Scrummable

The Death of the Author: Telling Good Stories

Nyamawoo — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 13:53:17 +0000

The Death of the Author is a postmodernist essay published in 1967 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. In it, Barthes takes aim at traditional methods of literary interpretation, which take into account the author’s identity and personal, political and historical context in order to interpret and identify meaning within a text in a […]

McDonald’s Sauce Dispenser is the greatest product ever

Thomas Rigby — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 20:16:00 +0000

OK, that’s a bold statement! I guess I should elaborate. Like a lot of teenagers, I worked in a Maccies one summer and I was struck by how awesome the sauce dispenser was. Basically, it’s a funnel attached to a handle with a trigger. Pulling the trigger releases 5 dots of ketchup in a quincunx […]

Gotta catch ’em all: The myth of requirements capture

Nyamawoo — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 18:21:18 +0000

When Pokémon Go was launched in July 2016 it took the mobile games world by storm. Smashing previous download records, the app leveraged the features of your standard smartphone to provide an excruciatingly simple augmented reality style gaming experience, allowing anybody to become their own Ash Ketchum, running around like a lunatic catching critters. It […]

A lovely cheese pizza: ‘Crunch mode’ got less tasty

Nyamawoo — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 11:43:02 +0000

Kevin McAllister loves pizza. What adventures he went on, and all because of a delicious cheese pizza! If you’re not aware of the reason why pizza is the primary catalyst for the entire McAllister character arc in the home alone franchise, you should totally watch the film(s) again and then come back. Pay attention. There […]

“Stop Being a Douchebag”: Ego and the development crew

Thomas Rigby — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 09:57:52 +0000

At the end of my third year of high school, the lockers were cleared out and any unclaimed stuff was up for grabs. I inherited a copy of Use Your Illusion II on vinyl – only one of the two LPs (I still have it today) and I bloody loved it. I was 13 years […]

Making the Mission: Impossible possible

Nyamawoo — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 12:27:32 +0000

Jack Reacher is pretty fabulous. If anyone reading this has read a Jack Reacher novel, or watched one of the Jack Reacher films, you’ll be aware of the awesomeness of Jack Reacher. Jack Reacher. He’s mainly awesome, in my opinion, because of things like this: See? The man is built like a tank, has the […]

Say Agile one more goddamn time…

Nyamawoo — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 11:05:05 +0000

Ok, so I have a confession: I’m sick and tired of agile. I’ve had enough. Not that I have an issue with the ethos by any means; my issue is more to do with the constant, infuriating need to talk about it all of the goddamn time (rich, coming from an agile consultant, I know). […]

Dunka-chunka-snunka-bunka-Hollyoaks! Or: constructing a user-centered product roadmap

Nyamawoo — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 09:07:03 +0000

Hands up who loves Hollyoaks?! Yes… I’m aware I may be in the minority here, outside of the scores of teenagers regularly getting their fix of the drama unfolding in the North Westerly town each day post-school. However, as much as the majority of the adult population may dismiss the overly dramatic soap as the […]

5 Reasons People Read Articles with Numbers in the Title

Thomas Rigby — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:01:43 +0000

Using numbers in the title of a blog post is an excellent way of giving the (potential) reader an estimate of article length. 6 reasons… will take less time to read than 22 reasons… The nerds behind blogging platform Medium determined that the ideal blog post length is 7 minutes. This doesn’t mean you should […]

Why is a soap bubble round? Or: When and where to use square bubbles

Thomas Rigby — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 10:11:55 +0000

The laws of physics, those undeniable laws of the universe that we can’t help but abide by, make round soap bubbles. They make green grass and wet water and rainbows that can only be seen between 40 and 42 degrees. These are templates crafted over millennia that just simply work. Flippantly, websites are the same. […]

Micro-interactions to delight and annoy

Thomas Rigby — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 13:00:15 +0000

Can your UI harm your UX? Let's find out...

The Build Triangle: Understanding Limitations

Thomas Rigby — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 11:09:52 +0000

In an ideal world, everything we build would be perfect – gorgeous code, on time, and under budget but most of us don’t live in a Disney utopia. Unfortunately, the real world chips away at our resolve and something has to give. Part of good stakeholder management is managing expectations and part of managing expectations […]

F**k you I won’t do what you tell me: the perils of the product roadmap

Nyamawoo — Wed, 30 Dec 2015 13:43:38 +0000

Who likes following orders? Better yet, who likes following orders blindly? One of the knottiest problems to untangle in the product development lifecycle is that of the product roadmap. Used correctly it can be a valuable tool for communication with stakeholders, and simultaneously an opportunity to allow a product team the autonomy to focus on […]

Can’t see the wood for the trees

Thomas Rigby — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 11:46:16 +0000

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, websites ran the gamut from the bland to the Flash™-y and everyone wanted to make them better. Way back in them olden days, there were so many ways to improve the hideousness that some websites were, and so the web design industry flourished. Everyone clamoured for […]

MNMLSM: Simplify, simplify some more, then start simplifying

Thomas Rigby — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 12:32:50 +0000

Minimalism is an interesting thing – far from meaning as stark as possible, minimalism is the idea of removing anything unnecessary for base level functionality. Imagine a human face. Now remove all of the details you can until it still resembles a human face. If, for example, you took the eyes out and it looks […]

Silent Grouping: Better than Kevin Spacey

Nyamawoo — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 09:10:31 +0000

Everyone understands the importance of being able to predict the future. And as software teams, we’re asked to do this a lot. Like it or not, there’s any number of stakeholders working with, or affected by, your project, and one of the things they’re going to be particularly concerned about is the delivery date. It’s […]

Backdoor Action: The Death of the Homepage?

Thomas Rigby — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 13:20:02 +0000

Google (other search engines are available) loves content. There’s a whole industry (or at least a facet of digital marketing) that has sprung up around Content Marketing that puts emphasis on copy-rich pages to draw consumers in. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to […]

Making like a mob boss: knowing your problem and how to fix it

Nyamawoo — Sat, 30 May 2015 12:51:16 +0000

Tony Soprano is a badass. He’s the epitome of power, charm, ‘New Joy-sey’ mafioso cool. Under his leadership, the New Jersey family grew in power to the point that it reckoned with the New York mob, which (irrespective of divided opinion on what really happened at the end of season 6) is a pretty impressive […]

The more you are of the moment, the quicker you are of the past

Thomas Rigby — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 19:43:41 +0000

Everyone who ever got that haircut in high school just wanted to be cool. Look back at photos of some of the decisions you made in the name of “fashion” and you’ll understand the title of this article. We’re talking about the downside of cutting-edge technology. Bleeding-edge tech is cool! As a self-confessed tech nerd, […]

Design Fatigue: When bored doesn’t mean boring

Thomas Rigby — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 09:53:45 +0000

Jakob’s Law states that visitors to your website spend most of their online time on other peoples websites. Who spends the most time on your website? – you do. Whether you’re the developer, designer, or MD, no-one spends as much time on your site as you think they do (or wish they would). This leads […]

Mobile-first is the future of web design

Thomas Rigby — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 21:48:57 +0000

One of the main issues I have come across in the last three years of building marketing emails is that mobile responsive versions of emails are treated as an after-thought. Often a highly talented designer draws up a beautiful desktop version and then it is left to the interactive developer to whittle away at the […]