For the past few years, Grio has offered User Story Workshops – often as the first step of a new project. In the past, these meetings were held over the course of two days in our San Francisco offices. However, since the move to remote work, we’ve adapted these workshops to an online environment. As we’ve transitioned, we’ve had to figure out just what makes an online workshop successful.
For the last couple years, I have periodically heard the term “deepfake videos”, but prior to completing the research for this post, I didn’t know much about them. In fact, my knowledge of deepfake videos was limited to a few key facts that I’d heard repeated on the news and the internet: the average person can’t tell the difference between a real video and a deepfake video, anyone with a computer can make one, they will soon be everywhere, and they will definitely destabilize democracy.
Good estimates are extremely important to us at Grio. The process of estimating the time and resources required to complete a project helps us understand a client’s needs, forces us to think through all of the dependencies and tasks, and reveals opportunities to better align our technologies and methods with the client’s interests. More importantly, good estimates build trust — our clients deserve to know exactly what they’re committing to when they hire us for a project, and as we go through the steps of creating an estimate, we’re demonstrating our ability to ask insightful questions and come up with a clear project plan.
Several of our folks recently attended ElixerConf in Colorado, where Grio’s John Palgut gave a lightning talk on protecting your app from crashes by using a Supervisor – enjoy!
In 2018, the California legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Set to go into effect in 2020, the CCPA arose out of a compromise between legislators, privacy advocates, and a California businessman who had proposed his own ballot measure. How the CCPA came to be is a very interesting story – I encourage you to read more about it.
What is the CCPA?
In a nutshell, the CCPA is a law that gives all California residents the right to access any data that companies collect about them, know how their data is used, and exercise control over whether and when their data is collected.
There has recently been much discussion about getting more women into computer programming roles – the case of the Google manifesto shows that what many us think of as outdated gender stereotypes about programmers are still alive and well in some circles. However, it wasn’t always the case that computer programming was considered a ‘male’ field. Early computer programming was dominated by women, and it was women who were seen as uniquely capable of being computer programmers. Among early computer pioneers were many women who made important contributions to computer science and programming and invented many of the concepts & models we continue to use today.
At some companies, designers and developers have little to no interaction with clients or customers. It’s not uncommon for the people working on a project to be walled off from clients by account managers or customer service. At Grio, every designer and developer is client facing, and everyone ends up doing some of the work that is traditionally done by an account manager, such as managing day to day contacts, relationship management, and responding to problems & issues.
I’ve recently made it one of my goals to learn more about UX and design. To that end, I read a book that was highly recommended by our Grio designers, The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide, by Lean Buley. The book is written for people who are or want to be UX professionals, with a focus on those who either the only person in their company working on UX or who are in some way UX evangelists in their organizations. Although the intended audience of the book is UX professionals, there were also number of tips and ideas that a company like Grio can find useful. On many projects, especially when budgets and time are tight, Grio takes on the role of UX evangelist for our clients.