Alright, so people kept mentioning “Chris Ash” this and “Chris Ash” that, especially in those team meetings where everyone tries to sound smart. I figured, okay, what’s the big deal? I had to see for myself, you know, get my hands dirty with it.
My First Brush with the Whole Thing
It started when my manager, bless his heart, dropped a book by this Chris Ash fella on my desk. Said it would “revolutionize our workflow.” Big words. I nodded, smiled, and then it sat there for a week, collecting dust. But then, a new project kicked off, and suddenly “Chris Ash principles” were being thrown around. So, I finally cracked it open. Lots of diagrams, lots of buzzwords. My first thought? “Here we go again.”
I started by just reading. Tried to absorb what this Ash guy was actually saying. Some of it made sense, like focusing on the user, duh. But other parts felt like common sense wrapped up in fancy packaging. I decided the only way to really get it was to try and use it. So, I picked a small part of our new project, a user feedback form, and thought, “Let’s Ash-ify this.”
Getting Down to Brass Tacks
So, I sat down, re-read the relevant chapters, and tried to map out his “core tenets” – that’s what he called them – to my little form. It was a bit of a struggle, not gonna lie. The book was all high-level theory, and I was trying to figure out if the submit button should be green or blue based on “empathetic design journey mapping” or whatever.
My process went something like this:
- Tried to define the “job to be done”: Ash talks a lot about this. For my form, it was “User needs to easily tell us what they think.” Simple enough, I thought.
- Sketched out a bunch of versions: I spent a whole afternoon drawing different layouts. One with loads of options, one super minimal. I was trying to “iterate rapidly,” another Ash-ism.
- Annoyed my colleagues: I kept showing them the sketches. “Which one feels more Chris Ash-y to you?” I’d ask. Got a lot of blank stares, to be honest. One guy, Dave, just said, “Just make it work, mate.” Wise words, Dave.
I found that a lot of the “Chris Ash” stuff, when you stripped away the jargon, was just good old-fashioned thinking about the user. But the process he described felt overly complicated for some things. Like, do I really need a 10-step framework to design a contact form? Probably not. But, I pushed through, determined to follow the “methodology.”
The “Aha!” (or “Uh Oh?”) Moment
After a few days of this, I had a version of the form that I thought was pretty decent. It was clean, it was simple. But was it “Chris Ash” approved? Who knows. The real test was putting it in front of actual users, which wasn’t part of my little experiment, unfortunately. That’s a whole other battle.
What I did record, though, was that trying to strictly follow someone else’s named methodology can sometimes get in the way of just doing good work. It felt like I was spending more time trying to be “Ash-compliant” than actually solving the user’s problem in the most straightforward way. There was this one section about “value proposition alignment matrices” that nearly broke my brain. I swear, I spent two hours trying to fill out a spreadsheet that, in the end, told me what I already knew.
The big takeaway for me? Use these things as a guide, a source of ideas, sure. But don’t get bogged down in the dogma. Chris Ash, or any of these gurus, they offer a perspective. Sometimes it’s a useful perspective. Sometimes it’s just a way to sell books and consultancy gigs. I took some notes, jotted down the bits that actually resonated, like really thinking about the user’s core need before jumping into design. That part was solid. The rest? Well, let’s just say I’m taking it with a grain of salt.
So, that was my little adventure into the world of Chris Ash. I tried it, I wrestled with it, and I came out the other side with a slightly more cynical, but maybe slightly wiser, view on these grand theories. The form got built, it works, and I don’t think anyone can tell if it’s “Ash-ified” or not, and maybe that’s the point.