The weekend flew by, but I swear people sleep on Bradford all the time. As you should know by now, I’m a huge fan of the place. The city has a vibe, and the restaurants are silly good.

We ate at Bab Tooma, and it was just amazing. The food was insane, the interior was great, the kids loved it, and we ordered the feast, which was so, so good. In short, go. Eat.

Onto the week…

It’s been a slower week than I expected. Work isn’t flowing in quite as much as I thought it would, but loads of little ideas we had months ago are finally starting to arrive. We’re moving from ideation towards integration, and it’s exciting to see some of these things finally being put forward.

One of those is LLM-generated summaries. On paper, it sounds simple enough. Take a load of information and give the user something short and useful to read. But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more interesting the actual design problems become.

We’re looking at how to get the prompts right so users can quickly scan a summary, but still have the option to investigate further and get a much more detailed answer. How do we present that information without hiding the original data away? How much detail is enough? And how do we make sure the summary is genuinely helping someone rather than just giving them another thing to read?

My biggest question is around trust. Do users actually trust what an LLM tells them? And if they don’t, how do we build that trust? More importantly, if they do trust it, how do we make sure they’re still checking the information rather than blindly accepting whatever appears on screen? We need people to check that apples are apples and an orange isn’t a lemon.

It’s an interesting problem because we’re not just designing how information looks. We’re designing how people understand it, question it and make decisions from it. That’s the bit I’m enjoying.

I also delivered at PACE this week. Loads of meetings around some really juicy work that I was buzzing about delivering, and it went so well. Another platform for users to understand information coming in through emails, phone calls and scanned PDFs. There’s a lot of work involved in taking information arriving in completely different formats and making it something people can actually use, so I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

I’ve also been doing tons and tons of work on Faire. I love doing it, but the workload is piling up, and it can get overwhelming. I’m the kind of person who wants to do everything, and do it now. Unfortunately, there are only so many spare minutes in the evening, and there’s always another product listing, another bit of pricing to review or something else that needs attention.

It’s funny because I recently wrote something on LinkedIn about getting more involved in Bobbin & Bumble, and it seemed to resonate with quite a few people. I’ve had some lovely DMs off the back of it, which was nice.

The post was really about realising how much of my experience working in digital applies to running a small business. I’ve spent years working with teams, understanding users, making decisions and trying to get things moving. Now I’m doing much of the same thing with our own business, except there’s a very different kind of pressure when it’s your own money on the line!

Emma and I approach things quite differently, too. She’s brilliant at spotting an opportunity, creating something and getting it out into the world. I’m usually the one asking what happens next, how it all connects, what the numbers look like and whether we’ve considered the knock-on effects. We’ve had a few creative differences along the way, but it’s been genuinely rewarding finding out how our different strengths can work together.

I think the biggest thing I’m learning is that I really enjoy the wider business problems. Not just the website or the design, but pricing, profitability, suppliers, agencies, wholesale and figuring out what we should focus on next. I’m also keeping an eye on our Klaviyo team and looking at priorities for the next three months. There’s a lot going on, and I’m starting to realise that deciding what not to do is just as important as getting things done.

I may have started Christmas shopping already. There was a massive sale on Switch 2s and iPhones, so that’s a few things ticked off the list. I’ve got December issues in this house, with birthdays AND Christmas!

I’m also happy to take game recommendations for the kids. I’ve got a little list already, but maybe… I just like playing games too.

Watch of the week

Mostly Harmless. This documentary took me on so many twists and turns that I struggled to keep up. Did I like it? Yes. Was I also annoyed by the people in it? Also yes. Worth a watch.