Benjy Stanton

Trying weeknotes again I’m struggling to get into a writing habit at the moment, so I’m going to try weeknotes for a while.

My notes on how interaction designers can work with software developers and testers on agile delivery teams.

I’ve just started my 6th month as a contractor, and wanted to share some notes around the practicalities of being employed inside IR35.

⚠️ Content warning: cancer, death.

Here are some work goals I've set myself, now that I've started contracting.

Contract extensions I've just finished my first 3 months contracting, and have finished on a high by getting an extension for a further 6 months.

I'm turning 40 this month, so I thought it was worth marking it with a blog post Lots has happened since I turned 30. 10 years ago, I was still working at a design agency, and struggling to find a fit for my skills, which were a mix UX (user experience),…

What can interaction designers do to make services more inclusive?

I'm a few weeks in to my first contracting role and so far, so good.

Check out my uses page for an up-to-date list of hardware and software that I use for interaction design.

Time to clean the stickers off my laptop (again).

Good news, it looks like I've lined up my first contract role.

Hey friends, I've decided to take the plunge and go contracting.

A collection of tips for making PowerPoint presentations more accessible.

A collection of posts, articles, guides and podcasts about inclusive design. 6 Principles for Inclusive Design – Lillian Xiao A beginner’s guide to inclusive UX design – Trina Moore Pervall A framework for full inclusion – Ben Carpenter Accessibility and…

A personal challenge to visit all 40 plus beaches in Swansea and Gower, with photos, tips and map links for each one.

Inspired by Max Böck, I've decided to add a blogroll to my site.

Some inclusive design books that I'm reading, or are on my wish list.

I've been getting into the habit of writing excerpts for my weeknotes, so that they can be used in the social media snippets (or cards) when I share my posts on Twitter.

Design Swansea This week was Design Swansea 48.

Posting from my phone again today as we’ve gone to Liverpool for a friend’s 40th.

Accessibility best practices Leaning heavily on the GOV.UK Service Manual, and the work that the inclusive design team did whilst I was at UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency), I've been iterating on a list of accessibilty best practices to share with my cur…

First sprint This week my team finished their first sprint without any of the old supplier onboard.

Design Quality Assurance (QA) and device testing This week my devices from Made Tech arrived in the post.

Goodbye old team, hello new sprint It was sprint change over this week, and the last of the old supplier’s team were leaving, including the old designer.

Made Tech design community stuff I got myself some tickets to the UK Gov design system day conference in September.

This was my first week back after my holiday, and I went straight into my first client assignment at Made Tech.

This week we stayed in a static caravan at Broughton Farm, near Llangennith in Gower.

Camping at Alton Towers On Monday we got up early to drive to Alton Towers – a 4 hour drive from Swansea.

Meeting the team This week, I met some more of the team I’ll be working with.

This blog post explores the tools that I use for interaction design.

View my latest user manual.

Extreme heat and end of school This was the week of the extreme heat, and even though Swansea had cooler temperatures than the highs of 40 degrees seen in England, it was still uncomfortably hot.

Onboarding It’s the end of my second week, and even though I’m out of the official onboarding week, there’s been plenty of things to set up.

Onboarding My first week at Made Tech is complete… and so far, so good.

⚠️ Content warning: alcohol use.

I've been at test and trace for 3 whole months!

I recently joined the NHS test and trace team and I wanted to get a quick blog post out to mark the occasion, before too much time passed.

View my latest user manual.

I've had an email from Google Search Console telling me that it's detected some mobile usability issues on the site.

Back in December I decided to move this blog from GitHub and Jekyll, to Netlify and Eleventy (11ty).

Name Current streaming service (UK) Adventure Time Prime (not included in subscription) Arlo the Alligator Boy Netflix Clarence Netflix Danger & Eggs Prime Gravity Falls Disney+ Julie and the Phantoms Netflix Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Netflix She-Ra

This was the worst part of moving my site so far.

With my site deployed to Netlify, but still living on a preview URL, I wanted to do a quick visual regression test against the old GitHub Pages build, to make sure nothing had broken.

Average daily steps: 6500 Average weight: 12 st 9 lbs Continue being mostly vegetarian Save for Christmas and holidays every month Family walk every weekend Stop listening to white men on Spotify Move house or convert loft Pay off small Lloyds loan Switch…

Before I switch to building the site with Eleventy, I want to move my current Jekyll site over to Netlify.

Yesterday I tweeted that I want to switch this blog from Jekyll to Eleventy, then blog in the open as I rebuild the site with modern CSS techniques.

Having a representative sample of pages to check as I make changes to the blog will be useful for a few reasons.

Designing accessible interactive maps is hard.

This week I have been mostly thinking about accessible mark-up and content design for HTML tables (again).