Nick Schuler talks cultural treasures, COVID and co-design surprises

Earlier in the year, Boost UX designer Nick Schuler gave a talk on co-design at the virtual National Digital Forum conference.

In co-design, you create your product or service with the active involvement of the users and stakeholders. The big question, in the age of COVID, is whether you can get this active involvement when everyone is working remotely. Because if you can’t, you won’t get the benefits of co-design. You won’t get the user input, buy-in and fast feedback that helps you build a solution your users love.

Nick’s talking about digitalpasifik.org. Designed to make the digitised cultural heritage of the Pacific visible and accessible, the web application was planned from the outset as a co-design project. This became much trickier when New Zealand went into the first COVID lockdown just as the project kicked off.

In his talk, Nick shares what worked, what surprised him and what he’d do differently next time.

Digital Things: newsletter for the arts and culture sector

Digital Things is a bi-monthly newsletter which covers all things digital for the arts and culture sector.

It’s a handy resource for anyone working to give cultural treasures a life in the digital realm.

How product owners work most productively with developers

Following on from last issue’s case study on multiple product owners, here’s a guide for Scrum product owners on working productively with developers. 

Developers work most effectively when a product owner knows the product well, and communicates this knowledge responsively and decisively. This post shares the perspectives of a few developers to show why this is.

Test-driven job-hunting

Changing jobs is a big decision. But does a one-hour interview give you enough data to make the call?

At Boost, we optimise for team happiness. So we want to make it easy to decide if we’re the right place to work. That’s where the Test-drive comes in. It’s a special hiring event that lets you take Boost for a spin to see if we’re right for you.

Test-drive Boost hiring event:

Role: Software developers/engineers
Date: Thursday 26 May
Time: 6.00pm – 8:15pm
Place: Your place via Zoom

Blasts from the past 50 years of Kiwi music

May is New Zealand Music Month. While COVID is keeping the live scene a bit quiet, there are plenty of other ways to celebrate Kiwi musical culture.

Here’s a Spotify playlist featuring blasts from the past 50 years of New Zealand music.