My user manual

Posted 26th March 2021

A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues introduced the idea of a personal user manual to the design team. It didn’t really take hold as a ‘thing’, but I quite liked the idea.

I think it came from Cassie Robinson’s post, where you can also find some templates to go from.

The aim is to give your colleagues an easy to scan overview of what makes you tick:

  • The conditions you like to work in
  • The hours you prefer
  • The best ways to communicate with you
  • The ways to give you feedback
  • Things that you need
  • Things you struggle with
  • Things you love
  • Other interesting stuff

The key is, at least for me, that it’s all about soft skills. Or soft stuff, as it’s not always about skills, per se.

If nothing else, it’s a nice bit of self-analysis, which is something I should probably do more often.

Anyway, here’s my user manual. I hope it gives you a bit of an insight into how I like to work, and maybe it’ll prompt a bit of an activity within your team so you can understand each other even better.

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

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    If the text of an interactive element like a button or link is preceded with an accessible image, we’ve probably got an accessibility problem.

  2. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.