Simon Wardley’s very helpful set of universally useful patterns (aka Wardley’s Doctrine) in some forthcoming research I’m planning to do with a large organisation. When I’ve used it in the past…
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The shit chute
You’re a small team who are trying to change culture and practice within a large org. You’ve been set up well (like many other digital transformational teams) with strong, capable people who have done this shit before. You know through…
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Authenticity and integrity
I’ve had a problem with the use of authentic when it comes to describing some sort of aspired behaviour or way of being, but hadn’t quite got around to pinning it down until this tweet from the estimable John Cutler,…
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Design Systems, brand and identity (part three)
Previously I've outlined why we needed to create a more systemic approach to building our digital UI and described how brand and identity play a role in this, in this final part I'll talk about the design system that we…
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Design Systems, brand and identity (part two)
This was intended to be about a talk design systems and how they relate to Tesco's brand and identity. So let me start defining some terms: Brand Our brand is what people believe about us. It’s how our customers think…
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Design Systems, brand and identity (part one)
Here is the issue Our digital estate grew very quickly and tactically: when Tesco saw an opportunity to meet its customers in a new channel we went for it - groceries, sofas, kitchens, GM, carpets, wine by the case, media…
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How we made the country’s most accessible grocery shopping app (without anyone noticing).
Getting buy-in 1. Make a compelling business case showing the large underserved market of customers to which no supermarket is making any attempt to capture 2. Show how inclusive design and accessibility make the product better for everyone regardless of…
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Rent-seeking leadership
I’ve been thinking about value creation for the last week or so. I had beers with a friend and he made the crazily provocative statement that he felt like in his career there were only a couple of times where…
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Big design
When a company as large as Tesco creates digital products and services, they’re used by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. As a brand we're unashamedly mass market and aim to meet the needs and support the lives of…
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Observations, explanations and confidence
We’re in the process of creating an alpha for the store locator on Tesco.com, and we’re getting pretty close to the point where we’re ready to move into beta. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been building a prototype…
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Why we do customer research
We’re used to using market research in Tesco, which is a powerful tool for building insight about large groups of customers or target markets. With our service design approach, we use customer research from the bottom-up and look closely at…
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Making Tesco’s websites more helpful by design
Customers using Tesco online probably aren’t aware that our digital estate includes over 100 different websites and dozens of apps. But they do notice when something blocks them from getting what they need. They’ve been telling us they often find…
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Design Process - The DDL
Digital Design Language phases and why we have an iterative design process We’re building Tesco's Digital Design Language (the DDL) like a product, using iterative design to continually optimise the guidance on the toolkit. This means that we’re open to…
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Emotional design (or the Hallmark Cards approach to interfaces)
Why design for emotion? It's no longer enough for an interface to be usable, it needs to be an expression of the personality of the business behind it. Today's audiences are not just more sophisticated, more social and more expectant…