Home | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

SheSays Brighton International Women's Day

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:00:00 +0000

I was honoured to be invited to talk at SheSays Brighton for International Women’s Day 2026.

Photo by Harmony Kinnear, used with permission.

Note

Text shown on the slide above:
Flex your brain & your muscles.
Minimise waste, includes time.
Look after nature & people.
Everyone and everything = interesting.
Move with intention & fix things.
The right path ususally feels uncomfortable.

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Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Creating a sustainable workshop

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The first Green Software Practitioner Study Day took place on 6th August 2025 at .

Personally, it isn’t a stretch to say that designing and collaborating on the Study Day felt like a career defining moment for me. It has kicked off a professional side quest to support and build sustainable product teams - an idea seeded during .

The beauty of being the event facilitator meant that I had added motivation to finish my certification back in July. Then figure out the best flow for the day in August, based on my own experience!

The background

The idea for the event came to me during a meetup evening. Folks at the event mentioned completing the Green Software Foundation and The Linux Foundation’s Green Software Practitioner certificate which is a free self-study course available on the .

I too wanted to complete the certificate, but I found myself wondering if others encountered the same issues I did when it comes to self-paced online learning…

Time: the motivation was there, but as a small business owner the time wasn’t.
Relevance: in tech, to paraphrase John Donne, no one is an island–we are part of interdisciplinary teams. It seemed to me that the power of this learning could only be unlocked through collaboration.
Momentum: in my previous work as a strategic designer, I knew that driving sustainability and behavioural change needs many champions to gain traction. From my own perspective as a contractor, I needed other folks’ stories of success to help understand what more I could be doing.
Journeys: I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone and that others were also encountering the same barriers that I was. We are on this journey together!

I felt that all of the above, called for an in-person experience, by tech folks for tech folks. Where the time was reserved and structured to allow for the completion of the certificate alongside interdisciplinary discussion. So, I set about creating an interest page as an experiment, to find out if others might like a dedicated ‘Study Day’ too.

Who attended

I thought that I would get maybe 12 people to attend. To my surprise, we sold out at 27 tickets with a healthy waiting list. We were also awarded a grant from Brighton & Hove Buses to help defray the costs of the event and provide some free spaces for students and those on limited incomes.

A range of disciplines were represented across the 27 attendees including, developers, engineers, testers, consultants, accessibility specialists, product designers, product managers, UXers, founders, cloud architects, students, and recent graduates.

What an attendee said:

…being able to be in a friendly location with a group of people interested in the same subject matter especially was incredibly, encouraging and helped a lot…I would’ve otherwise just spoke about it for ages but not actually managed to execute.

The results

Here are just a few of the stories of success from those who attended the event. Its always cool to hear what to learn what people took with them and did next!

One person was able to use their learning on the Study Day to justify keeping older hardware running and to support donation and recycling initiatives for retired hardware.
I was able to support the sustainability aspects of a sucessful grant application for a client.
Another organisation brought their whole team to the event. This decision to invest in a benchmark of knowledge across a team is such a powerful action to drive progress!

The design of the day

I’ll not go into too much depth on this, because it this is my ‘secret sauce’ as a learning-centric designer. However, it was important to me that the content shouldn’t feel too rushed and the learning should be made more effective by immediately being applied and sythesised through interdisciplinary conversations. These conversations were constructively aligned with the topics we covered. Sharing experiences, asking questions, observations, and critique were actively prompted and encouraged.

The collaboration between and was crucial to the fabric of the day. LTUX Brighton came with the UX and product angles and Green Software Brighton, brought dev, backend, and DevOps perspectives.

The meta design of the day

Based on , here are considerations I brought to the design of the event to minimise direct and indirect energy use.

Scope 1 emissions

Based on the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocols these are emissions from direct combustion of fossil fuels (including petrol and other road fuels). As attendees and collaborators at the event fall into Scope 3, I’ll focus on my own travel here.

Activity description	Estimated CO²
I walked to and from Brighton station with my trolley carrying materials.	-
Return train journey from Brighton to Falmer	0.42kg*
I walked to and from Sussex Innovation Centre.	-

*11.909146km round trip at 0.035kg CO2/km, based on gov.uk 2023 conversion factors.

My estimate for the same return journey by car is 1.2kg CO², so by taking the train I’ve emitted between 65-67% less CO².

Note

Okay, so far so good. I did originally intend to cycle, but I had too much to carry, so something to consider next time is can I carry less?

Scope 2 emissions

Sussex Innovation Centre

The Study Day took place at Sussex Innovation Centre, again I don’t know their electricity and cooling emissions. However, their support for sustainable businesses and research are second to none locally. For example, the . Also, the University of Sussex is known for its approach to sustainability as outlined in their Susssex 2035 Creating Progressive Futures strategy ( ). In related news, Dr Caroline Lucas, former MP and leader of the Green Party, has been appointed as as part of the new .

P.s., I found out the answer to this later on when I founde the display energy certificate at SIC – photo taken on 28 Jan 2026, added on 25 April 2026.

Energy use in the room

In terms of active energy use in the room itself, there were 28 laptops and tablets running from active power supplies. We also had an LED monitor in the room, which turned off when it wasn’t actively being used.

To put this into perspective, if we had been on an online video call for the day the impact would have been far greater as most attendees were based within 50 miles of the venue. Strictly speaking emissions from a video call would then fall into scope 3 as the emissions would be disributed across the various attendee locations on their own computers, on their own broadband networks, on their own power supplies.

This is especially pertinent when we consider that video calling platforms, love to encourage us to use high definition video!

I did not turn this option on in Google Meet, as I far prefer the 'Joan Crawford' style filter that lower quality video provides - better for my skin and for the environment. I keep having to routinely dismiss this message–Google are quite insistent.

Granted not everyone would keep their video on for the whole day, but just as a ‘back of a napkin’ calculation…

If you had a high-definition video call that lasted 6 hours that would be 3.3kg of CO² for one person*
3.3kg X 28 people, including me as the presenter = 92.4kg
Added to that you have the laptops being powered at their respective locations which may have different power supply mixes (fossil fuels versus sustainable). Check out for cool visualisations of supply mixes across the world.

Had the majority of participants been travelling from further away then the impact would have been comparable. However, these figures certainly give me pause for thought and I will reduce my use of video during online calls going forward.

*figures from Purdue University are trapped behind a journal paywall, so I have worked with Gerry McGovern's estimates from 2020.

Note

Hmmm, a bit light on some of the detail in this section. Something to work on with venues going forward.

Scope 3 emissions

These are the indirect emissions that come from the goods and services purchased (upstream), the transportation of people and goods (e.g., transportation of the people attending), the use of good/services, and any other indirect GHG emissions.

Goods and services purchased

Good/Materials

This is where I tried my best to reuse and not to buy new. The three exceptions being a roll of sticky-backed whiteboard plastic, fine tipped dry erase pens, and a corner cutter (all from Amazon, more on this below). I used the sticky-backed whiteboard plastic and the corner cutter with some blank playing cards I already had to create mini reusable whiteboards.

I’ve been a fan of using playing cards rather than sticky notes for a while. This is because they feel less fixed and don’t have glue on the back and can therefore be recycled more easily ( , had the same idea with his ). However, I thought, what if I could make them reusable forever? Having handmade an initial batch of around 80 cards with the help of my Mum and partner, they have since become a staple of my workshops. So much so that I intend to create some in different colours taking inspiration from sticky notes and ArtEFact cards!

Rather than a conventional ice breaker exercise I used objects as a way of getting attendees to think about their intentions for the day. All of these materials were found and recycled. I’m not going to tell you what exactly was wrapped up in these bundles, as shown below, because again ‘secret sauce’™️. This use of objects was inspired by keynote presentation at conference, University of Sussex.

Central to my ethos for this event was banning certain single use and plastic based materials in my workshop kit as outlined below.

No more sticky notes - only wipeable index cards and mini whiteboards going forward!
No more largescale prints or single use paper roles. Only reusable placemats!
No more plastic things that require batteries (e.g. my timer clock, when I next upgrade my slide remote this will also be front of mind).

First time caller, Pauline (45) from Royston Vasey asks:

But, what about the pens?

Alas, pens are one thing I haven’t been able to find a sustainable and durable solution to. I did try wax pencils out as an alternative to dry erase markers and they were too difficult to write with as they require a lot of pressure and then were too difficult to clean off.

Catering and Snacks

For catering, we worked with fantastic chef, Oli Thompsett who is based at Sussex Innovation Centre. Oli created a marvellous vegetarian and vegan lunch for us based on seasonal ingredients and local produce. It truly was phenomenal and the nominal leftovers were boxed up, so there was no waste. Making sure we have a hearty and sustainable lunch will be a mainstay of every Study Day to come! Sharing a lunchtime chat is integral to the experience.

On the snacks side these were my domain. With this I avoided single portion packaging, prefering to go with larger bags which can be provided in reusable bowls. I also opted for healthier options such as lentil chips, tortilla chips, and dried fruit. Cans and, where possible, glass bottled drinks were provided and leftover drinks were used for next LTUX Brighton event.

Transportation of Goods

As noted, food was sourced locally and snacks and materials were transported to the venue on my trusty trolley!

Going back to my Amazon purchases, when I looked into where items actually ship from, two of my orders shipped from China. Even though I initially thought the were UK or EU based vendors. So, my new goal is to look for similar materials at local stationary shops to try to keep supporting the local economy.

Transportation of people

Attendees were encouraged to travel by public transport and were given a range of options, including the local . There is a stop for these on University of Sussex campus.

In the end the stats for travel were:

--- config: xyChart: chartOrientation: 'horizontal' width: 600 height: 500 showDataLabel: true themeVariables: xyChart: theme: 'dark' backgroundColor: '#111' plotColorPalette: '#FFF' titleColor: '#FFF' xAxisLabelColor: '#FFF' --- xychart title "How attendees said they planned to travel" x-axis ["Train & Car share", "Car share", "Bicycle & Car", "Bus & Bicycle", "Bus", "Car", "Train", "Train & Bus", "Bicycle"] y-axis "Journeys" 0 --> 12 bar [1,3,1,1,3,2,10,2,3]

Note

So a few car trips there, but in cases where this was combined with public transport, so making for shorter journeys. Hurray for the people who sorted out a car share!

Use of goods/services

One area to improve upon was waste management in the room, to make it easier for attendees to deposit compostable items. For instance, I provided vegware cups so that we could have some drinks in larger bottles. However, disposing of them meant a big collection effort at the end of the day. Attendees were also encouraged to bring their own water bottles and reusable coffee cups for use throughout the day.

This is where I’ll touch on our use of third-party IT tools. So at LTUX Brighton, we recently used our as an opptunity to ethically review the digital tools we are using. This was very much instigated by this event and . We decided to use Ticket Tailor due to their ethical ticketing ethos and UK-based operations, although would still like to see some clearer infomration about their climate commitments. Take a look at the to see a list of the tools LTUX Brighton use and why.

What about the Green Software Principles?

I’ve outlined the principles below and they didn’t apply to the event design, aside from my goal to consume as little energy as possible.

Something, that I will be bringing into the next event are the at the Green Software Foundation. I am actively applying these principles through advice I provide as a consultant.

I’ll also point to the superb, , lead edited by local web hero , and released in late 2025. These guidelines could be the basis of several more specialist Study Days (watch this space!).

Energy Efficiency “Consume the least amount of electricity possible.”
Hardware Efficiency “Use the least amount of embodied carbon possible.”
Carbon Awareness “Do more when the electricity is clean and less when it’s dirty.”

That’s a wrap, or is it?

It hasn’t been ‘a wrap’ for my sustainability focused thinking and I then went right into the sustainable design of the . In fact, I combined it that very day when I visited someone else at University of Sussex to look at some of their materials that I could recycle and reuse.

Special thanks to Deeksha Bhushan who took many of the wonderful photos recording our activities during the Study Day.

LTUX Brighton presents, Talk UX: Redesigning Place

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:30:00 +0000

In 2025, LTUX Brighton hosted the international conference for , .

Talk UX Stats

188 attendees over 2 days | 151 in-person and 37 online
20 talks
5 workshops
3 short film screenings
1 panel discussion
£201 raised for local charity, .

Personal Reflection

Personally, Talk UX was one of the most challenging, yet fulfilling experiences of my life. It really warrants it’s own blog post, particularly because we tried to make the event as responsible and sustainable as we could. As organisers we considered this in terms of how we organised, resourcing (both in-person and digital), and environmental impact.

I grew both in so many ways as a person, as a designer, as a leader, and as a business leader through the experience. I will be forever thankful for the vision, belief, and trust or our organising group and everything we achieved together.

This marked the end of my chapter leadership of LTUX Brighton. I’m staying on as treasurer as we move into next phase of our development as a group.

Photo by Laura Rodriguez
Left-to-right: Inka Howorth, Fiona MacNeill, Heidi Swigon, Lou Carroll, Alex Woodward, Emily Clark, Deeksha Bhushan, Alice Umeji.

**A huge thank you to Quiet Down There for their collaboration. Although we were only able to make a small donation this time, we hope to be able to do more in the future. Our goal was to help raise awareness about the amazing work they do to address hygiene poverty and we successfully did that with Talk UX and through our social media posts.

Green Software Practitioner Study Day at Sussex Innovation Centre

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:00:00 +0000

This event follows on from my .

I conceived Green Practitioner Study Day as a collaboration between LTUX Brighton and Green Software Brighton. Having previously collaborated on an amazing hackathon in 2024, we knew this could work well.

The idea for the event came to me during a Green Software Brighton meetup evening. Folks at the event mentioned completing the Green Software Foundation and The Linux Foundation’s Green Software Practitioner certificate which is a free self-study module now available on the .

I too wanted to complete the certificate, but I found myself wondering if others encountered the same issues I did when it comes to self-paced online learning.

Time: it wasn’t that the motivation wasn’t there, but as a small business owner the time wasn’t.
Relevance: in tech noone is an island, we are part of interdisciplinary teams. It seemed to me that the power of this learning could only be unlocked through collaboration.
Momentum: on that point driving forward sustainability needs multiple champions to gain traction. As a contractor I needed other folks’ stories to help understand what more I could be doing.
Journeys: I wanted to know that I wasn’t alone and that others were also encountering the same barriers that I was. We are on this journey together!

All of this, I felt called for an in-person experience, by tech folks for tech folks. Where the time was reserved and structured to allow for the completion of the certificate and interdisciplinary disucssion. So, I set about creating an interest page as an experiment, were other people interested in such a day?

I thought that I would get maybe 12 people to attend. To my surprise, we sold out 27 spaces with a healthy waiting list. We were also given a grant from Brighton & Hove Buses to help defray the costs of the event and provide some free spaces for students and those on limited incomes.

What an attendee said:

…being able to be in a friendly location with a group of people interested in the same subject matter especially was incredibly, encouraging and helped a lot…I would’ve otherwise just spoke about it for ages but not actually managed to execute.

Will you join us at the next Green Practitioner Study Day?

I have a longer blog post that I need to write about the sustainability of the Study Day itself (it truly was a sustainable workshop!).

There are two further events planned in 2026.

Friday, 30th January at WRAP (next to Brighton Station). Details and tickets at the .
Friday, 13th March at Plus X. Details and tickets are coming soon.

Pledge cards from the end of the event - using the mini-reusable whiteboards that I created for the Study Day which have now become a fixture at almost all my workshops. The three cards read, “Start doing: At 1st stage, consider carbon impact of anythng I work on; Keep doing: expanding my knowledge, learn ways to improve practice; Stop doing: being thoughtless about consumption. Thank you to Deeksha Bhushan for giving me permission to use this photo.

The quest for a sustainable workshop on sustainability at Green Software Brighton

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:30:00 +0000

A lightning talk where I reflected on digital sustainability and the irony that workshops designed to unlock our thinking tend to consume vast amounts of single use and non-recyclable materials. I asked the question, “how we can truly envision the future when we keep using the same old tools?”.

You can access the .

Short talk, long thinking

As is often the case with my talks, although the talk was short and thankfully kept to time, the thinking was long and deep.

My thinking for this talk was heavily influenced by attending the short course at the Royal College of Art in July 2025. During the course, I learned about signals, horizon scanning, and facilitating workshops to help envision regenerative futures. Such ‘futures’ may be beyond our usual ‘workshop’ thinking, which can be encumbered by structural barriers, financial limitations, and to a certain extent fear of the unknown.

I cannot fault the delivery of the course, which was incredible, thoughtful, and thoroughly researched. However, attending uncovered some ethical questions for me about the position and priviledge of designers who have financial and socio-political power to envision the ‘future’ and tell the stories of the future. A future which they may or may not be part of based on recent shifts in the tech sector and a future that still reflects the troubling power dynamics we see today.

This uneasy feeling was further heightened after attending an amazing talk by about his book, . I got to chat with Dan after his talk, and it was one of the best disucssions of my life. Needless to say, as an amateur art historian, this book is very much on my to-read list.

So, on a meta level, personally I was troubled by aspects of what is sometimes called ‘speculative design’ or ‘futures’. In these situations, were we as designers colonising the future? Would it be best to reimagine power first before reimaging action, or output? Or do we need to uncover tangible future objects as power is fleeting, too difficult, or perhaps too downright depressing? I couldn’t shake the feeling that we ‘futurists’ are rogue archaeologists and like the archaeologists of yore we engineered meaning based on limited understanding, empathy, and exploration of the descendent cultures near the ‘dig site’. At a micro level I also observed how many single use paper products it took us to explore these ideas. These dilemmas are my own and I continue to explore my thoughts through my design and art practices.

So this talk set out a series of commitments, which I then beta tested during the Green Software Practitioner Study Day in August 2025. I then successfully reused resources I created (mini-whiteboard cards) at work-related workshops in October 2025. However, there is a level of irony that when running a full on ‘futures’ workshop for the first time in December, I used more paper than ever! This was due to the scale of the event and unknown Wi-Fi connectivity. So, it is all a ‘work-in-progress’.

What I will say is the December event with the ‘futures’ workshop took an approach, informed by and . Exploring 5 years into the future, we created imaginary artefacts, but very much through the lens of our issues today and this felt like an inclusive, effective, yet non-invasive approach to ‘Futures’. As is often the case, I need time and practice to figure things out of my own and draw upon a range of influences and inspirations.

I end by posing a question:

What if the things that we need for the future need to be both remembered and imagined?

An example of this was these fantastic fish traps from the UK about 200 years ago which I saw at the More than Human exhibit at the Design Museum in August 2025 (from the Pitt Rivers Museum collection). These beautifully crafted objects were designed to catch only mature fish, letting young fish go free to minimise harm to fish populations.

We knew how to live with and design for our environment, but we have willfully forgotten.

Two panel discussions at EVOLVE [25]

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000

I had the honour of being part of first ever “EVOLVE [25]” a new premier tech conference for Brighton & Hove and Sussex. I was part of two panel discussions for the event.

I wrote a blog post about my perspectives and experiences at the event which you can read on the . The post has a particularly brilliant action shot of me, so is worth checking out to see that alone!

Panel 1 @ 2.30pm

Sustainable Development from the Inside Out: Driving Change Within Tech Teams

How tech teams and individuals, not just leadership, are embedding sustainability into their workflows, culture and everyday decisions.

Chair: Ed Chinn.
Fellow panellists: Mark Buss, Neil Clark, Catrina Baker-Bassett

I loved getting to know my fellow panellists, particularly our chair Ed Chinn whom I met for the first time. I look forward to future collaborations with these folks–forging new connection was core to the ethos of . It was such a special day!

Panel 2 @ 3.50pm

Building Sustainably as a Digital Product Team

As panel chair, in assembling the discussion I took inspiration from the new –“Minimise environmental impact”.

Chair: Fiona MacNeill
Panellists: Heidi Swigon - Content Strategist, Will Barnes - SEO, Oliver Winks - Developer, Eliana Zuluaga - UX, University of Brighton Student, Viraj Panickar - UX, University of Brighton Student, Louis Radtke - UX, University of Brighton Student, Vishnu Vijayan - UX, University of Brighton Student

I invited the panellists to think about

the entire product lifecycle
their place in that professionally or a role they aspire to in the future
what they can practically do in their role to make change
drawing on their past experiences, wither thrhough work or learning in their responses

You can check out the - including the full set of Ecómon cards.

Inspirations: Fantasy Football and Pokémon

Steve Rackley, one of the organisers, gave me the challenge of considering how students could be involved in the conference. As an ethusiastic alumni of University of Brighton, I was eager to take up this challenge and involve current students from the MSc User Experience Design I completed back in 2018. This was an amazing experience and allowed me to be in contact with students who had interviewed me about digital sustainability for one of their coursework projects.

As we had quite a large panel and needed to represent a number of specialisms, the challenge for me as chair was to make sure that folks had fairly distributed time ‘on air’ during the panel. My solutions to this problem were, to keep introductions to a minimum by co-creating Ecómon cards for each panellist, to take a fantasy football inpired approach as in what would each role in a ‘dream’ sustainable product team do? I also used a yellow card / red card system which fit this scenario - more on this below.

The Ecómon trading cards, shown above, gave us a shorthand and lighthearted way of introducing each speaker, including their specialisms they goals and for the students, their professional aspirations.

The yellow card / red card system was used to politely draw down particularly passionate speakers who were using too much air time (I am definitely guilty of this myself).

The panel went well and although we were right at the end of the day, we still had a great crowd.

I have taken learning from this panel into my professional work as an interim product manager for a startup. This also initiaed a passionate side quest to support the development of sustainable product teams throughout sussex through running and volunteering for . More on these aspects in future event posts and blog posts!

Will I see you EVOLVE [26]?

I sure hope so, and in 2026 they are scaling up by holding the event at Brighton Centre. Lets make EVOLVE [26] massive by coming together to celebrate the fantastic digital community that we have here in Sussex!

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UX Camp 2025 Reflections

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:30:00 +0000

Making things manageable

A brief catch-up on the last 24 months

This site has been loved and it has been updated. However, between December 2023 and December 2025, I sort of lost myself a bit. The TL:DR version is between working on Ladies that UX Brighton (now ‘LTUX Brighton’) and working in a full-time agency role I lost sight of my thinking/academic/artistic pursuits; I let my reflective practice slip.

The bizarre irony is at last year’s UX Camp, in my opinion I hosted my second-best session, on (my first would have to be back in 2016 when I was invited back for the , which meant it must have been good!). Last year I even prepared materials for a series of session-related blog posts here explaining how to do each of the hacks.

Did I post them? No.

This has been a matter of personal shame on my ’todo’ list for an entire year.

A new leaf is unfurling

So I’m starting afresh. I have radically reduced the number of posts on this site. Only keeping the most important reflections in a bid to help reduce this site’s energy use to a minimum. I also started my own Limited company in January, Macknowlogist, contracting in UX, research, and technology. Working for myself has a different cadence, enabling me to re-jig my reflective practice.

What am I doing differently this time?

I have created a template in Obsidian to help write these posts efficiently in markdown, from the start.
I’m going to write shorter posts more often to keep this site fresh. In particular I will write posts on how I am developing the decision-making framework I previewed at UX Camp this year.
On occasion I will write long form posts, but this must be intentional rather than accidental.
I am self-editing by using washable index cards and other methods to keep things more concise.
Most of all I am sketching more and more in my life and work and that is such a brilliant and restorative change.

Not so much sketching on this page - this was the start of the ideas for the ethical framework, with various influences including John V Willshire's work on the top-right.

UX Camp 2025 Rundown

What is UX Camp Brighton?

Only the best annual UX event in Brighton in my opinion (not a paid endorsement). Run impeccably by Patrick Samson, Lou Bloom, Luke Hay, Tom Prior, Chris How, Deeksha Bhushan, and Rob Pearson, it is an event where everyone is made to feel welcome to share their ideas on UX. As a style event there is no agenda until the hosts arrive and place their session synopsis cards. Each session is limited to 20 mins.

I’ve been going to since about 2014 and it has been, and continues to be, instrumental to my practice and learning. The other thing I find impressive is that every year, I can see how they have taken feedback onboard, improving the event and making it more inclusive. Like this year having the option of asking an organiser to pitch in the main room to the audience to remove that stressor. Nice!

The sessions I got to see

Five sessions run simultaneously in each time slot.

The session you get to attend is based on three factors:

How well the host’s pitch resonated with you
Whether you could get to the room on time before its too full
If you don’t you need to either have a back-up choice, or make your way to a room with space #potluck

All of the sessions below were delightful brainfood regardless of the above. Truly, I always wish I could attend all of them. I have summarised my favourite concept from each session below.

Graeme Aymer

Graeme shared the relevance of writing (1924–1987) to compassion in UX. He expertly took us on a journey of analysis through the following Baldwin quote.

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
~ James Baldwin (1970)

Everyone you’re looking at is also you.

This reminded me of the quote, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle”, or some variation of that. This quote is often attributed to Plato, Alice Walker, or Robin Williams–just proving that finding truth on the internet has been and always shall be a tenuous venture unless you have time to pull at all the threads. Hmm, remember this dear reader the next you use AI as a search engine 🤔

Regardless this is an important message, to paraphrase Graeme: “you are the silos, you are the bad work culture, you are the stakeholders, you are the participants, you are the colleagues, you are the bosses, you are the direct reports, you are the customers using your designs”. This is such a crucial point, not only in terms of empathy, but also in terms of taking action. It reminds us that we can actually change those systems, those hierarchies, because they are us and we are them.

You could be that monster…and you have to decide in yourself not to be…

Sayani Mitra

Sayani provided a comprehensive overview of how UX research could help to improve and enhance AI-focused products and products where AI is being implemented.

I loved Sayani’s easy to follow list structures to sit alongside the product development process. In a tech environment where research roles are under threat, often because of tight budgets, and the ‘promise’ of AI for research (without researchers!) this is the talk we all needed.

I particularly loved the following aspects, which I plan to add to my ‘super-group’ of decision-making frameworks.

Uncover… the real-world context early. What problem are you actually solving?
Prevent… prevent tech-first decision-making
Define… value before features and map these
Audit… bias in datasets
Influence… the final product output

Sayani’s 5 P’s of Ethical AI

Purpose - Is AI even needed?
People - Who gains, who loses?
Process - How is it designed?
Power - Who controls outcomes?
Proof - Is there proof that this thing even works in this context (my notes got smudged here, so this is my interpretation - the serendipity of analogue!)

For me, the implementation of AI always comes to down to these aspects:

What type of AI are talking about (e.g., LLMs, ML, automation, something else?)?
What context was the chosen flavour originally designed for? It is good to understand the origins of the tool you are using and therefore it’s limitations.
Is it adding value beyond what you can already do without AI (as in ‘purpose’ above)?
How can we implement it in the most efficient and least wasteful way possible.

So much of this thinking overlaps with Sayani’s points.

Rebecca Hugo

Rebecca’s talk was a clever construction with several levels of meaning.

On one level it pulled some valuable points about learning and behavioural change from the seminal film, (2000). Specifically, one character’s proclamation that given enough time he could “teach Japanese to a Monkey”. The point here is that by finding ways to relate new knowledge to existing knowledge and interests, it is possible to ‘hook’ people and help them to retain new information. Crucially, they will also be able to better apply that acquired information. In the context of the film ‘said’ character, Rubin helps another character, Josh prep for an exam with limited knowledge of the subject.

On another level Rebecca gave an example of how to use analogy in a clear way when communicating with colleagues and clients. Even if you knew nothing of Road Trip and the other pop culture references in the presentation, Rebecca’s storytelling abilities essentially used these as a series of . As in references relevant to the main protagonist or subject but irrelevant on their own in isolation. By using a range of references she added value for those who knew the reference and supplied intrigue to those who did not.

Finally, this talk was stacked full of useful advice and as a designer who focuses on learning. I enjoyed revisiting concepts such as ‘memory palaces’ (also known as the ), and the ‘ . I particularly chimed with Rebecca’s point that external skills and knowledge can come into play in your UX career.

A few of my favourite sound bites:

Same but different
Simply speak simply
Respond to the responses
Make it make sense

Creating mottos is yet another helpful memetic and it is something that I know Rebecca excels at, having attended her talks at several UX Camp Brighton events over the years.

Alex Edwards

Alex talked about the steps for closing the Discovery process. Alex is a design strategist and it was superb to gain insight into the level of thought and learning layers of consideration involved in her work.

The key point for me was getting the right people in the room. This correlates with my experience as a consultant. It can certainly feel uncomfortable as you need to accept that there will be dissent. However, if you don’t take stakeholders on the journey with you from the start then you are destined for trouble later down the line.

I loved Alex’s thinking around the different stakeholders you need to appeal to when wrapping up discovery (the preparatory research phase of any design project).

The stakeholders were…

Decision makers
Subject matter experts
Broader stakeholders
Snoopers and Poopers

The last group, “snoopers and poopers” is the one you only learn about through experience. It is bet to figure out who they are as soon as you can, so that your project isn’t shut down by someone with an opposing agenda.

I loved Alex’s approach to cataloguing insights throughout the discovery phase, with a table for listing all the content collected, including:

transcriptions,
information from the client,
desk research,
and notes

I thought that the inclusion of star ratings out of five for the ‘applicability’, and ‘level of detail’ were really helpful criteria. I’ll definitely consider how to implement this in my own practice. Particularly as a new contractor, I often work alone. I do this work as well, but don’t have a central mapping or record of it. I will try using with a table like this at the top level. This might be especially helpful later in projects when the design process can inadvertently drift away from Discovery findings for range of reasons.

Alex’s advice when considering competitors was also quite brilliant. Specifically, in addition to researching “competitors, comparators and disruptors”, it is worth considering the “household names” and then looking for patterns. Not only do I need to add this into my own process, but I also want to pull in, “how do/did they solve this problem now/before?”. Remembering that an analogue process might be a competitor is important and it is something I often encountered when working in Higher Education.

As a personal reflection, when under high levels of stress I retreat from my careful time boxing and resort to hand-written notes which then get into a state of disarray, adding to the stress. The solution? Have an A4 sized whiteboard to put thoughts onto and if I don’t digitise them they gradually degrade and get rubbed out by my wrist. There is also an analogue satisfaction to erasing these notes and at least I am no longer going through reams of paper notebooks.

A great tool suggestion from Alex was which builds visual site maps and screenflows. This is a really helpful way to understand dead ends. I did try it for a current project – it couldn’t quite handle all the layers of navigation. Regardless, I can see Octopus.do’s potential, even though I ended up mapping the structure manually in Figjam.

Insights

So after all this how do you “distillate the wins”? Alex used to collate the findings and also noted that affinity mapping as you go is key. You cannot leave this until later, you need to capture this thinking as you go.

I thought the concept of “sticky phrases” was very powerful and a great way for converting insights to memorable mottos (there we are with the mottos again!).

A couple of great examples were…

One size fits none
Frontline staff are the heroes

Finally, the most important thing with discovery is to outline how, and crucially when, it will be actioned. This is key to ROI (return on investment) and something that I have learned the hard way in the past. Discovery and research in general are perceived as expensive, it is critical to show that discovery is not an optional part of the process and to close the phase in an action oriented way.

This can happen, we are ready to start

Shubhangar Sidharthan

Shubhangar’s talk was a much needed wake-up call for me and for this reason it gained my vote as my favourite talk of the day in the follow-up survey. Shubhangar provided a comprehensive summary of algorithmic changes to personalisation in apps such as Instagram and TikTok. He covered the user benefits, as well as the algorithmic siloing, and the addictive tendencies that could be stimulated by these design decisions.

This talk was a powerful reminder of how I need to engage with this tech to understand trends, even if I choose not to engage beyond professional necessity. I had a TikTok account back in 2021 when I made a number of accessibility focused learning videos. At the time, I was astounded by the level of engagement and positive responses compared to my experience using YouTube. However, I could also see that that this interface was, as Shubhangar astutely described a “fruit machine”. Having an awareness of my own tendencies I chose to switch off.

I have observed in learning how much the trends and personalisation evident in apps, like the aforementioned and Duolingo, have been adopted in learning platforms. However, I find myself questioning how affective swipe-centric learning really is, beyond initial engagement. At the end of the day it still isn’t embodied learning and for it to really stick it needs to be applied in the real world and be relevant to the goals of the person. No amount of personalisation will change that.

On the point of addiction, there is such a thing as addictive learning and not in a good way. I had a 400+ day streak on Duolingo which I recently ended for good¹. The main reason was I felt pwned by the owl. As Duolingo resorted to increasingly manipulative design patterns (many have commented on this–a good overview by ). I could feel this process taking hold and adding to my stress levels. Disrupting my sleep by encouraging me to continue the streak before bed, rather than reading a book and allowing my brain to switch down a gear.

During those 400+ days, I learned a lot of French vocab, but so much of it was reliant on recognition rather than recall and unless I went to France on a regular basis, applying this knowledge in the real world, it won’t stick (see Praxis later in this post).

I come back to the need for learning to be supported by both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The true benefit of personalisation being the opportunity for the person who is learning to map their individual aspirations to recognised outcomes and experiences that will help get them reach those aspirations.

Shubhangar’s parting point was both poignant and prescient:

The future of UX isn’t just knowing what users want. It’s knowing when they’ve had enough

Richard Vahrman

It was great to see Richard again, after a 1-year hiatus. Richard, although he self-describes as someone who is not a UX designer, is brilliant at creating a memorable experience in 20 minutes. I don’t want to give too much away about Richard’s session as he was using it as an opportunity to test ideas for a future project. However, I am aways inspired by his ability to take people on a journey and pull people into his world. There is a such a playfulness to his ideas, while retaining a connection to more serious ideas in the case of his future project.

Richard inspired the Godzilla card when I recently facilitated the . His game using every day objects, reframed as talisman and trading objects, was brilliant. It really got people in the audience to think about group affiliations, the ‘in’ crowd and ‘out’ crowd and societal norms. This was ‘metaphor’ at a level that anyone could understand, regardless of pre-existing knowledge, and for this reason it was absolute genius!

Ghaith Nassar

Ghaith took us on a fascinating tour of how the and how the book has influenced their practice as a multi-disciplinary designer and facilitator. I have reserved this book through my university library membership and look forward to reading it².

I enjoyed the embodied way that Ghaith presented the content. Placing the printed out would-be slides on the glass wall in the room. This allowed us to see a holistic map of the concepts as well as where we were currently were in the journey. It made me wish that there were a way of doing this in a presentation without it becoming inaccessible. tried to accomplish this as a tool, however, it was always bound by the teacher’s or presenter’s path through the content. I found this approach delightfully metacognitive as a theme in Freire’s writing, as Ghaith described and I have interpreted was for the ’teacher’ to address their own hubris. What better way than to allow the ‘students’ in the room to engage with the content now, and also look around to the content of now. I found myself looking back at the earlier concepts and seeing the connections.

Sharing knowledge is not linear. So, why is it almost always a timeline? We let our tools dictate so much of what we do (‘ahem, PowerPoint’).

Key point:

Teachers have something to learn from students and students have something to learn from teachers.

Another aspect that I found fascinating was this little equation.

Reflection + Action = Word = Praxis

I loved how Ghaith broke this down for us…

Action ~ “Transform the world” Word ~ “Rights for everyone. With people not for people.” Praxis ~ Putting theory into practice or as per the : “the process of using a theory or something that you have learned in a practical way”.

And what about the relationship between the component parts of this equation?

Remove ‘Action’ and you are left with “Idle Chatter”.
Remove ‘Reflection’ and you are left with “Activism” for activism’s sake. Perhaps forgetting why you took action in the first place, is the action even still appropriate for meeting the desired end state?

The equation above, together with the five pillars of dialogue ("Love, Humility, Faith, Trust, and Hope") are elements that I will consider including in my super group of thinking structures and frameworks. That is for a future blog post/s and was the topic of my own UX Camp presentation this year.

…reality as a process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity.

Claire Bown

I heard Claire speak at the event earlier this year and found her background in marketing and transition into AI consulting to be inspirational. As someone who spends a quite a bit of time researching and thinking about LLMs and machine learning, Claire’s talk covered some familiar ground. Regardless, I appreciated the visual way she presented both issues with gender equality in tech and the consequential issue of gender bias in the outputs form diffusion models. This will be further exacerbated by the prevalence of in the training models, so where women’s data is included, it will be predominantly Western and predominantly White. This is something that Michael Kibedi has discussed and explored on his .

Claire asked image generation to create an image for each professional role typically found on a product team. Interestingly all the images sort of look liked versions of the same caucasian man, with varying levels of facial hair. The exception was the UX designer who was both a woman and of mixed race. Without understanding more about the training data, it is hard to know why this role was different. If we assume majority US data, then the has pointed towards there being more women than men in UX roles.

This data from suggests that 53% of UX Designers are women in the US as compared to 47% men. This source also cites that many men more are interested in UX roles than are actually working in them, suggesting a bias towards women in the role. So, as compared to other roles, like (77% men | 23% women) this goes some way to explaining the generated image. The reason for the other characteristics remains unknown and I can only surmise that there might be something in the position of UX Designer as an advocate for all users that the model opted to be more representative of all users. A more linear explanation could be the language used to describe UX roles in job descriptions is typically femme-coded as The panel included who has spoken on this topic at . I need to do more research on this myself, anecdotally having looked at a lot of job descriptions recently I wonder if words like, empathy, collaboration, co-design, facilitation, listening, guiding, liaising, might lead an LLM towards this bias? (couching this thought…).

Going back to the outputs above, I find this flagrant bias pretty disappointing. It concerns me that most things we build digitally seem to perpetuate the mistakes of the past rather than envisioning an entangled and messy, yet more humane future (á la of ). I am not anti-AI by any means, I use and to supplement my own research for the paragraph above. I also use several other models in contextually sensitive and productivity focused ways. However, we really really need to try harder and not take what these companies, or their models, say at face value without scrutiny. Just as I wouldn’t believe a human, unless they provided evidence of what they were saying–even high trust humans³ get things wrong.

Skepticism is probably one of the healthiest habits to cultivate. You can then feel happy on the occasions when you are proven wrong. It is the best route to critically responsible optimism!

So, my main take away from Claire’s talk - what do these platforms want?

They want to keep you using their platform, their model.

So, change it up, don’t have single brand loyalty try the same prompt in a different model and see how it performs. However, before you do, ask yourself my Create Another Way question:

Is the value of the output proportionate to the effort and cost of the input?

And yes, this is an existential question. If this question causes you to stop, pause, and create a single more effective prompt, in place of three, then I have done my work.

Until next year (although I will definitely blog sooner!), I leave you with Rebecca Hugo’s amazing speed tapping skills, as applied to the 2025 UX Camp Brighton quiz.

Footnotes

This was not related to the “AI-First Controversy”, a multifaceted issue discussed eloquently by ↩︎
By the time of writing I am now reading Freire’s book. Due to the way the book and the arguments within are structured, the format Ghaith used now makes even more sense! ↩︎
If you consider me a “high-trust human” then I’m telling you now that I get things wrong and that is part of how I continually learn. It is possible that this post will have wrong things in it when I look back in future. However, unlike an LLM when you chat with me I will include phrases like, “you’ll want to double-check this…”, “*I’ll answer with the caveat that…”, “I will come back to you with a more complete answer…”. ↩︎

Gr8 Expectations - A generative game about AI at Clearleft's Service Design Breakfast

Thu, 08 May 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Some of the hand-drawn cards used to enable and stimulate discussion.

Creating Another Way (CAW) at UX Camp Brighton 2025

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:00:00 +0000

I’m planning a series of blog posts about this talk as there is a lot of thinking behind ‘Creating Another Way’. It is a longterm work-in-progress! If you are wondering about Obsidian, find out more about their . I am a long-term fan.

So you want to go green? at Green SEO Brighton

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:30:00 +0000

A joint presentation with Kathryn Lawrence (Behavioural Scientist and Researcher).

Games for design and thinking at University of Brighton

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Student sociey run led by Jennifer Udenze, Kirti Kumar, and Jordan Rocha. This was a great day and it was superb to be invited to play reflective gam, ‘ ’. During the day I showed a range of design focused cards, including .

Showing Smithery's Regenerative Design Toolkit as an example of a design game to a group of students

Dialogue: community, volunteering, and setting up your own company at University of Brighton

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The UX of Self-Defence at LTUX Brighton

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:30:00 +0000

Learning is embodied and most effective when linked to sensory and emotional experiences. Sensory experiences and emotional reactions build neural pathways. Find out what Fiona has learned by completing 56,160 minutes of Kickboxing at the time of writing the talk.

Put the learning into work; take the work out of learning at Playful Learning 2024

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Research Hacking at UX Camp Brighton 2024

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Literature review

Starter template for creating a Microsoft List from an Excel sheet:
Template with the ‘CONCATENATE’ formula for creating formatted references based on a table in Excel:
Template for formatting the references in Microsoft Word:

Creating truly accessible forms at SD in Gov (Virtual)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Falling back in love with the humble RSS feed

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Kudos

This blog post is inspired by a tip from , who suggested that I check out (Mac, iPhone, iPad). Read Al’s .

A history of my relationship with RSS

My first blog

My relationship with blogging and frontend web development began in 2005 when I started my first blog, The Anatomy of an Armpit. The blog, which was on , recounted my trials and tribulations while stuck in an area of Scotland I wasn’t fond of - as I was a youth at the time you can probably imagine the content (think ill-advised Tumblr-style rants). Regardless, I owe a lot to my first blog which got me interested in HTML, CSS, frontend web design, accessibility, and usability - interests that I have to this very day. It also helped me gain an understanding of , which at that time was the main way to stay up-to-date on your favourite bloggers’ content. At first this was via humble browser tools and bookmarking, then via the long defunct, .

My first podcast

Then in 2006 I got into podcasting, a technology reliant on RSS metadata and distribution. To say I was ahead of the curve on this would be an understatement. At that time hosting a podcast was a painfully slow process and I used one of the more user-friendly tools, or Liberated Syndication. It would take 2 to 4 hours to upload one episode to your site host only to find out that the audio artifacting was so bad, you’d have to start again. I had many an all-nighter for the love of my show, Motif Radio (you can still see the ). Motif Radio was inspired by London arts radio station, and was eclectic to say the least.

Motif Radio cooincided with one of the most creative and productive periods in my life. It was also a time of hardship and so much of that difficulty fed into my passion for creating the podcast. One of my favourite memories was a successful episode release, it finished uploading by 11.30 pm which was highly unusual. I was so elated that my partner and I went to the midnight showing of at the Mall of America to celebrate. Even though it isn’t the best film, it will always have a place in my heart for that reason.

Podcasts - a longterm obsession!

My obsession with podcasts continues to this day and I’m an avid follower of about thirty of them, funding my favourite creators on Patreon. I have often thought about resurrecting Motif Radio, which ended in 2007, especially as now, after many years, I have the audio kit to do so. Something to consider on as we go into 2024, although it would need to come back under a new name as there is now another which specialises in urban music. In the meantime I have enjoyed my guest hosting spots on the .

So why the return to RSS after all this time?

I was working on some frontend web development at my job and I setup a new RSS feed as part of that. While configuring the feed I fell in love once again with the simplicity, the clarity of information, and the potential for curatorial serendipity. What do I mean by ‘curatorial serendipity’? Well in the era of and its ilk, so much of what I consume is curated by algorithms on my behalf. On the one hand this is helpful, as content is rich and time is short, but what is being filtered out? Am I missing the other books on the shelf which might be more interesting than the book I think I need? Or to continue this library-inspired analogy, those other books might be more interesting than the book the library catalogue thinks I need. I was yearning for a bit more control to follow the feeds that I really care about - enter by which is my new favourite. An RSS curation app which allows me to setup up my feeds, sync them to iCloud, and access them on all my devices. More on that below.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog using RSS, here is the URL you need.

<!-- xml feed for this blog-->
https://www.macknowlogist.co.uk/index.xml

To find out the RSS feed for just about any site, including your favourite content on Medium, check out this helpful .

As an added tip for sites using static site generators like Hugo, a good rule to follow is to take the root of the site and add ‘index.xml’. So I’d start by looking at the site footer and then the page source to identify which generator is in use. Then try adding ‘/index.xml’ at the end and see if you get a page that looks like a feed.

E.g.,

Take the example of one of my favourite websites about retractions in research, .

I take a look at the footer of the site…

I then try adding /index.xml to the root web address…

<!--The website https://forrt.org/reversals/ becomes...-->
https://forrt.org/index.xml

I know a feed when I see one!

Bingo! There is the feed that I want for NetNewsWire.

Festive giving aside…

As as aside, this post is clearly indepted to both and . I note that they both organisations have active fund-drives for the end of year. I will be giving to both as these types of organisations are important for preserving knowledge and transient digital artefacts. In a web which is progressively less free, I give back where I can.

RSS - my new old love

So having now moved my feeds from Feedly, which I had a) forgotten about, and b) got annoyed with its paywall limitations - I am now once again enjoying my old-school blog consumption. My only slight gripe is that some of my favourite sites (ahem, NNG) do not have RSS feeds for their articles. I might start asking nicely as I feel it is time for an RSS comeback!

Bonus tutorial - how I moved from Feedly

I started in NetNewsWire by setting up my feed account in my iCloud storage. As NetNewsWire accepts emoji’s I couldn’t resist including a wee satellite emoji in my account name. Then I completed the following steps to migrate my RSS feeds from Feedly in OPML format.

Go to your profile options on the bottom-left of Feedly (your avatar or the default placeholder).
Select ‘Organize Feeds’.

Click on your avatar/placeholder to get to the options

Click on the arrow on the right-hand side (great signposting here, anyone would think they might not want you to export your feeds…).

Click on the non-descript arrow on the right to get to the export options

Download your Feedly OPML file.

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Housekeeping

This will be my last blog post for a little while as I will be updating this site. This will include an updated theme, some backend updates, and new case studies. I’ll also be finally moving some of my artefacts from the temporary Notion page (temporary for two years…) to this site.

Overdue reflections: playing games and taking walks

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Previously on Fiona’s blog…

was immediately before trying out a new version of the ‘These UXers Need Help’ game. This post follows that and reflects on a recent Design Walk I devised and led.

Today’s method via Aristotle

“Who, When, Where, Because, What, How”.

Most designers have probably heard of the ‘five W’s’. They may or may not know of its origins in Aristotle’s book 3 of Nicomachean Ethics¹ as a set of seven circumstances to understand a situation. Newer translations of the text bring added clarity to the original intention of the thinking method.

“Therefore it is not a pointless endeavor to divide these circumstances by kind and number: (1) the who, (2) the what, (3) around what place or (4) in which time something happens,and sometimes (5) with what, such as an instrument, (6) for the sake of what, such as saving a life, and (7) the how, such as gently or violently”

(Aristotle, Eth. Nic. 1111a3–8, as translated by Sloan, 2010, p.239).

It is the “for the sake of” bit that interests me. When did it become ‘why’? Recently, while reading Indi Young’s Time to Listen², I realised that ‘why’ is not the most decisive question when working on listening sessions. ‘Why’ is that? Young posits that asking why does not help guide people to their inner reasoning and “interior cognition” (Young, pp. 128-179). She also notes, and I agree, that ‘why’ can be irritating when repeated more than once in an interview or listening session. From my practice, I also know that when you work with people working in highly codified environments, and you ask a ‘why’ question you are more likely to receive the organisations’ reasoning not their own. So, in this post, I am experimenting with Indi’s suggestion to use ‘because’ as a substitute for ‘why’.

These UXers Need Help - version 2.0

Prompts for the questions below are based on Curedale (2013, p.255)³.

Who…

…is involved?

UXup invited me to be part of their evening meetup on the 20th July 2023. There were about 25 people. The folks in the room are involved in different UX-related fields with a range of experience.

…is affected?

People in the room may have personal experience with some of the issues raised by the cards. This makes it essential to establish the rules of the gameplay early. For instance, different cards can be requested to replace the randomly drawn cards. Also, where personal experiences are shared, those who do not have those experiences listen to those who do.

…needs the problem solved?

On one level, this session took some of the runtime of the event. On a meta-level, it is a game to encourage and build empathy. A core capability for all designers of solutions for humans.

When…

…did it happen?

It happened towards the end of the event, and we ran out of time. This meant we had one practice round as an entire room, followed by one independent round.

…is the solution, this game, needed?

A few possibilities are listed below. When a group or team are…

…about to embark on a fresh research project.
…trying to calibrate and get to know each other.
…thinking about ways to give back to the UX community.

Where…

…is the situation?

The Pump House pub was a great venue for the game as there were spacious tables to work with the cards and game sheets. Currently, the game is designed to be played in person. It would be easy enough to play over a web call using photos of the drawn cards from the deck or a randomising spreadsheet (as a way to prototype it).

Because…?

The raison d’etre

To build empathy in an applied and fun way. This game is about considering the life surrounding your practice as a designer and how that life can sometimes make it hard to be a designer. The goal is to help players to become more attuned to the way that situations, personal talents, attitudes, attributes, skills, and power and set someone up for success or place barriers in front of it.

For the sake of…because?

It is rooted in my personal set of values. I have a passion to do something about making sure design is both inclusive, introspective, and reflective on a continual path of improvement. I want to share this passion with others. I want them to be infected by my enthusiasm. ‘Because’ ultimately, none of us are here for long, and if you find ways to help improve other people’s circumstances, what better legacy is there? You can achieve this through ‘design’ by thinking about the design of everything you do.

What…

For more on the ‘what’ check out my earlier blog posts about the game:

…are its weaknesses?

Sometimes, because the cards are open to interpretation, they can lead to a surface-level conversation when more depth is the goal. To solve this, testing and removing cards that have to be explained or could be performing better is essential. I did like the situation card ‘is transitioning from one state of being to another’ as it was interpreted as the move from graduate school to work, which is an entirely valid situation to discuss. One which can be fraught and particularly challenging in the current jobs market.

Another weakness is that the game really does need two independent rounds to work. Due to the luck of the draw, having two rounds gives the opportunity to have a round that has greater depth or ambiguity. Having only one independent round means it is essential for a warm-up only. I will do this differently next time and ensure a minimum of 30 minutes is allocated. That was beyond the scope of this event, where only 20 mins was given. It was still a valid opportunity to user-test the game.

How

This is the most significant area for improvement. The way I displayed the game using my phone and a display adapter for the screen in the room did not work well. In future, I will either use an external webcam with my laptop or take a photo with my phone and share it with my laptop screen. In both approaches, a laptop with a display adaptor would work more consistently with a display screen in the room. This would also allow me to move around more freely.

Closing thoughts

I am grateful to have had a chance to use the game with a group again. I was asked if I might consider extending the game at some point. The main thing would be to capture some of the suggested solutions for the scenarios. These could be taken forward as ideas or commitments. Devising solutions also relies on a mixture of experience in the group so that knowledge of available solutions is forthcoming. A more accessible version of the game might need to offer solution cards. For instance, ‘find a mentor’, ‘join a meetup group’, ‘attend a conference’, ‘ask for help on Slack’, ‘check out the latest design articles’, ‘find a career coach’, ‘speak to HR about career options’, etc. There is also a risk that solution cards could restrict the creativity of the suggestions provided.

Ladies that UX Design Walk

Who…

…is involved?

Those who opted to attend the first Ladies that UX Brighton walk. Some of these folks come to LTUX events regulary. Many were attending their first event. There was a mixture of ages from under 10s to folks over 60. Having such a group of interested people to walk and converse with was a rare privilege!

…is affected?

The walk did touch on sensitive topics, so it was important to let people know that at the beginning and to provide options for them to opt out of elements or leave early. Strangely, it was also the hottest day of the year, so that impacted all of us and the design that had to be adapted ad hoc.

…needs the problem solved?

The problem was grounded in the disconnection you can feel as a designer working in a digital and built environment. How can we find inspiration amidst distractions? How can we find quiet in the noise? The walk was about sharing creative methods for perceiving and imagining our city in new ways.

…helped me?

Designing an activity for people absolutely has to involve people. So, I asked several folks for feedback. Their thoughts and feedback helped me to refine and iterate the design.

Ellen Mueller: Ellen’s artistic practice includes organising walks, and has just written a book, . My chat with Ellen helped me think about ways to design the walk to care about the walkers and demonstrate that care. Ellen’s work and were the primary sources of inspiration for the walk.

You can check out .

Kate Shields: chats with Kate about all things art and walking definitely informed the design. Having attended virtual role-playing-game walks led by Kate on Twitch, rambling through the environments of Assasin’s Creed, Kate’s artistic practice is a great source of inspiration. For more .
Heidi Swigon: early chats with Heidi gave me the confidence to believe that folks would sign up to spend a Saturday afternoon walking with me! Heidi’s enthusiasm for some of the topics I was planning was like rocket fuel for my creative process. Heidi also helped put together the accompanying zine, contributing the front cover and other design flourishes. The zine was given to each walker on the day. Heidi also took photos and helped to re-find people during an activity during the walk. Big gratitude!
Suse Bentley: provided a vital listening ear more than once. The first time, we talked about the intentional act of walking as women in urban environments. The second time was when I needed to sense check an aspect of the walk to ensure I was handling it from a position of interest and understanding.

I am immensely grateful to everyone who helped me think through and produce the walk design. A special thank you to Viv Cohen, too.

As an aside, something that fed into the walk design was the gentrification of walkable urbanism, the walkable city as designed by architects and city/town planners. I was particularly interested in how this concept relates to the ongoing redevelopment of The Level down to the sea front⁴. Walkable urbanism is oft conceptualised through architectural mock-ups featuring stylised female characters ‘walking’ through these imagined future spaces, providing their seal of approval (Bieri, 2015 & 2017)⁵. Through their presence, these characters give a sub-conscious message: yes, this space is trendy; yes, this space is safe; no, this space is not for everyone, for if it were, it would not be trendy or safe. I am personally a huge fan of walkable cities, yet it is important to consider that those who benefit the most from walkability are those who can afford inner-city housing price tags.

When…

…did it happen? Rescheduled to the 9th of September from July. As a note, unseasonably, this was the hottest day of the year. At 2pm in the afternoon, it was also at the peak of the heat, reaching 33.2 degrees Celsius (91.8 degrees Fahrenheit)⁶.

…is the solution needed? The walk was structured as a story with a series of interventions along a planned journey, starting at The Level and ending at the Laines in Brighton. The story was mapped to the spine structure that Ellen de Vries provided at her session on facilitation at Ladies that UX Brighton in May 2023. As outlined below.

Context
The Question
Guidance/Intervention
Encounter
Transition/adrenaline push
Resolution

Alongside the points above, I considered how the could feed into this - as a researcher, it seems important to start with discovery. Yet, I also felt that we might need to complete some extra work to enable ourselves to become more open to discovery, and this is where a meditation exercise came in as an early addition to the walk. A mental cleanse of sorts.

Where…

My imagined map given to walkers, more representative of my own internal mental model than a physical map would be.

Locations planned:

Union Road, The Level next to the skate park.
North of St. Peter’s Church, York Place, The Level.
South of St. Peter’s Church, York Place, The Level.
Mazda Fountain, Victoria Gardens.
Memorial to nothing, Victoria Gardens.
Old Steine Gardens.
Disco Balls - Seafront next to OHSO Social.**
Subway next to Shelter Hall.**
Middle Street.**
Ship Street Gardens.**
St. Bartholomew’s Road.**
Poole Valley.

**Starred locations were skipped for reasons I’ll explain.

…is the situation? The heat and busyness of Brighton made it difficult to walk at speed, and being outside was unpredictable. For instance, at the ‘memorial to nothing’ location, the remnants of a dead bird were scattered around it making it sad and unpleasant to stay there. We acknowledged the bird and the unpredictable nature of walking outdoors and moved on.

Because…?

The raison d’etre To explore our city as designers together.

For the sake of…because? I had a drive to share things I had discovered about our city by walking and running around it during the pandemic. Something that I have continued to do. This city has the capacity to provide neverending intrigue and wonder. It is constantly changing and evolving. For me, a big part of Brighton’s design is the people in it and their performative individuality; the unique clothing styles, mannerisms, and theatre of it all that I find endlessly intriguing.

What…

…are its weaknesses?
I tried to pack too much into the walk, and this was exacerbated by the extreme heat which meant we had to find different places to stand together. Next time I would plan half the stops we had planned in the zine.

What attendees said in the event feedback:

Suggested an extended event starting in the morning, breaking for lunch, and continuing into the afternoon.
A more focused narrative, such as focusing on specific design choices and changes over time, or accessibility and inclusivity (this is definitely a walk I’d like to do in the future!).
Checking for other events that are on at the same time. As we had to change the date, this was always going to be a risk and there is always a lot going on in Brighton. A funfair on The Level and a competition in the Skate Park proved challenging at the beginning of the event - it made it hard to find people and was loud.

They liked…

The high level of preparation and organisation.
The rich discussions and variety of perspectives brought by fellow walkers.
For a time, it changed their perception of their surroundings.
The zine and accompanying reading list.
The free gelato and art materials.

…was unexpected?
A group of young men decided to join our group near St. Peter’s church and listened to what I had to say. When I asked them if I could help, they asked if they could join our protest. It is interesting that a group of less than twelve, majority women, walking along a street was perceived as a protest. But then context is everything; The Level has a long history of public assembly.

How

I did foresee that we might run out of time, so I built a real-world cheat code by planning a lane that allowed us to skip multiple stops and go to the end - Boho Gelato in the Poole Valley. This was an excellent plan, and I will continue to think about how role-playing games can provide inspiration across my creative practice.

Closing thoughts

I learned a lot by pushing myself out of my comfort zone for this walk, and I will definitely plan walks again. A realisation for me is how hard it is to plan an event in space, time, and motion. I am experienced in “space” and “time” due to my many years of teaching and running workshops, but traversing space over a set period of time definitely adds complication. Also, giving people time to explore an area independently and then regroup is nerve-wracking. I feared that we would not find each other again, and if it hadn’t been for Heidi’s help gathering people, we might not have. The bright pink bags with our art materials definitely helped - the whole tour guide thing of all having the same hat or backpack makes total sense!

A big thank you to all those who attended the event and contributed feedback.

Photo by Deeksha Bhusan.

References

Sloan, M.C. (2010) ‘Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the Original Locus for the Septem Circumstantiae’, Classical Philology, volume 105/3. doi: . . ↩︎
Young, I. (2022) Time to listen - How giving people space to speak drives invention and inclusion. USA: Indi Young Books. ↩︎
Curedale, R. (2013) Service Design - 250 essential methods. CA: Design Community College Inc. ↩︎
. ↩︎
Anja Hälg Bieri’s work was part of this amazing book I found in the research process, . ↩︎
‘British heatwave brings hottest day of 2023 so far’, Reuters. . ↩︎

These UXers Need Help - Version 2.0

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 17:00:00 +0100

Previously on Fiona’s blog…

I created a game for UX Camp Brighton (9th April, 2023) designed to encourage reflection on power and social capital in UX. As I outlined in , some people enter UX with more power, some with less. My goal with the game was to encourage players to recognise opportunities and challenges, both overt and implicit and consider ways that we, as a community of designers, can help (if we can help!). The game was losely inspired by and has a four deck structure.

How did it go?

The playtest at UX Camp Brighton went well and the response to the game was far more positive than I anticipated. There was at least one person saying “these cards are like my life last year”.

What I liked about the experience was that in the span of 15 minutes we could break through the artifice of ’the designer’. Spending time reflecting on the fact that we are all real people with real problems and sometimes those things impact ’the designer’, preventing us from doing our best work. In those times we may or may not need help, but experience is sometimes the thing we lack to access help or to help ourselves. That is where the experience ‘in the room’ that the game unlocks can help us all.

There’s also humour sprinkled through the game and I loved that the “has a landlord who is a 💩” card came up! This is definitely an identifiable experience for those in the rental market and added some levity to the game.

Most importantly, folks liked the game enough for me to be invited to this month’s UXup on 20th July to play the game again. So, it’s time for Version 2.0 🎉, more on this in below.

Studio action shot - creating new situation cards for version 2.0

How does the game work?

Note

This is the version 2.0 overview - I’ll undoubtedly refine it further.

The four cards placed on the game sheet create two sentences which describe a fictional UXer. The friction created between the two sentences and the concepts within them are designed to stimulate conversation. The game probes the fascade of being a designer and is about helping us to empathise with factors that are internal and external to a person.

Deck 1: Situation - this is how much power the fictional UXer brings to this situation. This could be a positive, neutral, or negative value. For example, positive could be “they know influential people”, negative would be that “they grew up in a poor family”.
Deck 2: Subject - this is ‘subject’ as in subjectivity of a UXer. Again this could be a positive, neutral or negative. So neutral could be “is a boxset binger” and negative could be, “is a solutioniser”.
Deck 3: UX Trait - this is the thing that they do in UX. However, it is not all kittens and puppies, sometimes they aren’t happy in their field or are unsure of what to do next.
Deck 4: Barrier - this is something that is preventing them from being the best they can be. For example, they “don’t have a portfolio”, or “have very little money”.

How to play

Take one card from each deck: situation, subject, UX trait, and barrier. Place the cards face down on the game sheet in the spaces provided. Flip all four cards and then allow 5 minutes to discuss the person’s situation (in a group of 3-5), what type of help might be needed and who will provide it. You may draw a replacement card if needed.

Rules of Engagement

Make your point concisely and then leave space.
If someone in your group has lived experience, listen to them.
Imagine how it would be to be this person who is a UXer (referring to our fictional UXer).

How about those cards then…?

Cards added to the Situation deck

The following cards were inspired by discussions with and . Serena is also giving a talk entitled, Making your value visible at UXup on the 20th July.

New cards

“Grew up in a poor family”
“Knows influential people”
“Is managing a longterm illness”
“Is using technology to aid their mobility” - this could be interpretted in many ways and is about emphasising capability rather than disability.
“Observes religious traditions”

We considered how the above factors might give people power or set them apart from others working in different design settings.

I also added a card inspired by phenomenal talk during UX Camp Brighton about problems with representation in datasets and the exploitation of labour in the global South supporting technologies such as AI and . Specifically I was inspired by a map Michael showed where the language datasets for verbal interpretation used by voice assistants come from (e.g., Alexa, Siri). Based on this map, it was clear that these datasets were what might be termed ‘ ’ – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. You can read more about Michael’s research on .

New card

“Has a strong accent when speaking”

This spoken accent could be regional, international, or a unique hybrid as my accent was for many years. When I first moved back to the UK, people used to tell me my accent was distracting during workshops because they couldn’t place it (it had a North American twang). That made me pretty self-conscious and I resolved to sound more “Sussex”.

Also, I have had periodic issues with my voice for health reasons and this has made me appreciate all the more how important both having a voice and having a voice are. Sometimes I don’t have much voice and as someone who likes to think a lot and then talk about my thoughts, it has been a source of frustration. To the extent that I once had an existential nightmare about being in someone else’s house with an Amazon Echo that I couldn’t find and I couldn’t speak to tell it to stop an alarm that was incessantly going off. It turned out that the sound in my dream was my actual voice assistant invading my REM sleep. Good fodder for an episode of !

Another source of inspiration for me was Trans Pride Brighton & Hove on Saturday, 16th July. When creating the cards I avoid using terminology and focus on what is going on for a person. The cards are also written to leave room for interpretation and that is both subjective and guided by the rest of the cards put down. So, I added the following cards and we’ll see how well they work:

New cards

“Is transitioning from one state of being to another”
“Has a hidden identity”

To add, Trans Pride Brighton & Hove are very much in need of support this year. So if you can help, .

Finally, based on discussions I have had more broadly and UK news I added the following cards…

New cards

“Has been made redundant” - inspired by with regards to user research roles, but also a trend more broadly in tech.
“Has exorbitant mortgage payments” - I realised I was only representing renters, and with the current interest rates, it is no walk in the park for homeowners either!

New situation cards that will be tested out at UXup and beyond

Card added to the Subject deck

After the “Accessible Forms” workshop that Ladies that UX Brighton had with and Meghan Reed from in March, I rreflected on the impact that having a disability might have on doing UX work. There are so many experiences I could try to represent and such attempts could be viewed as reductive. I will take suggestions from people with lived experience, but I’m not going to try to speculate. In that vein, I have drawn on my own experience in that I can find it very hard to make eye contact with people whom I don’t know very well. This is something I have to actively think about when I meet someone new and consider “am I making enough or too much?”. “Do people think I’m too intense?. All these things run through my mind. It is all the more important when you are building trust during research. It isn’t easy and it has taken years of practice. Ultimately, I try to convey that I really care and I am genuinely interested through my eyes, because I truly am. I am also thankful for web calls where I don’t have this problem and can focus on the task of deep listening. This made me think that the following is a good card to add…

New card

…can find it hard to make eye contact

New subject card for making eye contact

Cards in the UX Trait deck

Based on the playtest at UX Camp Brighton, I removed one card: “They are an experience designer with emotional cloud”. The card required a bit too much explanation and similar themes are covered by other cards in the deck.

New cards

“They manage meetings with finesse” - I realised that I didn’t have a good project management card and it is such a core skill in design (and beyond).
“They facilitate meetings with purpose” - Inspired by Facilitation Fundamentals talk at UX Camp Brighton.
“They help people feel comfortable and okay during sensitive research” - inspired by Charlotte Parker’s talk How to handle difficult situations in User Research and Lou Carroll’s talk on co-design, both at UX Camp Brighton.
“They share and explain their tools, methods, and resources” - inspired by Aaron Cameron’s talk “Democratising Human-Centred Design” also at UX Camp Brighton.

New UX Trait cards

Cards added to the Barrier deck

Two new cards are inspired by AI. I am generally pro-AI but it is not without it’s foibles and I felt it was important to represent some of the understandable anxiety and also the downsides.

New cards

”…is worried about being replaced by AI"
"…takes information at face value without checking it"

Having had amazing discussions in preparation for a discussion panel for Ladies that UX Brighton later in the year on ‘fem-coded’ work and . I added a couple of cards to help think about these types of tasks and how they might have an impact over time.

New cards

“always end up writing the meeting notes”
“they’ll only blame themselves”
“handles all the leaving cards and gifts”

New Barrier cards

That is version 2.0 with a rationale for each addition. Let’s see how it plays out!

UX Camp Brighton 2023 - Game on!

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 18:50:06 +0100

Today is UX Camp Brighton!

It is is 6.30am on the day of UX Camp Brighton 2023, one of my favourite days of the year! It is also the event’s 10th anniversary. I starting attending back in 2014; we go back a long way. Check out for a flavour - I just noticed that I am on there!

What is UX Camp Brighton?

It is a event where anyone can present on a topic related to UX for 20 minutes. In the morning you are given an index card and you add your presentation title and description and put it up in a grid which indicates which room you will use. You then provide a verbal pitch to convince people to attend. I always try to generate some humour with my titles, last year’s title was: Let’s talk about LX maybe, lets talk about you and me (refer to Salt-N-Peppa’s seminal 1989 album ).

Why do I love UX Camp Brighton?

Every year I get to meet such amazing designers including people who are new to design and people who have years or experience. I also have design friends who I only see at this event and every year I catch-up with how they are doing and what they are working on. In short I learn a lot about what is going on in design in a short period of time and I have boatloads of fun doing it.

What do I do at UX Camp Brighton?

Every year I attend I tend to host a session myself. Last year my friend Lou encouraged me to be brave and present in the biggest lexture hall type room. That was great and worked well as it was a slide-based presentation. However, although the session was good upon reflection afterwards I felt like I tried to pack too much in content and theory-wise (for more - check out ).

What am I doing instead this year?

Many of my presentations are strangely inspired by short conversations with one of the UX Camp Brighton organisers , this year is no different. Luke said “why don’t you do something about ”. I thought about this and also ruminated on what I had heard a couple of times when I first started to volunteer for Ladies that UX (LTUX). Some folks had queried, and to note there is never anything wrong with a bit of constructive enquiry, why groups like LTUX are still needed? This is a valid point given that LTUX was , when speaking from experience as a woman or non-male person you’d find yourself looking around the room at tech conferences to find the two handfuls of people who were also not male. Representation for women in UX is far more healthy - a estimating that in the United States 40.4% of UX designers are women and 59.6% are men. The also points towards the fact that salary equality is on the rise in UX, with women earning slightly more than men in the 5 to 7 year experience bracket (data is United States-centric as only 9% of responses are from the UK).

According to UXPA in 2022, salaries were at the same level across male and female genders in 2022.

However…

We need to be careful with this as history tells us that when work get associated with people who are not male, the pay goes down. To provide a quick example, take the pay differential between people working in customer service-related IT versus those in more technical roles (e.g., development, desktop systems). Even when men are in customer service roles this work is fem-coded and is usually paid less. I am just planting the seed of this idea in this post for now as I hope we can have a discussion panel on this in future at LTUX Brighton. In the meantime check out these fantastic resources which have been educating me on the subject.

The work of , specifically her book .
Daley Wilhelm’s recent article on Medium, .
Talks given by , as quoted by .

Get to the point Fiona…

This year I have designed a game to playtest. The game encourages reflection on power and social capital in UX. Some people enter UX with more power automatically, some with less. How can we help within the community to not only level the playing field but start the race from the same starter mark on ‘said’ field? The game is losely inspired by , but has a four deck structure.

The cards create two sentences which describe a fictional UXer. The friction created between the two sentences and the concepts within them is designed to stimulate conversation. The game probes the facade of being a designer and is about helping us to empathise with struggles which are internal and external to a person.

Deck 1: Situation - this is how much power you bring to this situation. This could be a positive, neutral or negative value. For example, positive could be you know influential people, negative would be that you grew up in a poor family.
Deck 2: Subject - this is ‘subject’ as in subjectivity of a UXer . Again this could be a positive, neutral or negative. So neutral could be “is a boxset binger” and negative could be, “is a solutioniser”.
Deck 3: UX Trait - this is the thing that they do in UX, or want to do in UX. However, it is all not all kittens and puppies, sometimes they aren’t happy in their field or are unsure of what to do next.
Deck 4: Barrier - this is something that is preventing them from being the best they can be. For example, they “don’t have a portfolio”, or “have very little money”.

That’s all for now, but I want to take a moment to cite my inspirations for the game.

For more on power dynamics and UX check this month’s LTUX UX Book Club book, by Kelly Ann McKercher (if you would like to come to book club on Weds 26th April, you can sign-up on Eventbrite).
Jeff Sauro,
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s .
Ruben Pater,
I bought and then hand drew to create this game!

UX Brighton 2022 - 4th November

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 18:21:29 +0100

The brilliant return of UX Brighton

UX Brighton, a mainstay of the Brighton UX community returned on 4th of November after a 2-year hiatus. This year’s event focused on UX and Product Management. I have been reflecting on this intersection both personally and professionally of late and outline my thoughts below. Some thoughts are fledgling, some are fully formed, some I may revisit, some I may abandon later.

According to one of my sketchbooks 2020 and 2021 never happened.

The level of a problem

Products solve customer’s problems or as I prefer to term it products provide a means for customers to get the thing that they want to do, done (props to as this is blatantly inspired by Jobs-to-be-Done). So a product should represent an innovation in that it makes that thing they want to do quicker, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or some combination of the former. But what about once that product exists? It needs to mature and respond to the way the customers change, their contexts change, or the thing that they are trying to do change. These are internal problems for the product to address within itself so that it might carry on solving the high-level problem for the most customers and also gain new customers.

When a product stops solving a problem

I am in the process of moving away from Evernote. As a committed customer for many years it used to be my brain outside my brain. Was it the lack of new features that pushed me away? No, although I am intrigued by the promise of and interconnection between thoughts and ideas, I was still mostly happy with it. Ultimately, what pushed me away were the little cracks in functionality; the five times duplicated note, the slow load times, the indexing failures. My trust was broken, just like an unreliable human relationship it was the little things which set off alarm bells. As a seasoned technologist, these tell-tale signs of an unloved product get me packing my bags. To the point where my bags are packed before I’ll even adopt a product these days (shakes head at proprietary file formats). No escape plan, no deal. This is what comes from years of being the person charged with saving other people’s data.

Defining a problem

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say defining the definition of a product-problem. In UX a problem might be at a micro level as in a specific process or interaction is failing, e.g., I cannot buy the replacement fridge-freezer I need due to an issue with one part of the payment workflow on a popular UK-based vendor’s website (true story). At a product level, if that website were a product and it’s primary purpose was to enable the successful sale of fridges then that product has failed. So UX problems can be product problems. So, is it more about the lens by which we see these problems? Could it be that the product manager owns a collection of problems across the product’s development cycle and the UXer owns their problems as a subset of that. I think that is how I interpret it as someone outside that particular domain, yet also identifying with it. My products are learning experiences, when they are successful they result in the subsequent adoption of desired behaviours. If the means of product delivery in terms of suitability, usability, accessibility, availability, reliability, and robustness fails, then my product also fails.

Defining a collection of problems

Problems do not exist in a vacuum and are often symptomatic of bigger issues. So, acknowledging the breadth and distribution of problems and then identifying which are the most important and impactful to address is essential. This theme arose in both Janna Bastow’s and Matt LeMay’s talks. Deciding what is most important relies on research and analysis based on having access to a variety of information sources.

It is also clear that a collection of problems derive from and are influenced by multiple domains within a business. So this is where the connections between business strategy, product strategy, and UX strategy converge. Jaime Levy’s excellent book on was referenced by speaker, Alison Rawlings. A profoundly influential book during my years in graduate school. This was where I learned about business research staples such as competitor analyses, a method I still use frequently today.

How did someone else solve this problem? Was the outcome a new product, or a collection of approaches working alongside a product (more like a service)?

Defining plans to address each problem in your collection

This is where it all gets a bit Pokemon, but then consider for a moment an epic boss-style battle in Pokemon or any other strategy-based game. You have a collection of problems; your opponents, the posse of pokémon. You have a bunch of constraints; the skills that your pokémon have, and those skills in comparison to your opponent’s skills. Your battle strategy should reflect that nuance of playing to the strengths of your pokémon or the weaknesses of your opponent’s pokémon. There is probably a reason why the word strategy conjures up pictures in my mind of mustachioed people in a room playing a gigantic game of Risk. It is complex, it is messy, and very few people have a holistic viewpoint, preferring to stick to their own area of the board. Then add to all of this chance and the inevitable risk that brings; the roll of the dice, the rogue influence of a powerful person, a pandemic.

Defining a strategy as a collection of plans

A strategy attempts to understand problems, barriers, constraints, context and external influencing factors and create a framework for plans, and by extension a rationale for decisions. As Matt LeMay noted, your goals will gain clarity if you can explain the reasons for trade-offs.

Making decisions and actioning plans

To expand on the above further, I feel that strategy can be a framework or container for plans, plans are the catalyst for actions, and actions are reliant on decisions. So my key take away from speakers Lucy Spence and Alison Rawlings was the need for clarity in decision making. Good decisions, or at least a decision of best-fit, are research and data informed. Decisions should also be reflected upon after they are made. As an approach to this Spence shared statements that she uses to bring transparency to her decision making:

Knowing the outcome, I would make the same decision again
Knowing the outcome, I would make a different decision today
I would use the same process to solve the problem again
I would use a different process if I were doing this again

Hmmm the little thought experiment with Evernote below could help me learn something as it sits in the bottom-right quadrant of this decision matrix.

My decision to use Evernote back in 2013

Let’s take a look at decision to adopt the Evernote product in the first place, perhaps I will gain further clarity…

Selected statement:
Knowing the outcome, I would make a different decision today

Why?

Because my expectations have shifted and I have changed since I adopted Evernote. It is also proving to be quite a lengthy process to get my notes out intact¹.

How have you changed?

Well, I’m much more into coding than I was back in 2013. I suppose I want a note taking app a bit more like GitHub with tagging and version control.

It sounds like the context has changed…

My expectations have changed because the technology landscape has changed. But my skills and knowledge in coding were the catalyst for my increased awareness of the broader technology landscape.

Selected statement:
I would use a different process if I were doing this again.

Why?

Because my requirements have changed. The issues with functionality have probably just pushed the matter forward.

A ha! There we are getting to the truth of the issue, but like any human decision it isn’t clear cut. I had outgrown the product and my trust was degraded, the combination of both led to a level of inconvenience so as to hasten my move.

Recognising when your plans are not working and correcting the course

As noted by speaker Janna Bastow, this might manifest as solving too many problems for a small number of influential people, at the expense of solving the biggest problems for the most people. Bastow advocated splitting up this kind of custom or agency-style work from the product work. This is an interesting idea as it is clear to me throughout my career that large scale projects have often suffered at the expense of the small ones. While many small projects which seem doable on paper, ultimately they eat up the time which should be dedicated to larger ones. Lest us not forgot that having many smaller projects on the go calls for the need to routinely context-switch which consumes more mental energy as a matter of course. The popularity of methods such as Sprints, indicate this need for placemaking for mental space-making.

To conclude

To conclude, it is clear to me that when you own a product, it is always on show. What I mean by that is that as long as a product fulfills the core need then it will be loved and largely ignored, but when the cracks appear and that situation is compounded by eager competitors or lack of innovation then abandonment feels more enticing. I always had respect for product managers, now I have even more.

Random closing thought

Was Captain Kirk engaging in metacognition when he took the test? If you take the scenario at face value he cheated at the test. However, was Kirk considering this problem-space of the Kobayashi Maru at a philosophical level? Kirk refused to accept that the solution was predetermined and by researching the situation found an alternative. This alternative reflected his personal ethos and values. These values persisted throughout his career, he did not accept the no-win scenario². There was always a solution, he just needed the right crew of people to work together and see it.

This reminds me of two of my favourite points in Matt LeMay’s talk…

“Most questions of role clarity are actually best resolved by goal clarity…” “High performing cross-functional teams naturally self-organise around shared goals.”

LeMay also provided a great primer on Adam Thomas’ ( ) ‘ ’ which relate to the sunk cost fallacy (which Mr Spock explains below).

If you are interested, I have moved to and used the following script to convert my notebooks to Markdown: On that point I also write this blog in Markdown; a clear example of how my requirements have changed since 2013. ↩︎
Of course [spoiler alert] Khan put Kirk’s ethos to the test (in both the original and the reboot), but that could be a whole other blog post. ↩︎

Cufflinks - Edition 2 - 23rd October

Sun, 23 Oct 2022 18:21:29 +0100

Welcome back to Cufflinks

Hello again! Truth be told I was not expecting a 6-month hiatus between blog posts. I have had so many thoughts, ideas, and experiences that I have wanted to blog about but lacked the time to do so. What have I been doing all this time? Well I’ll provide you with an overview below, but first I will share my favourite articles over the past few months.

Reading highlights

Headline: embracing a level of discomfort means that your are actively learning and growing. A very wise friend once told to me that we often do the thing that we are second best at. That is because the thing that we are best at is often deeply uncomfortable. I feel this way when I am working in the solution space in design, especially when there is a lot of ambiguity. I also felt like this when I worked as an artist and curator. In short if I didn’t feel uncomfortable I knew I wasn’t really doing to work. As humans we tend to like the path of least resistance. So keeping your sights on the longer term benefits is essential if you want to stay the course.

Mei Zhang’s post is a wonderful gift to all designer-kinds. It provides a helpful article and an for navigating the many methods and tools approaches available during each phase.

This article provides a very fun and accessible explanation of Design Thinking and how it works. Using a high stakes dinner party as an analogy!

This article is pure brilliance and I keep coming back to it over and over. It has become a permanent fixture in my personal playbook.

This article include excellent time and communications flow management tips. Many I had already implemented, some I had not and now do. On this topic, I am really looking forward to the . That has been a great feature in Slack and is a good way to respect folks’ time and control your own communications hours.

Even those of us who have been writing alt text for years can improve our practice (so many that I would tweak with hindsight). This guide is going into my #LX #UX toolkit for safekeeping and frequent reference. Thank you @scope #a11y #accessibility

— Tweet by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill) on June 11, 2022

Some things I did and things that I am doing

Here is a whistle stop tour of my person highlights over Spring/Summer 2022.

I was a guest on the UX Coach Podcast

It was an honour and a pleasure to be invited to be a guest on UX Coach Podcast which aired in July. Visit the UX Coach website to .

One of the highlights for me during the discussion was talking about the difference that coaching made for me in my career…

…I had to make a change…having that coaching experience and being able to look inside myself and go “what are the skills I have to solve this problem?” Oh, I actually know a bit about data analysis. I know a bit about algorithms and what are recruitment processes based on? Algorithms, LinkedIn keywords. Okay. Let’s go and have a look at what all of the keywords are on the favorite jobs I would really like on LinkedIn. And then let’s think about how those apply to me and do I have them? And I thought, yeah, I actually do. I can genuinely cover all of those keywords. Those are all things that I know about and have applied. So then I added those to my profile. And within a week I got a recruiter contacting me.

And it was like, if I just thought of about it in the way that I think about solving problems in my job, then I could have been onto this much earlier…

For more on this you can check out .

So what I have learned is if I approach solving my own problems with the same level of interest and tenacity that I apply to those of my clients, I will find solutions. This is rut kyptonite!

I completed some career firsts

My first Sprint

I devised my first design Sprint (Knapp, Zeratsky and Kowitz, 2016) in August for an internal client group. It was both intense and invigorating to consider inputs, outputs, flexibility and outcomes. The process was successful and thanks to the ingenuity of my collaborators we only used 4 sheets of paper across the event. We avoided the usual pile of sad and used-up post-it notes by using which allowed us to write, wipe off, and reuse. My particular favourites were the (index cards) which have now become a mainstay in my design studio.

Learning campaign based on user research

I have designed and run outreach campaigns before. However, this was the first time that in-depth user research and interview transcript analysis had pointed towards the approach as the most effective solution. Discovery to truly understand the underlying problem made all the difference. The campaign itself is multi-channel across intranet, internal communications tools, and email. It also includes a three-week challenge via the LMS as a mini-course with a limited-edition badge. The campaign has resulted in the creation of valuable job aids which can persist beyond, helping colleagues in their work.

I have been volunteering for Ladies that UX Brighton

Now this is the venture which has been taking up time when I might have been blogging, but it is totally worth it! Ladies that UX (LTUX) is a magnificent organisation holding meetups in 85 places around the world and supporting women and people of underrepresented genders in UX. LTUX Brighton chapter has been on hiatus since March 2020 due to the pandemic. So, myself and co-organisers now have the task of rebuilding it from the ground up. After several months of meetings and concerted networking we are getting ready to re-launch in 2023. A highlight for me has been getting to give a talk to students on my former MSc UX program. It was such a heartening experience to share my enthusiasm for UX and the Brighton UX community with a group of interested people. If you would like to learn more or get involved (we are seeking more volunteers and speakers) visit the .

My favourite image from the new branding from Ladies that UX. Can you guess where this is in Brighton? - Answer at the end of the post.

I am feeding my mind, moving my body, and curating my space

I am cultivating creative and curious encounters on a daily basis. This is a lifelong pursuit for me, but I have to admit that I had let it lapse a bit due to busyness.

In a similar vein I can recommend the work of Stefaan van Hooyd, author of who I saw give a talk at the Learning Technologies Autumn Forum (13th October, ExCel Centre, London).

Amazing talk with @stefaanvanhooyd on Curiosity #LTAF22

— Tweet by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill) on October 13, 2022

Activities to feed my mind

Applying for my alumni library membership and reading books outside my current area of knowledge. Currently I am reading a book on linguistics.

Okay I have to admit that I let out a high pitched exclamation of delight when I received my approval for alumni library membership today. Thank you @brightonalumni for making this possible!

— Tweet by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill) on August 3, 2022

Going to the theatre more. The show that caused to me to think, learn and reflect this week was Ifrah Mansour’s one-woman show, “How to have fun in a Civil War”. Which effectively and poignantly retold her own experiences as a young child in Somalia.
I have been drawing again and will be trying to attend life drawing sessions at least once every couple of months. It is clear to me that the intense observation required in drawing supports my practice as a designer. It is a muscle I definitely need to continue flexing.
Finding any excuse to see art both locally and when I am working in London. Sticking around after work to visit the Tate Modern for an hour where I saw the , as shown in the featured image for this post. I loved the way that the former oil tanks at Tate remind me of the former industrial smell and tranquility of the nooks and crannies in The Soap Factory (an art gallery and former workplace of mine).
Another unexpected delight was getting to go up The Shard last week and gaining a whole new appreciation of London. Seeing the space where the was founded from the vantage point of their gods and wondering what life must have been like 2,000 years ago.

Moving my body

I took part in two runs in September. One with work colleagues through City of London for SolarAid. It was amazing to run freely without cars amongst the towering buildings and neons reflecting off the rain-sprinkled tarmac in the evening light. I also ran my first half-marathon in September as part of the Great North Run. I raised nearly £400 for Mind charity and spent a wonderful long weekend in Newcastle with my mum. I also continue to kickbox and have taken up a bit of Thai boxing when I can fit it in.

Curating my space

I found some signed cards by one of my heroes, the artist Marina Abramović at the Baltic art gallery in Newcastle. The cards suggest ways to essentially hack your perception and are based on techniques Abramović uses prior to her performance art pieces. I decided that these are great for my studio and give me inspiration alongside some psychology cards and the odd cloud notecard! You’ll also note some fairy lights to cheer me up as we enter the long-dark of Winter.

You may not find a skull in the grand tradition of momento mori to be tranquil. For some reason I do!

Something I made or fixed

I have been contributing to awesome ID list of helpful tools for .

I have also been knitting these socks for my dad. Pretty jazzy huh?

The answer to my question about the building in Brighton: it is the top of the Dr Marten’s shoe shop ( ).

References

Knapp, J, Zeratsky, J., Kowitz, B. (2016) Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. New York: Bantam Press.

Extra features

on the topic of referencing…

A thread 🧵: As a #Dyslexic person who struggles with reading-at-speed, screen readers are a gateway to knowledge. I like to stay up-to-date by reading academic papers and industry reports. However, I want to talk about academic referencing styles and why they are a problem...

— Tweet by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill) on May 14, 2022

Cufflinks - Edition 1 - 24th April

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 19:00:05 +0100

What are these Cufflinks?

Cufflinks is the title for recurring blog posts where I share some of my favourite links. I plan to write these posts on a semi-regular basis. The inspiration came from the fantastic, Stéphanie Walter’s “Pixels of the Week” which is an amazing resource. Do check out .

Welcome to the first edition of Cufflinks!

Something I wrote

I am delighted to have been invited to write a guest blog post for . My post entitled, outlines my approach and some of the UX methods that I used in my former job as a Learning Technologist. The post is such a fantastic record as it really underlines why I made a career change. UX/LX research and design methods are now fundamental to my work as a Learning Experience Specialist and I build on this practice every single day. It is an amazing adventure and I am absolutely loving it.

Excerpt

Design methods can provide strategies for thinking about a problem on your own, or with a group of people. Methods can also provide ways of gathering feedback and showing your thinking to stakeholders and senior managers. Some of the methods may feel familiar, as they derive from anthropology, psychology, and social sciences.

Flow of activities starting with video interviews, followed by a written interview transcript. and a chart showing click activities when using software. Then example statements for a job or action: when I am [context], to help me [motivation push/pull], so I can [outcome]. A functional test list comes from the job statement followed by video and written web tutorials.

Things I have read

This article is a nice piece of validation for my guest blogging venture above. The writer talks about the importance of making UX work visible. So, it is not only the work of doing the research, but it is the process of involving stakeholders and then sharing the results. All three aspects vital to ’the work’. Doing this work on research and design in the open, helps to uncover the synergy between projects and to break down historic silos.

The more inclusive you are in inviting stakeholders to explain and understand your processes, the more brainpower you have on the solution. This way the product objectives can be more aligned from different perspectives and hence everyone — UX professional, organization, users, and business — wins.
- Hossein Raspberry (2022)

A key part of contributing to the design of an organisation from the inside is to find common ground to agree on. Design principles as rules of best practice are a good place to start. The ‘ ’ are now 25 years old, yet they are more relevant now than ever. I have often thought that the inclusion of the ’d’ word might be a mistake. As ‘design’ might imply that ‘designers’ alone are in a position to make an impact, in fact these principles need to be embedded at every stage of the product cycle and at every level of the product itself. Also as the principles were written by a group led by the architect Ronald Mace and the group included engineers, environmental design researchers, product designers, and architects it is clear that these concepts apply in any situation where a solution for humans is being built. We need to avoid the situation outlined in the below by engaging with all users and avoiding the assumption that what will be functional and safe for one, will be functional and safe for all.

Screenshot of Edward Rice's post on LinkedIn. Post includes the text: 'Poor Accessibility Regulations and enforcement results in this type of dangerous design. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what’s wrong with this, on so many levels. Another case where common sense is not commonly used!'

This brings me on to the ideas of pace layering and cultural rates of change and why patience and persistence are both virtues for anyone involved in design and transformation. This month’s dConstruct newsletter from refreshed my memory on this one. Originally devised by Stewart Brand is his 1999 book, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, pace layers are a concept for thinking about how the rate of change differs at levels of civilisation. Fashion being the fastest to change and culture, followed by nature being the slowest to change. A chapter from Brand’s book is at . This concept has become well-worn in design spheres but still has merit as shown by Richard Rutter who uses it as a catalyst to consider the changing nature of UX-related professions.

From Brand (2018) Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is fascinating when you consider what learners think they need to know in comparison to what they might actually need to know to achieve competency.

If you’re training people, you can expect the bottom percentile to not even be aware that they are wrong. Dunning Kruger say it is because metacognition is linked to skill level — the same attributes that make a person skilled in the domain are needed to evaluate if one is right or wrong. There are domains where this is true — like logical reasoning — but also where it is not true, and where the effect would not be as obvious.
- Curiosity Research & Design (2022)

So with this in mind, we need our approach to be effective and to feel relevant to those learners who potentially think they know more than they actually know. Dr Phil Hardman’s bitesized suggestions, such as Observing Experts and Meaningful Collaboration are great and have already got me thinking about some alternative approaches to things that I am working on at the moment. I am eager to participate in the BETA version of the Learning Science Bootcamp, the sign-up link is available on the page above.

I have been thinking about creativity at work a lot recently. This is partly because I personally know that I am at my best when I make time for creative thought in my week (something I am doing right now by writing this post). At least an hour of that time should be at work. Most commonly this involves taking to paper to draw out the solution to a problem, but sometimes it involves a 10-minute skipping break in my local park. Why skipping you may ask? On the one hand, skipping is something that I have been actively practising for many years and on the other it is the closest you can get to dancing in a public space without confusing people. With skipping I can create a dance routine on the fly using different jumps and rhythms to fit what I am listening to on my headphones. This gives my brain a creative distraction from work tasks that might be troubling me. Then when I go back to the work tasks they are far more swiftly dealt with; that is the thing about brains, less is more.

I am taking this one on the nose, as I wrote this in an email the other day. I will also say that the issue noted by the author is how the statement ‘feedback is a gift’ was used to avoid communicating authentically and with empathy. The response Ang cited was “Thanks, Nick! I love feedback. Feedback is a gift!”. This is an empty response which suggests that they had not read the constructive feedback, least of all taken it onboard. To receive feedback with empathy is to listen and acknowledge, whether you agree or not, then delay a full response if more full consideration is required. Receiving feedback is hard and this is something I am continually working on getting better at myself. I for one will consider the article as a piece of practical feedback, which will cause me to think twice prior to stating the obvious next time and rather just focusing on the ‘doing’ part instead.

A fascinating article providing insight into working artists from a range of disciplines. How do they stay motivated? How do they cope with public critique? This felt like the perfect application of my point above, where a key idea in the article was to not internalise negative or positive feedback, but to take what you can from it to improve and most importantly not let it eat up your insides.

Note to self…

These are tools or posts which I have, or will, find useful.

Something I listened to

A great episode featuring some of my very favourite thinkers and theorists.

Something I made or fixed

I am trying to fix things and to buy second-hand when I can. My Converse trainers started disintegrating before our eyes at UX Camp Brighton this year so it was a topic of conversation. Thankfully all fixed now, thanks to some hardy denim from my fabric scraps and some all-purpose glue.

Just to follow-up on another key discussion point from @UXCampBrighton - I live by my word @yandle @UXLouX #Solved #FixDontBin I ❤️ my Milky Way shoes @Converse

— posted by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill) on April 23, 2022

UX Camp Sticking Power

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 16:42:07 +0100

What I did

On the 26th of March 2022 I attended UX Camp Brighton for the first time in three years. In 2019, I could not attend due to other commitments and for the past two years the event has not run due to the pandemic. The momentous return of UX Camp gave me an opportunity to refresh my in-person presentation skills by hosting a talk about my new found career as a Learning Experience Designer¹. The talk took a metacognitive approach by first looking at what a Learning Experience Designer (LXer) does. I then applied my discipline by using a LX lens to deconstruct the UX Camp format. Specifically, I provided a short demo of as it would apply to the event. From an Learning Experience (LX) perspective, UX Camp can be seen as a chance to learn about and, most importantly practise, UX and user research skills in a safe space.

I'm here for the title #uxcb22 @fmacneill

- Tweet by Rebecca Hugo (@becstex) on March 26, 2022.

Photo credit: Rebecca Hugo

I used the talk as a testbed for new ideas; some worked well, some need further reflection. This approach of testing with an audience was inspired by who was recently interviewed on . Nixon noted the use of public speaking to prototype ideas and get fast feedback. This was a liberating idea for me as for years I have felt that I cannot speak if I do not first write. But perhaps I can speak to write and write for speech. This is something that I need to develop and hone, but Nixon’s career is certainly an inspiration to me. Like me she has traversed and art and creativity within her career, yet she has also successfully applied these diverse experiences within business. But enough about me and my UX Camp talk, you kind of had to be there.

What stuck?

Taking the base idea of the talk forward, after two weeks, what of my own learning? What has stuck with me from UX Camp Brighton? By revisiting my recollections in this blog post, I am going to embed those concepts through the act of reflecting on them. Bonus!

The format of UX Camp means that I could only attend some of the sessions. The format has sessions running concurrently and they are not repeated. You also have to race to the session rooms and if the room is full, you find another session to attend. Of the sessions I attended the following had sticking power for me:

Applying 80/20 in UX @Foolproof -

This session was based on the , when applied to UX, in that…

80% of your user’s experience could be affected 20% of your product.

Unexpectedly Obvious - Chris How

This session provided a series of examples where design solutions were both ingenious and obvious. This was summarised by Chris How as:

Understanding the problem + Imaginative thinking = Unexpectedly obvious design

Are you at the table or on the menu? - Laura Yarrow

This session focused on the issues with the mystique surrounding UX purpose and process. There can be a notion of feeling hard done by and misunderstood as a UXer and Yarrow offered something of a growth mindset for UX designers and researchers to adopt. Yarrow deftly summarised the role of a successful UXer as a “Trusted Agitator”. A simple concept which really resonated with me across my career, both now and during my time as a Learning Technologist with a UX specialism.

Presenting presenting - Alliterative Alphabet Aerobics - Rebecca Hugo

Always one of my favourite speakers, Rebecca Hugo served up a session with poise, candour, humour, and genuine knowledge. Only the likes of Sandi Toksvig can compete in terms of creating a delightful and creative verbal universe during a talk.

Why Lorem Ipsum sucks and what to do about it -

Some great tips for using authentic text and content when prototyping in Figma and why that is important, especially when testing designs.

Why did it stick?

So what made these sessions successful from an LX perspective?

Applying 80/20…

In ‘Applying 80/20…’ Tehreim Arif gave us an authentic opportunity to practise with a scenario where we had percentage-based data from a fake employee survey. The employees had been asked the following:

If you could change one of the following things about your organisation, what would it be?

We were given the findings as percentages and asked to arrange them from highest to lowest on a piece of paper. We then needed to slice the data based on the figures that got us closest to 80% cumulatively. Alternatively we could look at the figures that made up the top 20%. Figures represented action items like: office location (28%), progression roadmap (25%), salaries (23%)

Having found the action items to work on, we were asked to look at these as a percentage of the number of items that were reported in the survey. So, say you had 10 action items in your quantitative survey question and each was selected by some of the participants. Then if three of the items made up close to 80% of the opinion (e.g., the list above which equals 76%), then that would be 30% of overall items where action was needed.

So, you get a measure of the areas to focus on to get the maximum value from the user perspective. You also get a way to communicate that concisely to stakeholders via the following like the following statement.

76% of employee experience can be improved by focusing on 30% of the organisation.

This session gave us an opportunity to practise and apply this method. Arif also gave us a series of scenarios where she had found the concept useful in her own work.

Unexpectedly Obvious

Chris How is a master storyteller and this session was no exception. The thing about stories is, they stick. These stories were told through evocation of different eras using slides based on single photographs with rich verbal narrative in accompaniment. Yes, the design solutions where compelling, but the context and route to ‘said’ solutions was even more interesting. My favourite story was Van Halen’s use of a proto ; a bowl of M&M’s leaving out the brown ones, nested in their long menu or rider of requests for gigs. This was use as a test check if the rider was being read and that the safety protocols it specified were being followed. For more on this check out on this piece of rock history.

Laura Yarrow held up a magnifying glass to all of us in the room. Laura used relevant examples which were designed to reflect the experiences and needs of the specialist audience at the session. This meant that when the reflection was triggered it came from a place of experience and authentic mentorship directed towards us as audience members.

Presenting presenting - Alliterative Alphabet Aerobics

Rebecca Hugo’s session was perfectly placed. Many of us had already presented that day or were about to. Those experiences were fresh in our minds. We had also attended other sessions that day which were still ripe for internal critique. Then there was Hugo’s presentation itself with a tinge of Lewis Carroll-esque humour phrased as an alliterative alphabet of tips, Hugo knowingly self-critiqued while engaging us in levels of metacognition.

Why Lorem Ipsum sucks and what to do about it

This resonated because it bore resemblance to my own recent experience as a tester giving feedback. Nothing takes you out of a demo like copy and content that shouldn’t be there and Sam Steele provided some compelling visual examples, showing how to create prototypes with the right level of detail.

What am I using now?

I am using 80/20 as part of a research project supporting a page redesign.
After Yarrow’s talk I reflected on how easy it is to play the role of the misunderstood artist/designer/researcher (speaking for myself here). What is harder is to bridge the communication gaps between your work, your colleagues, and your audiences. That is something that I am actively working on, so this talk really resonated with me. It is not enough to do the work, you also need to be able to explain the work and know where and how to collaborate. If I am doing my job properly I should be the gossamer that brings things and people together, not the hunting spider sulking in the corner! I am indeed a “trusted agitator” and I also loved the way that Laura used a simple graph to explain this relationship. I have taken inspiration from the graph to build a basic scoring system for a prototype learning game that I am building.
Hugo’s talk hastened me to reflect on my own speech patterns (the section entitled, “understand unruly utterances”). As a result I have resolved to try and solve a verbal tick borne out of my own occasional social anxiety. Starting questions with, “I don’t know if…”. I wouldn’t dream of phrasing a question like this for research, so it is time to fix it! Stop, think, speak.

Thank you UX Camp Brighton!

In spite of having two years away, this year’s UX Camp Brighton was one of my favourite events branching all the way back to 2014 when I first attended. Being part of the UX community in Brighton means so much to me personally, to my career, to my practice, and to my abilities as a designer and researcher. The learning journey never ends and it is nice to have help along the way.

Bonus feature

Al Power’s session, UI Design Tips for Success also had sticking power (pun intended). However, officially I saw it two days prior to UX Camp Brighton at our practice session as part of . Al has posted some great resources related to the session, so do .

My new title is Learning Experience Specialist but I feel like a designer and I worked hard to occupy a design space. So practice-wise I consider myself a designer. ↩︎

Magical Meetings - A Review

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This post relates to of thinking about what makes an online space inclusive. I decided that UX Brighton’s monthly Show and Tell events are a good way to set mini deadlines for myself. Sometimes I use these events to present new tools or UX methods that I am using. This has now branched out to presenting the occasional book review. My review of Magical Meetings was presented at the August 2021 Show and Tell, where I fed forward my learning in an abbreviated 15-min summary. The book also got me thinking broadly about my own experiences of working in education and the soft skills involved. So, I decided to give the information some breathing space prior to writing this longer form blog post.

About the Book

The book, Magical Meetings was discussed by one of the authors, Douglas Ferguson on . Ferguson founded Voltage Control a company that focuses on facilitation including meetings, workshops, and team dynamics. They also look at workflow and transformation, considering for example how to optimise agile sprint cycles within different organisations. All of this sounded fascinating and quite different from my current work in Higher Education.

Title: Magical Meetings, Reinvent How Your Team Works Together
Authors: Douglas Ferguson & John Fitch
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Copyright Date: 2021

Summary

This is my own summary of the book to give you the gist.

Magical Meetings reframes the act of facilitating, attending and reporting back from meetings. It aims to empower facilitators to prevent bad meetings from taking place. It also provides strategies to support human creativity and productivity when meetings do happen.

Setting

Where did it happen?

The tips, advice, workflows and templates provided in Magical Meetings were validated through Voltage Control’s day-to-day work as an agency focused on the facilitation side of business process for software development.

When does it apply?

Magical Meetings is not talking about all meetings, rather it forcuses on: Workshops, Sales Meetings, Presentations, and Conferences. Any of these meetings can take place in-person or online.

An excerpt to give you the flavour

This is one of my favourite elements of the book, a test to establish whether a meeting should take place. In the table below, if one or more of the questions between 1 and 4 are ‘yes’ then the meeting is worth having. If question 5 is yes, then a written report, an email, or an update in a project/task management tool, such as Jira, Trello, or Microsoft Planner would be better.

The table below is a direct quotation from p. 24 of Magical Meetings.

#	Should we even have a meeting?	Test
1	Is there a clear purpose for gathering people to meet?	Y/N
2	Is there an artifact/prototype to review?	Y/N
3	Is there going to be an artifact/prototype that we can create after workshopping in the meeting?	Y/N
4	Will decisions that alter the direction of the project be made?	Y/N
5	Is this essentially a status update in disguise?	Y/N

Note

Once you start using the table above it may lead to existential unrest. It led to my own sudden realisation that many meetings, beyond my control, were indeed “status updates in disguise”.

What worked for me

There is a lot to like about this book, to summarise my key takeaways…

Meeting Purpose

The book presents ways to think about meetings as an edifice of the working environment. Turns out there are a lot of company-cultural hang-ups related to meetings and emotional needs as part of that, so it is useful to split up meeting planning and communication into sections. First is the purpose of the meeting, for which the authors provide the following criteria: “Informative, Explorative, Generative, Decisive” (p. 26). I have found these criteria useful for reflecting on my own meeting experiences, considering clarity of purpose and whether it was clear to participants what the purpose was in advance. Essentially for a meeting to be truly successful, participants must understand why it is being called, what the expectations are for their input and what is in it for them personally or as part of team working towards shared objectives. From an inclusivity perspective, the key aspect is expectations for participant input. Being able to mentally prepare beforehand for collective and group focused work is crucial for some neurodiverse people. It is also important to plan out aspects of the meeting which could be worked on individually, yet still together, to unlock ideas and to provide space for the less dominant yet equally valuable voices in the room.

Meeting Outline

The second is a meeting outline. This is essentially an agenda or schedule listing what will happen when, including activities and breaks. These elements should be mapped to the meeting purpose and objectives. The authors provide the Nine Whys¹ questions to focus in on the purpose. They suggest asking the questions at the beginning of a meeting or workshop to help get everyone on the same page. A helpful tip for communications planning was to share the meeting outline with not only with the group of participants, but also with individual participants ahead of time (p. 40). Then follow-up with a group reminder the day before. Although this is quite labour intensive, it is certainly worth it in terms of getting the most out of the meeting time.

Meeting Rules

The third is setting meeting rules. This is something, based on my own experience, that is oft overlooked but can make all the difference to making sure that all participants feel respected and that their opinions are valued. So, for example, a rule I could get behind is not speaking over people. It is something that happens frequently in web calls and can be circumvented by writing in the chat or having a notebook to hand, “save that important thought, don’t interrupt someone else’s flow”. Of course, folks can run on too long, so I have always found it helpful when chairing forums to ask that contributions are limited to two minutes. Sometimes there are technology focused rules like putting your smartphones away, as suggested by the authors (p. 29). I am less of a fan of this, as if folks are tempted to look at their phones, then this tells me that the flow of the meeting is not optimal. I take note of this, move on and improve the next iteration of the meeting.

Online Meetings and Workshops

The authors, Douglas and Fitch also note that online meetings and workshops take double the preparation time and this is certainly true based on my own experience. However, it is also possible, like a real room to be a “Meeting-Room Architect” (p. 31). In a real room this can be about arranging furniture or creating zones, something I worked on in the past through the likes of practice sharing café events and a la carte style technology taster sessions. In the virtual space this can be about the interaction between tools, so Microsoft Teams might be the room, Mural might be the participant’s own desk, Word Online might be a flipchart. As I have talked about in previous blog posts and as is starting to emerge in tools like and , the idea of a fictitious floor plan can also be a helpful McGuffin (or trigger for the plot) for an online meeting. As part of this the Douglas and Fitch propose a video orientation for online meetings and workshops, which participants watch in advance. Having tried this out, the best approach was to create a TikTok-style video with very brief steps and lasting no more than 90 secs. Otherwise, folks won’t watch it. Creating annotated screenshots or short video clips with a voiceover is a good way to stay on track.

As an aside, one of the most transformative sessions I ever attended involved sitting on chairs looking down as a single iPad on the floor and imagining it as a window (kudos to at UX Camp Brighton circa 2015 for this one). This proves that it is not always about furniture and stationery but also about imagination.

This online orientation video is too long (3:37mins). Just an example.

Do the work in the meeting

One of the key messages in the book is the idea of doing the work in the meeting. This is something that has always been a facet of my own approach when running any type of meeting, large or small. Another key concept is ensuring that the people in the room want to be there, so that the people in the room bring the right kind of energy. Therefore, making meetings optional, but providing clear communications prior to and after the meeting helps to counteract what the authors call, “FOMO” or Fear of Missing Out (p. 132). I have tried one of the recommended methods, providing a story of a meeting as a debriefing method using a story spine, number 4 on the as devised by a former artist at Pixar. It was inventive, but a little bit tricky to tweak for my meeting (which was a nationwide accessibility meeting), but certainly quick to digest and celebratory in tone.

Extra Features

The and the on the Voltage Control site are very helpful. I used the with UXUp meet-up group participants. The activity involves asking participants to recommend books, write a mini-review and upvote other folks’ suggestions. I also added a final element which was to ask participants to indicate which book they would try to read soon. I will use this as a sharing exercise again and next time I will allow podcasts and videos in addition to books, to get a fresh list of materials not only the staples. You can view the here to give you a flavour.

What did not work for me

As an educator, some of this book felt like reinventing the wheel. This is because a key idea in contemporary education is “constructive alignment” (Biggs, 1999), this is the notion that in order to stoke student motivation learning needs to be mapped to the learner’s goals. Thinking back to the , mapping activities to a set of objectives is very similar to creating a lesson plan which maps to a set of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are essentially an educators’ objectives for their students, which sit under the larger umbrella goals of a programme of study. This book made me want to get educators and facilitators into a meeting design face-off, who would do it better? My guess is that a good facilitator from a design background and a good educator have a lot in common, something that Diana Laurillard so eloquently explored in her seminal book, Teaching as a design science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology (2012).

This got me thinking about all the hidden work that educators do, or the soft skills, and I started to list them. Once I had a sizable list I thought, maybe every design team could benefit from having a former educator, or career-break educator, on their team because this hidden work yields demonstrable value. If you would like to see , I have included it below.

Conclusion

Ultimately this book succeeded on several levels. It helped me consider best practice, it helped me reflect on my own practice, it enabled me to try out new methods, and it stimulated an emotional response of very mild irritation.

I give it a solid 4 out of 5 moons.
🌕 🌕 🌕 🌕 🌑

I recommend this book for a variety of workplaces and contexts. It provides actionable strategies for iteratively tweaking team and company culture.

“…restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens” Ferguson and Fitch (2021, p. 158) as quoted from , a Science Fiction writer.

References

Biggs, J. (1999) ‘What the student does: teaching for enhanced learning’, Higher Education Research & Development, 18(1), pp. 57-75. doi:10.1080/0729436990180105.

Ferguson, D. and Fitch, J. (2021) Magical Meetings, Reinvent How Your Team Works Together. USA: Ideapress Publishing.

Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. London: Routledge.

Fiona’s List

Or why a talented educator may be a boon to your design team.

A good educator aligns every session with bigger picture goals.
Educators usually have at least three back-up plans.
Educators are used to being challenged. There is an art to knowing when to deflect, acknowledge and move on, and when to challenge an idea which is unreasonable or may mean that others in the room are excluded or made to feel unwelcome. Educators have to deal with these scenarios every day.
Who is in the room? The session, whether led or facilitated, needs to work for the people in the room. Understanding participants’ needs and motivations is key to success. An educator will think about who is in the room and why they are in the room.
A good educator spends a lot of time thinking about the language they use and adjusting it for the audience.
Educators are expert at subverting time and space. A good educator is a storyteller, a challenger, and a sounding board rolled into one. An educator can set the scene for a space and therefore get people into a more flexible mindset, ready to explore.
Educators are driven to learn, by a desire to share what they have learned.
Educators have many methods to draw from to breakthrough even the toughest shells.
Educators persistently innovate and learn from failure. A core facet of any educational training is learning how to reflect on your own work.
Educators have had to learn the hard way about when and how to take a step back. So facilitating group work is a key example where you need to provide the core ingredients and then let the group mix them together themselves.
Educators communicate in advance to ensure that people feel included and forewarned of the task and expectations.
A good educator pilots or tests a task themselves before asking students to do it.
A good educator can also wing it in a situation where preparation has not been possible. An educator’s version of winging it is based on a wealth of experience. In fact you won’t even know they are winging it. Sometimes these are the best sessions for participants as over preparation can be a ’thing’.
Educators can read just about any room. Reading between the lines in terms of empathy. An educator can tell when something else is getting in the way of the task and can find a way to help.
A good educator can build a rapport with anyone, to find out what their motivations are and what they want to learn.

A really helpful page on using the . ↩︎

Reblog - What makes an online space inclusive?

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on the on 05/07/21 as part of my role at University of Brighton.

A crowdsourced blog post and reflection

Back on the 15th of June I facilitated an open discussion as part of programme. The discussion, entitled, ‘What makes an online space inclusive?’ invited audience members to reflect on their own experiences in online spaces and their own practice facilitating online lessons, meetings, and events.

Session description: Think about the last online event you attended. Was there anything that made you feel included, or excluded? Did you have the option to add your pronouns? Were you actively invited to turn on your webcam, but only if you wanted to? You might even have become immersed in a collaborative exercise, almost forgetting you were on a video call! This session is a discussion focusing on how to support accessibility and inclusion in online learning spaces. Thinking about what works and what does not work and what is needed before, during, and after an online session to make it successful. This post is split into two sections, what happened at the event? and the meta level. The first section, what happened… summarises aspects of the discussion and the activity in the meeting chat. This is very much a crowdsourced blog post and I owe the vast majority of the helpful and acutely observed content to my fantastically engaged audience during the event. The second section is a reflection on my own practice and the steps that Jisc organisers took behind the scenes to support the event.

What happened during the event?

Setting the scene:

What do I mean by an online space? At the beginning of the event, I needed to establish what I meant by this term as it is a slightly lateral way of thinking about situations/events which may defined in a technical sense as webinars, online lessons, or online meetings. This is a big ask of an audience, but I wanted to encourage them to think about online space in broader terms rather than using siloed categorisations.

My definition: An online space is where groups of 3 or more people come together to meet online. These spaces are facilitated via meeting and webinar tools and the format is governed by the people who facilitate and/or attend. The format can replicate in-person meeting styles or can be specific to online.

Ingredients for an online space as an algorithm diagram

Examples to illustrate ‘format’

I provided two categories of format with examples:

In-person formats: online spaces which attempt to replicate an in-person meeting format/experience. Here are just a few of those that I listed.
- Round table, with the example meeting tool Wonder.
- Large group meeting, with example tool Microsoft Teams.
- Conference or lecture presentation
- Watch Party, with example tool Backyard.co (no longer available as of 26/06/21 - sunset due to being bought out by Discord).
Uniquely online formats: online spaces which present new modes of interaction or collaboration.
- Audio-only large group meeting, with the example of Twitter Rooms.
- Collaboration in real-time with interspersed audio, with example tool Mural.

A Twitter Room featuring hundreds of attendees with the director Edgar Wright and the original cast of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World discussing the film. The subtitle function is shown on screen, making the event accessible to all.

Questions for the audience

1. What was it like at the last online learning event that you attended?

Some folks taking part in the discussion, had just come from delivering their own training sessions with staff.
One person noted that the format of the Jisc Connect More conference was good because presenters were speaking for 20mins and then there were questions and answers for the remaining 10mins.
Another person noted that they had attended a long online event featuring multiple presenters. Some of the presenters were engaging for them, some were not. Therefore, they would have found it helpful to have a schedule for the speakers so that they could drop-in to the call when specific people were presenting.
Some folks felt that the range of tools being used during an online meeting/event, in addition to the main online meeting/webinar software, could be a little bit overwhelming.

2a. What supported your focus at the online learning event?

Being asked to do something interactive or to respond to questions.
For a person who had been teaching an online learning event beforehand, they felt that being a little nervous helped to sharpen their focus (I completely agree!).
Including a personal story or experience can help to humanise an online presentation and bring people back into the room.
Team teaching can help to support the presenter’s focus and to ensure that questions typed into the chat are addressed promptly.
Being able to see attendees’ webcam video can help when you are presenting. However, as an attendee you might not always want to share your webcam video. Sometimes there can be a mismatch in expectations or perspectives between the presenter and the attendees or participants.
Collaborating in real-time on a document with people who were equally interested/focused on a project-related goal.

2b. Was there anything that disrupted your focus at the online learning event?

Lack of closed captions being available.
No opportunity to ask questions.
Internet breaking up at the presenter’s end.
Mics left on so you get background noise from attendees’ environments.
Feeling alone at the event, like I am the only person there.
Those in shared office spaces could find their environment distracting and/or worry about background sound during an online call/session/event.
Some commentary on verbal ticks and overuse of certain terms such, as ‘so’*, ’like’, ‘you know’, ’em/um’.

*I am so guilty of too many ‘so’s’, something I try desperately to edit out in my own video tutorials and vlog entries!

3. Think of a positive experience at an online event. What helped you to feel engaged?

Someone recounted that they had attended a conference where alpacas (as in the animals) had joined during the opening session.
Using people’s names to “connect with people over the abyss” (I loved this turn of phrase).
A person noted that being asked to manage the chat for an event, had provided them with insight into the way that attendees were connecting with each other. Although while they were engaged in that they could not focus with the speaker’s content.
Several people spoke to the importance of receiving an agenda. Especially knowing the agenda beforehand and when the breaks would take place.
Knowing or hoping that there would be a follow-up email including any supporting materials and things that might have been missed.
Someone mentioned an event where the keynote panellist presented while outdoors. They said that this provided a stronger emotional engagement [comment: very interesting approach, a bit like a political speech or rally].

4. What helped you to feel included at the event?

The ability to like or react to comments. Some noted hesitancy with use of emojis to begin with, but now it is an expectation and an important part of acknowledging the value of someone else’s comment. A chat reaction is like the type of non-verbal cues that build connection in the real world; a nod, a thumbs up, clapping, a shake of the head, a shared glance.
Someone using your name when you have made a comment in the chat. A couple of folks agreed that this was important.
A best practice tip when running training sessions was to try to welcome everyone by name as they came in. Although this can be challenging in large sessions.
Having chat questions and comments included and acknowledged by the presenters.
Being able to specify gendered or non-gendered pronouns and preferred name.

5. What excludes you or makes you feel excluded during an online event?

Presenters speaking too fast.
Not allowing time for questions or providing space where the audience can think through what has been said.
Events where questions in the chat are not followed-up on and are just left floating.
Even in an online meeting space there can be a sort of feeling of an in-crowd where it can feel exclusive. Something to avoid is having a side conversation with a colleague while attendees are arriving and instead keep it more neutral and welcoming. Even if your colleague wants to chat, encourage them to wrap it up.
Folks noted events where the chat is disabled, so there was no option to engage other than when invited to ask questions at the end. This felt quite disengaging.
Not being able to see the speaker. So, no picture-in-picture option for the speaker’s camera with only the slides shown on screen.
There can be elements in the user interface for webinar tools that can be very distracting. For example, animated GIFs and animated UI elements that serve no functional purposes.
Heeding the audience when they cite audio-visual problems and immediately seeking to correct the issue/s. Having a critical friend or co-teacher who can verify and flag any sound/video issues.
Speed of speaker’s talking can make it difficult for attendees to follow. Especially in situations where bandwidth is low (so synchronisation between audio and video may not be great) and captions are limited. This can be challenging to interpret and tiring for those who rely on captions for the key information.
Too many slides with too much detail or content.

Personal Introspective

Part 1: Human Factors

What should event organisers or teachers do to help people feel included? I have paraphrased the answers below and added some commentary. You can access the original answers via the embed or link below.

Be friendly, approachable, be human.
Ask if attendees have any accessibility requirements. Provide pre-event details about how the event will run¹.
Do not say ‘we don’t have much time today’. This can be a stressor for attendees².
Allow time for any technical issues.
Make the session relevant to the group whom you are meeting with, so that the experience does not feel generic.
Greet and welcome people who attend. Remember to smile!
Provide opportunities for attendees to do something creative together (e.g., doodling)³.
Let attendees know how they should engage with the session. Provide an agenda as well beforehand.
Ask about what tech folks are planning to use beforehand to support forward planning (e.g., audio, video, 4g, Wi-Fi).
Respect the decision of attendees to keep their webcam turned off.
Provide an icebreaker or warm-up activity.

Access the first poll results, via this direct link.

Part 2: Technology Factors

What accessibility features or tools should be in-place during an event to help people feel included? You can access the original answers via the embed or link below.

Closed captions.
British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter⁴
Sending slides in advance and/or sending them afterwards.
Being told if you will receive the slides after the event.
Providing support for presenters prior to the event⁵.
Someone to help manage contributions in the chat if the speaker is mainly engaged with the live audio contributions.
Provide different ways for people to answer questions and interact during the meeting/session/event.

Access the second poll results, via this direct link.

Results and Summary

Things that help

Entries added in the chat pane are included by the presenter and acknowledged.
Open questions allowing engagement.
An agenda is sent in advance of the session.
Emojis and reactions tools.
Webcams on and off - have clear prompts and expectations for when webcams should be turned on.
Having moderators to help manage the chat.
Being able to vote-up, respond or react to other folks’ comments in the chat.
Being able to include pronouns.

Things that do not help

Too many slides with too much detail.
Presenter speaking too fast.
Questions in the chat pane that are not followed up.
No option for written chat.
Animated GIFs which run in the background with the user interface or in the chat and do not cease looping.
Distracting sounds such as typing in the background and noisy offices.

Meta Level

This section is about reflecting on how things went from my perspective as the presenter and discussion facilitator.

How I positioned myself

From the start, I wanted to be clear that I did not have all the answers and that I was the discussion facilitator. I introduced my role within the space and Laura Hutton’s (Jisc) who was helping to oversee the chat and take notes for the final summary slide. Laura and I debriefed beforehand to ensure that we were both clear on how the session would work.

How I positioned the format of the space itself

I created a virtual version of the Long Table, which was devised by performance artist, Lois Weaver (2013). I wanted my imaginary room to include everyone and provide ways for attendees to be creative.

How I verbally described my imaginary room: A long table with a paper tablecloth is shown in the centre of the room. There are pens and two microphones on the table. There are four chairs on either side of the table. The table is surrounded by chairs in an amphitheatre format, half-circle format. There is a video camera and a British Sign Language interpreter in the corner of the room with a live feed to a protector in the room. A table of drinks and refreshments are in the corner of the room. If folks cannot come to the table, then a microphone is passed to them. When people put their ‘hands up’ they were taking a seat at the table. When people wrote in the chat, they were writing on the tablecloth. Changing the feeling of ‘being’ in a space, through use of furniture, technology, or projection, and rules of engagement has long been a preoccupation of mine and virtual spaces are no different. As I noted in the , Dave White’s blog post (White, 2021) was the inspiration for my use of imaginary floor plans which have become a staple.

Things that I did to help make this session feel inclusive

I spent some time summarising the accessibility and response features that are available in Zoom at the beginning.
I provided a link to the Google Slides featuring all the questions (props to Miranda Melcher for this idea; Melcher, 2021).
I provided clear guidance for how to engage during the session and provided more than one mode for answering questions (verbally by putting hand-up, via chat - this also applied during the use of polls).
Designed the slides for accessibility with minimal and concise content. Using simple clear fonts and no white backgrounds on slides. I also used simple graphics to reinforce concepts.
I provided a warm-up question to provide folks with a trial of engagement.
I read out the content from each of the slides to the audience and verbally described the images on slides.
Reading the chat messages out by paraphrasing and acknowledging the names of the authors. Acknowledging a name pronunciation mistake.
Providing social interaction (chat and verbal), then encouraged use of the polls for more personal introspection.

Ways that Jisc supported this session

Jisc’s pre-event speaker briefing document was excellent. Providing clear expectations, an overview of the technology, and recommendations for optimising your presentation setting (e.g., lighting, sound, optimising your internet connection etc.). I was asked to join the session half an hour early and was greeted by a very helpful session facilitator (thank you George!) who ensured that the technology was working as it should and provided me with host permissions on Zoom. As mentioned, Laura Hutton from Jisc was also on-hand during the session, which was great and is essential in case of any loss of connectivity. This is yet another reason why sharing slides either via a link (e.g., Zoom) or via a files area and then posting to the chat (e.g., MS Teams) is a good idea.

Things that I would do differently next time

Improve the wording of the first question slide. As I needed to clarify the question in the chat.
Show the question slide to ask the question and then switch to the webcam view to support better discussion. Therefore, perhaps one question less to allow for that as it would take more time to switch. Although this is a function for the Wishlist as switching between sharing to webcam mosaic view is never as smooth as I would like.

Wishlist webinar function - a keyboard shortcut to switch between screensharing the thing that you last shared and the webcam-based mosaic view. I want to be able to ask the question and then prioritise the webcam display without stopping sharing completely. When you stop sharing and re-share over and over per question it leads to a delay when you are multitasking.

Considerations for teaching

There are so many takeaways here. I think the big one for me is not feeling rushed when teaching in an online format by designing my content accordingly. I did not feel rushed in this session, but it is easy to misjudge the pace and timing. Therefore, having a practice is always a good idea. I will certainly consider the speed of my verbal delivery and try to work on minimising my verbal tick of starting sentences with the word ‘so’.

One more point is that I have found myself wondering if there will be greater expectations from students in terms of technology use when we return to teaching in-person. For example, the chat and inclusive nature of the chat were mentioned a lot. For people who find it hard to formulate their thoughts and/or figure out where to come into a conversation chat has been a transformative function allowing them to express themselves. There are also occasions where students or attendees may feel embarrassed to ask a question verbally. So how can we take the things that work well in online spaces and allow them to augment our in-person classrooms? Providing multimodal means to respond may need to become as much a part of our in-person practice as it has with online teaching practice; solutions to this could be analogue or digital.

Bonus content

In the process of researching content for this post I came across this brilliant video about BSL for popular technology terms. I love the ways that technology words and concepts have been translated into signs. I particularly loved ‘Internet’ and ‘Google’.

References

Eventbrite (2019) ‘ ’, EventBrite Blog, 23 June (Accessed: 14 June 2021).

Melcher, M. (2021) CPD Webinar: What students actually want from online learning: results from a university-wide study of student digital accessibility needs [Google doc]. Available at: (Accessed: 31 May 2021).

Weaver, L. (2013) ‘ ’, LADA Live Art Development Agency (Accessed: 14 June 2021).

White, D. (2021) ‘ ’, David White, 1 February (Accessed: 13 March 2021).

Tip: this should be done prior to a meeting/session/event. During the meeting/session/event start by providing an overview of the general accessibility features of the tool that you are using. ↩︎
This is such a brilliant observation as we all know that online events need to be shorter due to screen-time. However, we need to design and create content for the medium rather than trying to cram too much in - this is my key piece of learning from this event. I have been guilty of this on occasion, and I am going to work on designing my sessions to feel content-rich without coming across as time-poor. ↩︎
This was something that I thought about doing during this session but decided against it as I try to stick to a rule of two when it comes to using technology in sessions. So, when you have a webinar/online meeting tool you are already using one piece of technology, during Jisc Connect More this was Zoom. My second technology was the polling software, Poll Everywhere, as I wanted the audience to think about their answers individually and then vote up others’ answers as well. This is easier to achieve in MS Teams with the chat reaction buttons, but not possible in the Zoom chat and polling tools that we were using that day. I was also providing access to my slides on Google slides which could be taking up another browser tab or window if folks chose to have that open. I am not counting that as an extra, but it is always worth trying to mentally picture the context and content of your attendees’ screens when you are designing an online session. ↩︎
This was done very well at the Accessibility London event for Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2021, here is another example of a bilingual design webinar where two languages were signed. ↩︎
I think that that the team at Jisc did a fantastic job of this and it is something that I have commented in my reflection. ↩︎

Vlog 3 [1/2]: Adventures in ViewX - Double Diamond for Watch Parties

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Reflecting on designing a watch party for UX Brighton

Watch the UX Brighton watch party for yourself (took place on 13th April 2021)
Look at the which was provided as a Google Doc
Visit the that I used to guide my design and then reflect on my experiences
Check out the (H5P interactive activity)

Edited Vlog Transcript

Hi folks, I know it’s been a while. So, yeah basically what I can say is I’ve had a couple of really paperwork intensive months. I ran a watch party for because I presented about a few of the challenges I’d found through working on some discovery at my workplace. The suggestion was that perhaps we could do a UX Brighton watch party and that might provide me with an opportunity to experiment to try out some things that I couldn’t try out at work and to get some really helpful critical feedback. So, I’m really delighted to say that I got that opportunity because I really did get amazing feedback and I have since used the learning that I gained from that particular watch party to feed into my professional portfolio, and I’ve also used it to think really critically about how I talk to staff about watch parties how I encourage them to onboard people during watch parties.

Discover

Three key problems to solve

I’ll come on to some of the key takeaways in a little bit, but I’ve used a mural board to help me reflect. This is based on the Design Council’s Evolved Double Diamond (2015) which is what I used as the sort of basis for my design process for the watch party. From my discovery work within my workplace there were three key problems to solve. So, first of all staff had been screen sharing video that they wanted to show to students, and they wanted to screen share the video so that everyone could watch it together at the same time. The key issue was that when you share video over a tool like Microsoft Teams, like Zoom, it’s very much reliant on the speed of your broadband connection but also the speed of the people’s connection who are watching at home. So, what we’d often find is that the video would play fine for the person who was sharing but then at home people would find that there was no audio, or the video was kind of juddery. Some of the screen shared video was blocked by Digital Rights Management. So particularly in Microsoft Teams it has some Digital Rights Management and so what the student would see on their end was just a kind of grey or black screen there would be no content even though it was playing fine for the instructor. The biggest problem of the three was that when if you, as the instructor, were playing a video out to students and you were screen sharing it would look to me, as the student watching, like I could use the closed caption tools say if you were sharing a YouTube video. Most YouTube videos have a CC (Closed Caption) button on the bottom right-hand side that allows you to access the closed captions. Well, if you’re screen sharing it it’s sort of a flat facsimile of the video so I couldn’t actually interact with those subtitles, those closed captions so that wouldn’t help me if I needed that.

Facilitation and watching other people ‘watch’

Another key ingredient that I identified through the discovery phase was that there must always be a facilitator. SAnother key ingredient that I identified through the discovery phase was that there must always be a facilitator. So, for example if you were someone who had content ready, and you gave people a watch list of stuff it doesn’t mean that you can then go away and just leave them to it. There’s something about needing to be there, needing to guide that discussion, or guide the activities which are kicked off by the video content, so the video content is really more of a prompt to get things going it’s a way of presenting information and then interspersing it with something more personable something more um discursive. So, it allows you to potentially cover more content quickly because a video is kind of produced. The next point here is that I think there’s something to be said for watching other people ‘watch’ things (I have included some of my favourite references related to this concept ). So, I know that when I’m in a cinema my attention span is much better than it is when I’m just sitting at home watching Netflix. So, if my attention’s lagging in a film I kind of look around and go “are other people still interested in this film or is other people looking kind of you know a little bit bored” and if everyone else is really engaged then that kind of makes me think well “_I should re-engage, obviously I’m missing something her_e”.

Define

Software requirements to address the challenges

The next thing was to think about “well what interface do I actually need?”, “what software would meet these requirements um for the watch parties?”. So, I had some must-haves: audio discussion, must have space for people to write into a chat that is yep definitely needed, webcam video connection yep, and access to closed captions my post, ‘But what about the subtitles?’ discussed issues meeting this requirement. We needed some kind of high-quality way of sharing the video. Basically, any way of screen sharing video wasn’t great, so I needed something that allowed me to kind of press start and stop for everyone at the same time. Circles here that have the ticks on them (on the Mural board), these are actually requirements that were met by the software that I used for the watch party which I’ll come onto in a bit. There were some ‘should have’ things so access to closed caption customization so being able to change the font size and the position of the closed captions is really important. Having access to reaction tools like smiling and clapping and thumbs up and being able to move aspects of the interface so if the chat box was really distracting to me while the video is on, I could minimize it I could also choose which things I kind of wanted ‘on’ tool-wise or ‘off’. The thing we didn’t have was support for mobile devices that the tool we ended up using really didn’t work great on mobile devices.

Thinking about ‘ViewX’ or the Exerience of Viewing

So, while I was kind of going through this process, I also thought about defining what formats were possible with a watch party. Funnily enough I’ve sort of nicknamed this process ViewX so like UX but ViewX like the experience of viewing um I think there is something about this that’s just been utterly fascinating to me like how does the environment of viewing affect how you view? So, the first approach I had was named after Nick Knowles who’s a DIY expert on TV and this one was about using your own video footage but then chunking it into key concepts. The next method I thought about was based on Elvira the Mistress of the Dark who always would play, this is kind of a 1980s thing, but she would play like really rubbish B movies and she would intersperse her own commentary with that. So, it’s a little bit like Mystery Science Theater um, but it was more like segments that interspersed with the video. Because it might be that video requires that kind of contextualization in order for it to make sense but there is also um some value which I’ll come on to in perhaps not always presenting one way of interpreting video and in fact leaving it more vague and open to audience interpretation. That’s where that can really help to stimulate your discursive elements during the watch party. So, what I came up with was what I’ve now since labelled the Michael Moore approach which is sort of a video essay type approach where I actually captured sections of YouTube videos and represented them as a mashup, so each section of the watch party was sort of a video mashup where I’d placed really short clips from a range of videos together. With the Michael Moore approach as I’m calling it you can present these video clips smashed together with or without video commentary so you could have a sort of voiceover that presented some context which is similar to the Elvira approach, or you can just present the videos together with no context which is almost more interesting. I think it depends on what you’re aiming for. So, I think that because there was no commentary from me the videos were just presented as they are, but as snippets, people had to decide well “why did Fiona pick that snippet and why did that how does that relate to the next slip snippet or how does that relate to the one that came before”?

The ‘Nick Knowles’, using your own content. A chaptered Panopto video is shown as an example on the right of the slide image

The ‘Elvira’ format or approach. Video commentary alongside a video of Michael Caine is shown as a visual example on the image of the slide

The director Michael Moore is pictured to represent an approach of curating preexisting content from YouTube or other video services. An example of a series of clipped and embedded YouTube videos is shown as an example

Defining a format or schedule for the event

So, this brought me to kind of defining the format for the event itself. It was a three-part watch party over two hours. So, we had a sort of conceptually based video collection, as I say, mashed together short clips, kind of one after the other. Then we had some discussion and then we had our second video collection. That was followed by some more discussion and a break. Then we came back and played a game. An online game which was not related to any of the content it was literally just kind of providing social levity if you will, and then we had a third video which we were planning to watch and we didn’t watch it because I basically lost my nerve a bit and felt like we were too close to the end and that we should just wrap up.

Selecting the tools - leading into the Develop phase (second diamond)

So, this leads me to the tool. So, based on all of these kind of aspects in the discovery and definition phase I decided that the best choice was a tool called backyard.co which had all of those reactions, chat tools, and this thing called YouTube watch party as one of its kind of interactive games that it offered. So, I like the fact that we could use the YouTube watch party game or tool and then switch to another game in the same platform so it would feel very integrated. It wouldn’t be a case of us switching between completely different tools in a session which I have since found that you kind of have a maximum of two tools in a session, otherwise you do start to lose people.

I used (interactive learning tool) to create the video bingo because I wanted something that was quick to build, it allowed interaction on a variety of different devices, and it also gave automatic feedback so people kind of got a confirmation that they had got the bingo right and that they had filled all of the squares in, and then I asked them as part of the onboarding to let me know when they had filled in all the squares. So, that I could kind of celebrate the person who managed to identify all the bingo phrases that were said in the videos first before anyone else!

References

Brame, C. J. (2016) ‘Effective educational videos: Principles and guidelines for maximizing student learning from video content’, CBE—Life Sciences Education, 15(4). doi: 10.1187/cbe.16-03-0125

Design Council (2015) ‘What is the framework for innovation? Design Council’s evolved Double Diamond’, Design Council. Available at: (Accessed: 13 March 2021).

Guo, P. J., Kim, J. and Rubin, R. (2014) ‘How video production affects student engagement’, in Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning @ scale. ACM, pp.41–50. doi: 10.1145/2556325.2566239

Hotchkiss, G. (2010) ‘The psychology of entertainment: Why we love watching in crowds’, Out of My Gord, 20 February. Available at: (Accessed: 4 July 2021).

Mastead, T. (2005) ‘The social dimension of emotion’, The Psychologist, 18(8), pp.484-487. Available at: (Accessed: 4 July 2021).

UCL (2020) ‘Why watching a movie could improve wellbeing’, UCL Brain Sciences, 20 January. Available at: (Accessed: 4 July 2021).

von Zimmerman, J. and Richardson, D. C. (2018) ‘Synchrony and the art of signalling’, The Psychologist, 31, pp.32-36. Available at: (Accessed: 4 July 2021).

Vlog 1: introducing a personal challenge

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What does an inclusive and successful online event look like? Setting a personal challenge

\[The short version rather than the 4min vlog\]

I work as a Learning Technologist, which means that I help academic staff at a university think about how to use technology to facilitate and augment their teaching and the students’ experience of learning. During the covid-19 pandemic, within the space of days my role as part of a team, was crucial to maintaining delivery of teaching and learning. This has given me the opportunity to experience and continually reflect on the use of online spaces for teaching and learning. Prior to this I have worked with Webinar technologies for 10 years. I have also organised and chaired a range of local and national online events as well as experiencing many as an attendee. Based on all this, I now have a critical mass of experience. From this position, I feel that I can reflect and because my practice is user experience focused, I want to set myself a challenge. To identify the optimal elements when creating inclusive and successful online events. The following factors will be key to this challenge:

How power and control function in the virtual space.
How to provide space and time for consumption of knowledge.
How to provide space and time for collaboration (see also, White, 2021).
How to provide space and time for discussion, while actively considering and disrupting the structures of power and privilege that stand in the way of inclusion in online spaces.

As part of this reflective challenge, I want to consider what a user experience design process looks like for an online event. I’ll base this on the Design Council’s (2015) Double-Diamond which is based on four key design principles:

“putting people first”
“communicate visually and inclusively”
“collaborate and co-create”
and “iterate, iterate, iterate”

I anticipate that this challenge will take a while to explore on this blog. Sometimes, that exploration will take the form of vlogs, sometimes short podcasts, sometimes blog posts, and sometimes drawing. Furthermore, sometimes I will look at the big picture, or conversely a micro-interaction. This is about reflecting based on depth of experience and about capturing observations as and when they happen.

A virtual event space plan inspired by White (2021). This was used as part of introductory slides for an online event. The illustrations of virtual space, as we imagined it, were designed to structure discussion and to minimise any perceived power and hierarchy. The great thing about virtual rooms is that your table and room can be larger than in real-life! If you can imagine it and draw it, you can draw your audience into that space.

References:

Design Council (2015) ‘What is the framework for innovation? Design Council’s evolved Double Diamond’, Design Council. Available at: (Accessed: 13 March 2021).

White, D. (2021) ‘Spatial collaboration: how to escape the webcam’, David White, 1 February. Available at: (Accessed: 13 March 2021).

COVID-19 three months in: what have we learned?

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Background

This post is a personal reflection in response to a question posed by on Twitter as a retweet of . Observing that other individuals tagged in the tweet have more involvement in policy and management, I was both humbled and interested in why my opinion might be sought. Deliberately I have chosen not to read the answers of others, such as ’s , as I wanted to provide my own perspective. I shall be sure to read that after-the-fact of course and thank you for asking Tom!

To provide some context I have been working as a learning technologist for almost 10 years and my perspective comes from that space: the direct solution space. Although I am occasionally consulted on policy decisions, I am rarely a decision maker and I do not manage people, I do manage systems as a product owner of sorts. In addition to my learning technologist ‘hat’, I am an accessibility advocate and a trained User Experience researcher. I am passionate about inclusive design, moral transparency and pragmatic teaching and learning.

Entering lockdown

When it became clear that lockdown would be our new reality; decisions had to be made and actioned rapidly. It also became clear that learning technology expertise was a valuable commodity. As a discipline we were suddenly placed at the centre of supporting the continuation of teaching practice, as opposed to our previous position as the grand adviser-integrator-augmenters. I praise my own managers during the lead-up to and final situation of lockdown, who made quick and clear decisions with regard to which tools would be used, and for what tasks in the emergency teaching situation.

Observations during lockdown

I am going to define these as loose observations at this point as I do not yet have the benefit of hindsight. However, I do believe it is important to record your own thinking at a given point in time even if, ultimately circumstances end up proving you wrong.

The ultimate prioritisation list

An intense re-focusing meant that we were able to work with a clearly defined technical toolset in an efficient way. We also shifted to a more agile CMS in the interest of getting information out quickly via targetted microsites (Wordpress Blogs). Under normal circumstances the requirement to use standard platforms and administrative processes take precedence, but there was no time for that. As a consequence within a short space of time a relevant, fresh and ’living’ set of resources were built to support teaching as it exists right ’now’.

The aforementioned set of resources, are out in the world as open educational resources which feels more important than ever in the time of COVID-19. When my Frequently Asked Questions for Microsoft Teams could make a difference for a primary school teacher without a learning technologist - that means a lot to me professionally and personally. This is why I got into this field and over recent years I have noticed a growing tendency for learning technologies information to be squirrelled away. Hopefully this trend may start to wane moving forward. On a technical level, a small but important innovation on our information site was adding the power of ad-free Google search so that the answers to questions could be found more easily.

Answering the right questions

Referring back to my Frequently Asked Questions, that is not to say that I myself am reinventing the wheel, I am linking to materials which technology vendors such as Microsoft and Blackboard have provided. I already valued these resources which have improved in quantity and quality over recent years. However, a key role of a learning technologist is to know how to contextualise these answers by answering localised questions. Essentially joining up the dots between the question asked, the language used to ask the question, and the language that technology uses to describe itself. So we add grand adviser-integrator-augmenter-translators to our list. I think now more than ever I value and acknowledge the open resources provided by vendors and other universities across the world.

A new conception of time

Due to the sheer volume of work coming in for a brief time the shape of my job changed. I was in a sort of rapid creation mode during the first three weeks of lockdown. This ‘mode’ was at turns the most productive and stressful experience of my learning technologies career and was certainly more akin to the adrenaline highs of my previous vocation as a artist and curator; like the feeling of the hours leading up to an opening night. This productivity was supported by a conscious filter where my clients knew I was busy so instead of asking me a question in the first instance, would attempt to find the answer on their own or sought support centrally from a service desk. This was a new situation for me. I like being known as a solutions person, a go-to person, but it suddenly dawned on me that because I am available and take pride in providing a quality service sometimes this means that my own productivity and wellbeing are put on the back-burner. With fewer help calls and more efficient means of answering the questions that were coming in (I’ll come to that later), I suddenly had the mental focus I needed to develop two new teaching sessions. I had time free of interruption to think hard about showcasing best practice in the session designs and this was a wonderful feeling. Finally I had some head-space and because I was producing enough work to meet my own self-imposed goals, I got to have lunches away from my desk for the first time in years.

There is a piece of learning here for me to take away and ruminate on. My role has since reverted back to something more reactive on the day-to-day. However, I am going to consider how I can reach a better state of equilibrium so that I can have blocks of work free of interruption. This tension has always existed in my work, between proactive and reactive, but I do think that in the longer term a project-based workflow more akin to development work, with Agile sprints accompanied by service models which support fewer interruptions may be positive. When you are in a service role there can be an intense feeling of guilt when you have taken an hour to work on workshop preparation and have 30 emails - even ‘quick’ questions at this volume consume work time.

Chat is my new best friend

Thinking of those ‘quick’ questions, I am pleased that HE is finally starting to adopt chat-based tools. I had been using for User Experience (UX) professional networking for a number of years and looked forward to the day when a similar solution would be part of my Learning Experience work. COVID-19 has hastened this change in work practice and although only a small numbers of my clients use it so far, where it is used it is far more efficient. The tendency to write emails-as-treatise in academia is still quite prevalent and when I have found myself sliding into this habit (e.g. >10mins composing an email), I have saved the email as a note and called the person instead. If you can do this too, your learning technologist will thank you (trust me!). Also as a dyslexic, I have often been concerned about how I perceived via the medium of email. Emails end up being more like letters, language and vocabulary can be judged. Furthermore, my tendency to forget words from sentences as my brain works faster than my personal language centres has been a perpetual source of self-critique. With chat I can write the answer with less fear and can always correct a spelling or add a word after the fact. It makes solutions faster and language less precious.

Resourcefulness vs. idiosyncrasy

One of the downsides users sourcing of their own solutions is that the local setup does not always match the technology developer’s ideal. For example, folks find exciting help guides which suggest that they can schedule MS Teams meetings via their calendar. These features are not available due to differences in the local setup and this means that some of a learning technologist’s job is about tempering expectations. It does point to the end of branding and idiosyncrasy. To support more as learning technologists we potentially need to have fewer home-grown elements and this means that branding the VLE/ePortfolio/

\[insert eLearning tool here\]

is not as sustainable as it was in the past. This is also true due to the frequency of updates. Vendors are far more responsive to suggestions from users and interfaces change at a steady rate making it tricky to stay on-top of help documentation especially when in a continuous delivery, Software-as-a-Service model.

On the notion of home-grown, I would add ‘fudger’ to my definition of a learning technologist: adviser-integrator-augmenter-translator-fudger. A learning technologist has MacGyver abilities for sure, also make this analogy, to transmute existing technologies to fit a need for which the technology was not originally designed. At any given time I am managing and sustaining so many of these ‘solutions’. With the increased demand for my services, the ‘paper clips’ have started to slip and I have come to realise that this is hidden work which could and should be managed using specialist tools. All of these fudges might actually be more expensive in terms of time expenditure than working on a more holistic solution. Furthermore when fudges are applied in the learning space, rather than say an administrative space, they can lack digital authenticity as in using a tool designed for one thing as another. The experience of using such a solution may differ from students’ broader experiences of technology and cause a level of dissatisfaction; a square peg. It is easier to smooth these things over when you are teaching in-person, harder when the interaction is front-and-centre and it doesn’t feel like the right solution.

A illustrative clip of the ‘paper clip’ in the CBS show MacGyver

Online learning?

Up until recently, I quoted the excellent article in the and would say that we have been “emergency remote teaching” rather than producing online learning. Having said that, this is now shifting in a very exciting way, and the hybridised designs that I am starting to see for future teaching demonstrate astounding progress in a short time. Part of the challenge of redesign of teaching and delivery is that there is no longer a default. The defaults before were: just do whatever it is in-person, or print it out and give it to people. I cannot tell you how many times I advised on technology and even helped to setup a solution to hear that the person got worried and returned to the ‘safe’ solution of in-person oft to never revisit the technology again. This is no longer an option and it is scary. The closest that we have to a default is the VLE and sometimes I have to remind people that it exists amongst all the new and shiny; it is our dependable pal.

Experience at the picnic blanket level

Suddenly interactions and micro-interactions are gaining importance and this is a very good thing. I have been using Charles and Ray Eames Powers of Ten video for IBM (1977) as an analogy for this in teaching. Suddenly the focus has changed, we are at the picnic blanket level. The clicks are important, the minutes are important in the hours of a day of teaching content. This is key because although as educators we cannot compete with the attention-to-detail that UI/UX designers apply to micro-interactions in software applications, but like designers we are creating an experience and every interaction is part of that experience.

Eames & Eames, Powers of Ten video for IBM (1977)

The Corridor Effect™️

The Corridor Effect™️ may not be the final title of this phenomena, I am still considering it, because really it is about the lack of corridors. Think about how much information we glean from colleagues in corridors, how those encounters build social cohesion and provide other perspectives and most importantly differing interpretations of information. Right now we are all in our own bubbles and this can profoundly affect some students who find locating and prioritising information difficult. They may have relied on the organisation and perception of others to stay up-to-date before. That is no longer an option, unless we build in these opportunities. Discussion boards, encouragement of study groups, specific support groups for some students; all of these approaches and more can be used and must be used. The consequence of not doing so means that the gap between those who understand the rules of academic game and those who are still learning how to play will exponentially grow.

Photo by on

Teaching with empathy

I think that as educators, now more than ever we need to think deeply about the experience of engaging with learning as a journey. For us, we may have travelled this particular learning path many times; we may have taught the same content over successive iterations of a course/module. For the students it is most likely their first time and add to that the current personal, professional and societal challenges and undoubtedly this is a big ask. I have seen some amazing examples of empathetic, yet rigorous, teaching over the past few months and despite the challenges currently facing Higher Education internationally, this gives me hope.

Conclusion

This post is an unabashed summary of my ideas, perhaps fledging ideas, and I do not doubt that these ideas have surfaced elsewhere in educational theory. However, I feel that sometimes writing from experience and considering how something exists and feels at a given time is a valuable endeavour and I plan to test and revisit these notions in the months-to-come. Thank you for reading.

Notes

1 is not a panacea, it is imperfect. However, I have had a glimpse of a new world of productivity and personally believe that problems should be viewed as a dataset rather than our raison d’etre as a profession. We will not be able to respond to the ongoing demands of this crisis if we are stretched in too many different directions.

2Empathy is a term that has been overused in design, but it is a term which has never been more relevant when used in its truest sense. Empty empathy when used in a purely semantic sense is worse than none. True empathy is about taking time to think deeply about the path as it is travelled by others. For more on this, I highly recommend reading the designer, .

A technical perspective on a telepresence robot

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

From January until May 2019 the eLearning team evaluated the AV1 robot avatar, a telepresence robot manufactured by the company No Isolation, based in Norway. This post aims to provide a brief overview of what we learned during our pilot project.

Controlling the robot at Falmer campus from Moulsecoomb

Our findings are shared with the caveat that they are specific to our institution and in different circumstances the end-user acceptance of the technology and the results may have varied.

About the pilot

This pilot project was designed to establish the functionality of a telepresence robot, the AV1, with a view to providing a bookable service for eligible students in the future. The AV1 robot’s purpose is to provide an avatar for an individual student who wishes to attend a class but may not be able to be present in-person. Such a student, due to circumstances including, but not limited to, medical conditions, learning disabilities or caring responsibilities could benefit from attending virtually from home or in an alternative location. The AV1 robot provided a different type of value proposition when compared to existing solutions such as video conferencing; it provided an individual, encrypted connection to the classroom for a single student user.

The aim of this pilot project in the first instance was to establish the functionality and usability of the AV1 robot device. We planned to do this by inviting students from a specific school to participate in testing the robot during a class session. These students were invited irrespective of need as it was not possible to target a specific student population, for instance those with learning support plans. We had hopes that having established the functionality of the robot we could progress to a second phase of the project. This second phase would be in collaboration with colleagues who work to support students directly so that we could make the technology accessible to those students who need it.

AV1 Robot

How does the telepresence robot work?

The robot unit is positioned in the classroom for the student and then the student uses a phone or tablet to control the robot’s line of sight and display facial expressions on the robot’s face from afar. The phone/tablet can also be used to ask the instructor questions and to access the video stream. For the privacy of other students, any recording facilities on the smartphone/tablet are disabled. The video stream therefore is also time-specific, just as it would be for in-person attendance at a lecture. The robot also allows for a level of anonymity if desired, so the student can choose to silently observe and attend the lecture or seminar without calling attention to their absence or revealing their identity.

We created¹ this video to provide a quick description for student of how the robot works…

Aims for the pilot project

We have provided some information about the proposed research methods at the bottom of this post. The aims listed below are provided with an indication of how successful we were at achieving each.

Aim #1

To establish the utility of the device in lecture and seminar settings.

Aim #1 - Result

We were able to test the robot in two seminars sessions through technical staff use (no use by students). We did not use it in a lecture setting due to scheduling.

Aim #2

To build expertise in Information Services, as such devices may be recommended as assistive technologies for students in the near future. It is important to establish the telepresence robot’s function and how to accommodate such devices on the wireless network.

Aim #2 - Result

We were successful in this area, both the eLearning team and our colleagues in network services learned about how the robot worked on our network.

Aim #3

To understand the student experience of using the telepresence robot from a location beyond the classroom.

Aim #3 - Result

We were unsuccessful. The robot was demonstrated to two different groups of students in different year groups and the pilot project failed to recruit.

Aim #4

To establish the telepresence robot’s suitability to potential requirements and understand the limitations of the technology.

Aim #4 - Result

We were successful in learning about some of the requirements and also understanding the limitations of the technology in our particular setting.

Aim #5

To understand how the presence of the robot affects the taught environment, including the experiences of academic staff who teach with such a device present in-place of a student.

Aim #5 - Result

We were unsuccessful in this venture as we were not able to test the robot in situ without the presence of a technical staff person in a naturalistic way due to not having student participants.

What actually happened?

While we sought ethical approval for user testing, the robot went on a little roadshow to meet members of staff. It was introduced at one of our regular ‘All things eLearning’ tech afternoons and was enthusiastically received by staff. The robot was also taken to meet the university’s disabilities and dyslexia team, who were interested in how the technology could be used to support students. During this time the robot was tested in a few locations at the university’s Falmer and Moulsecoomb campuses. Colleagues in network services also spent some time testing the robot to establish the network load of the streaming video functions. Everything seemed hunky dory and ready to go.

After ethical approval was gained. A small number of willing academic staff were recruited, and the robot was taken to visit two separate classes by a member of the eLearning team. These class visits were put in place to demonstrate the robot’s capabilities, to explain the aims of the project and to allow for recruitment of student participants by a neutral third-party² This is where our story takes a downturn.

During the first class visit we discovered some limitations related to connectivity. The AV1 can automatically assess the available network connections and choose the best connection based on signal strength. This is a helpful trait, but we encountered an issue where the robot routinely dropped off eduroam. We would have liked to be able to enforce which signal the robot selected, but we had no control of this setting. As a result, the reliable little robot failed spectacularly when confronted with the 4G connection in the South Downs National Park where the Falmer Campus is based³. There is an assistant app which allows for a level of technical oversight, but the controls were too basic for our needs and did not include any diagnostic functions. Alas, the robot did not give a good first impression through a combination of circumstances. No Isolation were great at working with us to resolve the Wi-Fi issues and willingly took onboard feedback related to the robot control apps. Another class visit was arranged.

During the second class visit the robot was demonstrated successfully, but the video stream was very poor quality as the signal once again reverted to 4G having been on WIFI successfully earlier in the day. Other devices in the room were connected to WIFI. What was different about this visit is that the students were not keen on the robot and their response to its presence seemed to imply an air of ‘uncanny valley’⁴. They didn’t want the camera to look in their direction and there was a feeling of unease in the room.

Testing the AV1 robot out in a classroom

Personal reflection from project lead

There are a variety of factors that led to the early cancellation of this project, but the main reason was lack of student study participants. To reflect, this could have been due to the time of term and the proximity to assessments. Another point is that as the main researcher on the project, perhaps I did not articulate the value of the tests adequately. I also could not pay students or offer them any incentives for participation beyond helping other students; for time-strapped students with many competing demands this may not have been enough. If the project had been working with a small focus group of students in different settings, that could have worked better, particularly if those students were in need of such a solution. However, such a venture would require a different group of stakeholders than we had for this basic pilot.

From a technical standpoint I felt that the staff overhead was too high to be sustainable. On a logistical level we would need a person to take the robot to the correct building and lecture/seminar room at the correct time and to then coordinate with the student user to ensure that they were able to connect. Furthermore, the assistant app for remote support of the robot was not yet sophisticated enough to meet our needs in terms of providing diagnostic information about the robot and its connectivity.

In our proposed service model, the robot would belong to the university and could be borrowed; based on testing the robot is not really designed for that type of deployment. In reality the robot really has a one-to-one relationship with the student, and it is not easy to reset it for use with a new mobile device without contacting support and requesting a new activation code. For instance, it would not be possible to have a service where a student could call/email our help desk and request a telepresence robot for their session in the afternoon, as their phone/tablet needs to be coupled to the robot. That is not something that we could do easily on an ad hoc basis from afar and it would then need to be reset again to allow the next student borrower. The ideal use model is that the robot _is _a representative of an individual student in the classroom, which is fine, but implies that the student also owns the equipment themselves. In our HE context, it may be that students would not need such a service for all their lectures, but for example only on particular days where they might have had a flare-up of a health condition. So, in our borrowing model, we would have to provide an iPad to couple-with the robot and that iPad would have to stay with the student for as long as they used it.

Following on from the point above, I believe that a borrowing model could work in HE for planned leave such as, maternity/paternity, medical and personal. Maternity leave has already been explored by a pilot project at the University of Oxford (European Bioinformatics Institute, 2018). In these cases, it would be possible for a student to pick up the robot’s accompanying iPad prior to going on leave and then keep the iPad for the duration of their leave, so that they could attend classes. This also implies that there would be a need for more than one robot and for there to be means-tested or referral-based eligibility criteria. Without considerable service planning, it would be easy to see that such a service might be underutilised in the reality of a busy HE setting.

Verdict

There is certainly potential for a future service provision, but more sophisticated management tools are needed for HE settings. Anecdotally speaking, the reaction of some students to the aesthetic design of the robot suggests that a different approach may be needed for the device to feel appropriate for adult learners.

References

Gibbs, G. (1988) _Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods_. Further Education Unit. Oxford Polytechnic: Oxford.

European Bioinformatics Institute (2018) _Meet the robot avatars helping Cambridge students combine education and motherhood_. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/meet-the-robot-avatars-helping-cambridge-students-combine-education-and-motherhood (Accessed: 24 October 2018).

No Isolation (2018) _The impact of AV1 on children with long-term illness and absence_. Available at: https://www.noisolation.com/global/research/the-impact-of-av1-on-children-with-long-term-illness-and-absence/ (Accessed: 24 October 2018).

Schrepp, M., Hinderks, A. and Thomaschewski, J. (2017) Design and evaluation of a short version of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ-S). _International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence,_ 4(6), 103-108.

University of Edinburgh (2019) _Reflection toolkit_. Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/reflection/reflectors-toolkit/reflecting-on-experience/gibbs-reflective-cycle (Accessed: 26 March 2019).

Research methods

The following qualitative research methods were planned:

A testing session would be arranged during a scheduled class. The student would have attended remotely during the class and would have been asked to use the telepresence robot independently after receiving basic instruction.
The student would have been asked to complete a short questionnaire at the beginning of the session prior to use. A second version of the same questionnaire would have been repeated at the end of the testing session. The core questions are based on a validated user experience questionnaire (UEQ-S; Schrepp, Hinderks and Thomaschewski, 2017).
Anonymised typed notes would have been taken during the testing session to record any verbal feedback that the student tester wished to share with the researcher.
Academic staff participants would have been asked to complete a written reflection of a minimum one-page in length based on Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (1988; see also University of Edinburgh, 2019).

The following quantitative research method were planned:

The bandwidth used by the telepresence robot during the testing sessions would have been monitored by the university's network services team.

Addendum

about parents’ privacy concerns related to use of an AV1 robot in a classroom setting.

we used to create the video. ↩︎
The member of the eLearning team who does not have an existing service-based relationship with students. ↩︎
quite a rural and hilly area]. ↩︎
. ↩︎

UX Camp Brighton 2018: Jobs-To-Be-Done-(R) #uxcb18

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Why am I here (as in you, at this blog, and reading this now)?

I hope you are here because you would like an introduction to using RStudio for data visualisation. I also hope that you are here because you are interested in (abbrev~ JTBD; Ulwick, 2016). This blog provides an example of how to apply one of the approaches that sits under the mantle of JTBD, an Opportunity Landscape (Ulwick, 2016; VIII. Target Hidden Growth Opportunities section).

What are we going to do?

We are going to create a plot, or Opportunity Landscape (SEE also Ulwick, 2017), based on data from a quick opinion survey that was distributed via social media. Survey respondents were asked to rate particular tasks that they regularly complete on a smart watch according to importance and satisfaction on 5-part . At this point I should add a caveat, for those familiar with JTBD. These questions were not based on full job statements or stories but were abbreviated task statements. This is largely because based on survey testing, I found that the time it took to read and consider longer Job stories, based on Situation->Motivation->Expected Outcome (Klement, 2016) required too much mental effort for a <15min survey. I have found Job stories to be indispensable at the interview stage, when derived from transcripts as a means to uncover motivations. In the context of this post I would say that my methodology is a bit of a mash-up of JTBD and Gerry McGovern’s top tasks (2010; 2017).

Why are creating a plot?

I believe that the true purpose of any plot is to start conversations. Data visualisations have the power to both subvert truth and to challenge commonly held assumptions, I aim for the latter. Always.

Why are we using RStudio with ggplot2?

The beauty of using RStudio with ggplot2 is…well beauty. Most people can make standard Excel visualisations without too much effort, but even with a lot of tweaking they still have a heady whiff. In the past I used Adobe Illustrator, but speaking of my own failings it was too easy to leave the land of accuracy and enter the land of surface-treatment. Here are my top reasons why you should consider using RStudio with ggplot2:

You know how to use Microsoft Excel, but would like to create better visualisations…
You have lots of data and you would like to segment it and look at a smaller portions without getting caught in a scrolling cycle-of-doom in a humongous spreadsheet…
You want something inexpensive - the only cost here is time, but it is well worth it…
Once you have built it, it can be used over and over and over…and tweaked quickly for whatever the need…
Bonus: RStudio and gpplot2 can be used to prototype data visualisations for interface design and depending on your audience a realistic looking representation/visualisation could be very important.

If any of the statements above have piqued your interest then keep reading.

Step 1: Collect the Data, Show me the Data

In true Blue Peter style, here is one I made earlier…

The plot above is based on Webcredible’s fantastic blog post on the topic of JTBD (Josephy, 2016).

I should add that your plots can be much more extravagant than this, but essentially this is the basic type of plot that we are going to create to get started. The descriptive lines above are superfluous¹. They are useful to keep commented-out in your code though as they can be used to create quick descriptive visuals for stakeholders when needed. What we can read from the visualisation above is that I could have asked about a lot more jobs; it is a bit sparse, but 12 jobs is what this particular survey could accommodate. Also the majority of the jobs fall into the ‘overserved’ domain. This means satisfaction has been rated higher than importance and according to Ulwick (2016) this is prime territory for disruption. So although initially, when I looked at this visualisation I was like “oh blast”, as I was looking for some untapped potential related to smart watch jobs and there is none. Actually it is more that customers are overserved for jobs that aren’t perceived as that important and therefore the landscape is primed for some new competitor to come in and do the job in a cheaper and perhaps less good, but cheaper way, which though market adoption and iteration of ‘said’ cheap version may eventually lead to something better (Ulwick, 2016). Of course another dimension would be to ask questions about jobs that have not yet been considered for smart watch, but these were out of scope for this particular survey. In a way this plot perfectly sums up smart watches as they are still finding their footing, they are still superfluous to the smartphone which is almost ubiquitous. The point I am getting to here is that this plot asks questions of the data, that we might not normally ask if we were looking at each question in isolation. It is only when we bring these jobs together that we reach a new level of meaning.

Collect the data

You will need a survey question something like this…

…Or split it into two versions of the same question depending on the allowances of your survey tool. “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!!!!”

DANGER WILL ROBINSON by BasilLeaf, on Flickr

A photo of a robot based on the character from the 1960s TV show, Lost in Space.

" ( ) by

Q: Hey didn’t you say earlier that you need a 5 part Likert scale? But you only have four options in the ‘satisfaction’ scale above?

The answer is I had to take a difficult decision about the experience of users on smartphones using my survey. One more column and it was over the precipice into the land of non-function. As I am only interested in ‘Quite Important’ and ‘Very Important’ and ‘Satisfied’ and ‘Highly Satisfied’ in this context I sacrificed the final column. So the results for the first question looked like this…

] For the Satisfaction element, I created an in my final spreadsheet, to make 4 equaled 5, 3 equaled 4, 2 equaled 3 and 1 equaled 2. This put everything on the same scale.

Download the data

Any good survey tool should allow you to download the results to CSV format (Comma Separated Values) and any survey tool worth its salt should also provide a SPSS or data analysis format which codes each response with a number. So in my case I wanted to the most positive response to have the highest rank value. I am going to use Excel to sort the data, as that is/was my comfort zone and I think that it is good to start from a position of confidence and trust in the original figures prior to visualising them. Personally speaking after only a few months of working with RStudio, I now feel happy to complete the entire workflow in RStudio.

Tip: Split up your Importance (IMP) and Satisfaction (SAT) onto separate tabs in your Excel spreadsheet

Believe me this will make your life SO much easier, when it comes to doing your calculations.

Step 2: Do the Maths

Having separated your data, create a new tab in your spreadsheet and create the rows defined in the column labelled A below. Then use the data on your Importance tab to populate column B. Start with one question-worth of data, we’ll get to the rest of your questions soon.

So for row 3 “total importance”: count all the entries in the importance column for that particular job from the first data row to the last - indicated by A_x_ \[COUNTA\].
For row 4 we want to count how many of these entries had a rating of 4 (Quite Important) and 5 (Very Important). So we use a COUNTIF formula to look at values greater than 3. As we aren’t dealing with decimals (yet), “>3” is accurate enough for this purpose.
For row 5 we need to find out what percentage of overall responses are Quite and Very Important. So we divide row 4 by row 3 and then times by 10.

1	A	B	C
2	Job	I am a job	In Excel speak
3	total importance	How many entries are there in the column?	=COUNTA(‘IMP data’!A2:A x)
4	imp >3	How many entries are there in the column >3?	=COUNTIF(‘IMP data’!A2:A x, “>3”)
4	imp %	Importance/total importance X 10	=B4/B3*10

Create identical rows for satisfaction (after in my case, adjusting it upwards first, due to having a satisfaction scale of 4 parts), so that you end up with this…

The Opportunity Algorithm

So you will need a final row, row 10 to calculate the Opportunity Score. This is outlined above, but to explain the contents of the image. You take the outcome of importance, which is your percentage, so 9.6 in this case and take away the outcome of satisfaction, again a percentage. So that would leave you with -0.1, then add back on the outcome percentage which is is 9.6 and you end up with the total opportunity score of 9.5. outcome importance + (outcome importance - outcome satisfaction) = Opportunity Score 9.6 + (9.6 - 9.7) = 9.5 This is not the most exciting opportunity score, the most exciting ones are more than 10, or better yet more than 12. Oh and here is why I said that you should start with the formulae for one question-worth of data and to split Importance and Satisfaction onto separate sheets…Once you have created one column for Importance and Satisfaction data you can simply drag the formulae across all of your questions.

Create R Food

Having done all that you need to get your data into columns for RStudio, specifically we want four columns to start off with: Job; Importance; Satisfaction; Opportunity; and Score. So that it looks like this…

Tip to get your data from rows to these columns use the transpose(array) function in Excel, here it is in action…

Step 3: Get Sta(R)ted

Install R from the R Archive: Pick a mirror close-by (geographically speaking), e.g in UK - ,
Mac tip: make sure that you check the MD5 hash and SHA hash match. You can do this quickly and easily in terminal.
\[Mac only\]: Install - information about this is provided at R Archive above.
Install RStudio: again do check the MD5. You can get the installer here -

Step 4: OoooH aRrrrr

Launch RStudio and have a go!

Image of the RStudio UI

So now that you have done all of the preparation you can actually start to create plots. Before you do anything else you need to load your library. In this case we are using ggplot2 which is part of - packages for R with standardised concepts and grammar. This is a good place to start as I have found that some of the R packages are quite idiosyncratic and it can take a bit of time to wrap your head around the internal logic, whereas the Tidyverse stuff all made a lot of sense. This could be because I originally learned to code in the JavaScript iteration of RStudio comes with a lot of packages already, so…

library(gpplot2)

If you needed to install it first and say you wanted the whole Tidyverse it would intuitively be…

install.packages(tidyverse)

Next you need to define your data and as you will recall we set that us as a .csv file on the desktop so lets call the data ‘jtdb’…

library(gpplot2) jtbd <- read.csv("~/Desktop/JTBD\_R/jtbd.csv", header = T) 
#This is a comment in RMarkup, 
#so lets also find out about the data itself by using the summary function summary(jtbd)

Result in the console:

Well…that is jolly helpful information!

Now for the plot part:

#the plot mapping - telling where your data to map on the axis 

ggplot(jtbd, aes(x=Importance, y=Satisfaction))+ 
# the "+" allows you to add another function, each function goes on its own layer, 
#so the order is important for example geom_point defines your data as points on the plot 

geom_point(color="blue", alpha=0.5, size=4)+ 

# To map aesthetics in a more intentional way - for instance adding labels, 
# we can use another function geom label which requires two variables 
#(in this case Importance and Satisfaction) 
# and tell it which column to get the labels from, in this case, the "Job" column 

geom_label(aes(label = jtbd$Job), 
nudge_y = 0.08, 
nudge_x = 0.06, 
hjust="right", 
alpha=0.8, 
size=4)

This gives a starter plot like this… [

. Just to prove that it is easy to get started I gave myself a little challenge…

After that it is really all about the aesthetics with this particular plot. Specifically I added a data.frame (a container for data) for each aesthetic element such as text, lines, shaded polygons and areas. These were then called as shown below…

#Labels for the areas of the plot 

labelover <- data.frame( x = 1, y = 9.5, label="OVERSERVED" ) 

#Potential for disruption line 
segment4 <- data.frame( x = 0, y = 2, xend = 7, yend = 10 ) 

#further down in the code where the plot is created - I call these

ggplot(jtbd, aes(x=Importance, y=Satisfaction)) + 

#Calling the text 
geom_text(data = labelover, 
aes(x = x, y = y, label = label), size=5) + 

#Calling the 'potential for disruption line' and adding some annotation to it 

geom_segment(data = segment4, 
aes(x = x, y = y, xend = xend, yend = yend), 
alpha=0.2, linetype=2) + 
annotate("text", x = 5.1, y = 9, label = "Potential for disruption")

Step 5: Aesthetics

Well that provides an overview of the basics the rest will be based on your own aesthetic decisions. So I have provided the full code work-up with annotation below and recommend that you have a go and explore. Also if any of you are R and ggplot2 ‘pros’ I am open to feedback as I am sure that it could be improved. To summarise, from my perspective using RStudio has provided the following benefits:

A fast way to create reproducible visualisations of JTBD data
An effective way to create prototype data visualisations for a range of design contexts
An inexpensive option when compared to other data packages. Although I can get a student discount on software at the moment, I was thinking about the long term and developing a skill with an open source package
It has helped me to think differently about data and to iterate visualisations in the same way that I would with other design projects
It is immensely satisfying

References:

Josephy, J. (2016) ‘Jobs to be done - a better way to innovate’, Webcredible blog, 19 May. Available at: (Accessed: 23 March 2018).

Klement, A. (2016) ‘Designing features using job stories’, in Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done’. pp. 28-80. Available at: (Downloaded: 24 March 2017).

McGovern, G. (2010) The stranger’s long neck: How to deliver what your customers really want online. London: A & C Black.

McGovern, G. (2017) ‘Measuring customer effort with Top Tasks’

\[_PowerPoint_ presentation\]

. Available at: (Accessed: 23 February 2017).

Tufte, E. R. (2001) The visual display of quantitative information. 2nd edn. USA, CT: Graphics Press. Reprint, 2013.

Ulwick, A. W. (2016) Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice. Available at: (Downloaded: 3 March 2017).

Ulwick, A. W. (2017) ‘The path to growth: The opportunity algorithm’, The marketing journal, 9 July. Available at: (Accessed: 23 March 2018).

Code

Access the code for this post on my .

Code for JTBD data visualisation by is licensed under a . Based on a work at .

Edward Tufte (2001) would likely frown to see these lines - “erase non-data-ink” (p. 105). ↩︎

Hone Smart Home

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of my last entry I outlined my discovery that there was an app building company called Bubble, which would likely lead to brand confusion. As a result I decided to go back to some of the ideas on and consider other possibilities that would tackle some of the same goals. The following company traits need to be suggested by the name:

Organisation, finesse, attention to detail
Protection and/or care
Attentiveness
A connection to housing and or containment

Initially I came up with “Corral”, especially as I thought that this would appeal to the Smart Home market in the United States which seems to be more fully developed than that of Europe (I have sought data to prove this but a lot of the market research is behind pay walls, I did however find a nice snippet from Statista included below).

“Corral” suggests containment, gathering and shepherding something that is perhaps unruly. There could also be a potentially useful or possibly tacky mnemonic in that “IoT Corral” would remind users of “O.K. Corral” (O.K. Corral (building), n.d.) , another US connection. However, I decided this would likely err on the tacky-side. “Corral” is quite a specific idea so I tried out some new logo ideas and also had a think about rocking the minimalist boat by creating a more three-dimensional logo.

Shapes which could suggest a corral - essentially an abstracted animal pen.

Shapes with the shadow casting turned on. This allowed me to think about how these images would look if they were simplified into 2D shaded areas to provide the illusion of depth and perspective. I created these images in Sketchup (Trimble, 2017), a piece of software which I will undoubtedly use for some of the graphic prototyping in the app. I have a background in 3D modelling and the smart home visualisations will be more effective if they are modelled architecturally.

In this version I omitted the lines in order to see how pue shading would look.

[Was once a linked image to the logo for Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe - link is no longer available in 2021 when this post was archived]

I was thinking of something like this logo but with a top and bottom section and more shading placed over logo text or on the left of the logo image (Stankowski & Duschek, 1992 as in Hyland & Bateman, 2011, p. 266).

The “Corral” concept although an equilateral has some similarities to a circle or oval and could suggest protective and nurturing qualities as we learned from the initial lecture with Phil Jackson. It could also be seen to bear representational similarity to an eye depending upon the placement of the logo title text.

“Corral” wasn’t quite working for me, it felt too fortified and possible too specific to the United States, it also started to remind me of a bank or credit card and there needs to be something more personal and homely about this product. Once again I changed tact.

The next idea that I pursued was to develop the word “Hone” as the company or app name. I immediately had a better gut feeling about this word especially when combined with my “IoT” trademark-style embellishment. On the surface level there is a nice mnemonic in that the word rhymes with “Home” and upon searching there aren’t any competing products with the same name.

“Hone” is a verb which when used with no object is often confused with the concept of homing in on something as opposed to sharpening, perfecting or focusing which is the correct meaning; another “home” association, even though it is incorrect it is actually of benefit (Hone in vs. hone in, 2015). The only consideration with the word itself is that if viewed from a distance in a font without a high ascender on the “h” it could be read as “none”; this may mean that a capital letter at the start of the word is preferable. With this in-mind I started with the typefaces I had explore of what I had first in the Adobe Creative Suite (Adobe, 2017) and then took a look at some Google fonts (Google, 2017a). Initially I started with quite chunky fonts and felt that I would like to include a powerbutton in the design to indicate control rather than making the home connection explicit by using a symbol. This also felt like it would allow space for the company and app to expand to the commercial sector if the connection was more subtle.

The first electronic Hone logo mock-up using the Montserrat Subrayada (Ulanovsky, n.d.) font and Prosto One (Lemonad & Emelyanov, n.d.) fonts.

This initial logo was too blocked and the plugged-in nature of the black lines, reminiscent of wires connecting each letter suggested an audio system or electronic music genre. I created a contact sheet of fonts based to keep for future reference and to trial in some logo designs: You can view this at the .

I tried out a few more ideas based on some hinting towards the futurism and vorticism art movements (see 2, 6 and 7), although these experiments proved to be overly busy and vaguely reminiscent of the cognitive dissonance I encountered the time I observed the design of the “It’s a small world” ride at Disneyland in CA, USA.

Gbklyn, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I ran the logo contact sheet by a few people via social media, just for some initial thoughts and they gave me some good things to think about particularly the difference between European and US design tastes (an even split of EU and US comments). This also challenged some assumptions I had made about the better designs, so I will work up the best ideas in time for the session with Phil in order to get his feedback on the concept.

As a final piece of research to confirm that “hone” was a solid choice of word for branding I looked at the Google Ngram viewer (Google, 2017b). The Ngram Viewer allows you to search Google books content from 1800 - 2008 based on boolean word queries. So I searched for “hone” and I was interested to find that the capitalised form of the word was at the peek of it’s popularity around 1910 right at the end of the Edwardian era. I have made comparisons between the current state of Internet of Things (IoT) to the disarray around .

For example, during the Edwardian period there were different current voltages for electrical supply in different areas of England surly a recipe for fire or electrocution; IoT has many different wireless frequencies and no common consensus on standards so it isn’t all that different (although accidental death is less likely). This Edwardian connection provided more design inspiration and made me think that deriving inspiration from Edwardian architectural etchings and engravings may look more modern than 3D models which look dated very quickly. For example, Hive which is British Gas’s Smart Home thermostat has a lovely simulation interface, but the home simulated with 3D graphics looked like an early 2000s computer game (it seems that British Gas might have realised this too and the demo is now harder to find on the site, but still seems accessible via this link: [link no longer available]. With this in mind I considered what a banner could look like for hone, the logo needs some tracking adjustments, but this was a first try with some basic layer blending and a clean finish.

Phil also suggested that I look at some different wood finishes if I stick with this aesthetic. After coming back to this header test after a couple of days the current wood finish sort of reminds me of that cheap MDF coated board, so I definitely need to look at some alternatives. Something with more of a creamy background like this futurist drawing might be better.

By Antonio Sant'Elia - Utopie metropolitane, la mostra (in Italian). Style & Design. l'Espresso (2013-03-28). Retrieved on 2013-04-01., Public Domain, Link

References

Adobe. (2017). Adobe creative cloud [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud.html

Google. (2017a). Google fonts. Retrieved from the Google fonts website: https://fonts.google.com/

Google. (2017b). Google Ngram viewer. Retrieved from the Google Ngram Viewer website: https://books.google.com/ngrams

Home in vs. hone in. (2015) [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.dictionary.com/hone-in-vs-home-in/

Hyland, A., & Bateman, S. (2011). Symbol. London, England: Lawrence King Publishing Ltd.

Lemonad, J., & Emelyanov, P. (n.d.). Prosto one. Retrieved from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Prosto+One

O.K. Corral (building). (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved February, 18, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.K._Corral_(building)

Trimble. (2017). SketchUp Make [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://www.sketchup.com/download?sketchup=make

Ulanovsky, J. (n.d.). Montserrat subrayada. Retrieved from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Montserrat+Subrayada

Naming - initial ideas

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On this page of my sketchbook I used a dice rolling exercise (Barnard & Briscoe, 2016) to explore different name combinations for the potential company. Initially I gravitated towards BubbleHome as a concept.

I then completed two iterations of the Lean Business canvas and fleshed out the idea a bit more. To summarise the main points, as this plan is likely to evolve over time:
Problem - top 3 problems

Each device has its own management system - this is a lot to keep track of
There is not a user-friendly way to map and monitor a smart home ecosystem in one place
Devices can have significant security issues when not setup correctly

Solution - top 3 solutions

Aggregate operational updates from devices via open api
Provide a mapping tool allowing users to position devices in a model of their home and review synchronous operations
Provide security advice based on device ecosystem and configuration patterns.

The cost structure versus the customer segment is a bit of a sore point in the canvas plans. The development costs seem like they will be very high in comparison to the small audience for this product in Europe. Marketing this product to US consumers might reap more benefits as there are a greater number of smart home products specifically marketed in the United States. The research to prove this is largely behind heady pay walls (NPD, 2017) but the main products such as Nest (Google, 2017b) and SmartThings (Samsung, 2017) were initially launched in the United States and therefore logically it makes sense that they may have larger customer segments in the United States as opposed to Europe. Another factor which I was able to locate recent research on was that security cameras are the most popular devices (NPD, 2016). This emphasis on security could serve my solution as well, as IP cameras are for security, but if they are compromised that could present some huge privacy issues and security issues for the end-user. It reminds me of the Shodan baby cam story (Porup, 2016) from last year and this thread on Reddit (jenn_and_tonic, 2016):

I spent a bit of time sketching logo ideas for a logo. I felt like I wanted BubbleHome to be approachable so initially I considered a bespoke serif script font. However, this would be rather unconventional for a tech-focused company where clean sans-serif screen fonts are the norm. I tried out the idea of including a house pictogram in the logo, but it kept looking more like an upload symbol than a house/home and I felt that it would narrow the scope of the solution (visually exclusive; what about apartments?), and there might be future expansion into corporate solutions.

This version was too busy and was really just a test. The blue background seemed caring and trustworthy, as did the circular bubble formation. I decided to take these elements forward to the next version. Font: DIN Alternate Bold // Background colour: #448ccb

I really liked this version and the evolution of “IoT” for Internet of Things becoming a trademark-like descriptor providing immediate context. To back up my assumption that IoT is an understood concept, I did a bit of digging in Google Trends (Google, 2017a). I compared several search terms and was interested to find that the interest in IoT now far outstrips “Internet of Things” although it could be that some are searching to find out what the acronym means! I also looked at “Smart Home” and “IFTTT” (main competitor in theory) for comparison. Another interesting observation was that the “Smart Home” term seems to be greater interest in the United States and the United Kingdom and “IoT” seems to be more prevalent elsewhere - this might be partially explained by the translation of Smart Home into different languages. This is something to bear in mind though with regard to marketing.

[Had to remove older Google Trends data]

I got as far as creating a Hero image for the Bubble or BubbleHome concept and then found that there was app builder with the name Bubble ( ) and very distinctive logo and I felt that this would like affect the success of the concept as an independent brand.

Plus there is a danger that people might think of a house like this:

Back to the drawing board…

References

Porup, J. M. (2016, January 23). “Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse. ArsTechnica. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/how-to-search-the-internet-of-things-for-photos-of-sleeping-babies/

Barnard, D. & Briscoe, R. (2016, June 14). Workshop on creating games and playful interations for adult learning in public spaces. Workshop presented at the first conference on Playful Learning, Manchester, UK. Abstract retrieved from http://conference.playthinklearn.net/blog/programme/full-abstracts-thursday-14th#10

Google. (2017a). Google trends search [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=smart%20home,IFTTT,Internet%20of%20Things,IoT

Google. (2017b). Nest learning thermostat. Retrieved from the Nest website: https://nest.com/uk/

jenn_and_tonic. (2016, June 19). I bought and returned a set of WiFi connected home security cameras. Forgot to delete my account and I can now watch the new owner [Electronic forum post]. Retrieved from https://redd.it/4ortwb

Maurya, A. (2016). Lean canvas. Retrieved from https://leanstack.com/lean-canvas/

NPD. (2016). Network connected cameras account for the majority, 61 percent, of U.S. home automation industry revenues. Retrieved from https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/2016/safety-and-security-are-lead-drivers-in-smart-home-technology-interest--according-to-npd-connected-intelligence/

NPD. (2017). Home automation. Retrieved from http://www.connected-intelligence.com/our-research/home-automation

Samsung. (2017). SmartThings - smart home system. Retrieved from the Samsung SmartThings website: https://www.smartthings.com/uk/

Welcome to my new IDM22 Journal

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! I have decided that I would like to keep up my reflective writing activities during IDM22. This is due to my recent experience on the web development module and also thinking back to when I took IDM21 (seems so long ago now!). In both cases it was an immensely valuable venture.

Purpose of this blog

I find that I needed a central place to gather my thoughts and referencing-styles throughout this process, so a blog seems like the perfect solution to pull together snippets as I go along. This is not however, just any blog as I have decided to build it in Jekyll (2017) a very basic blogging platform, although deceptively technical, which is based on ruby. I feel that this will give me an opportunity to learn more about ruby and also after about 10 years of working with WordPress as a CMS I think that it is time to expand my repertoire a bit. Essentially, this site will be my online whiteboard as it is essential for me to have a space which I can access from anywhere and also I do not actually own a physical whiteboard! Using one at university would not suffice as I need to leave my scribblings and musings on it!

Initial ideas

To recount a few initial ideas based on our first design session. We have been set the task of devising a logo for a company and I suspect that the company will be our fictional client in this scenario. I also know that we have to create a functioning prototype for this particular assignment, so with that in mind I considered profitable and interesting options for an app design.

As a basis for this I considered some potential problems that could be solved. At first I thought that it would be good to build a clinical examination app, as that would benefit aspects of my day job supporting nursing students. Students have to take practical examinations for their clinical skills and an app that helped make it easier to mark these tests would be immensely helpful (the tests are often very complex). However, after more consideration I felt that this would not offer sufficient design challenge to satisfy the module’s learning objectives. After all this type of app would essentially be an interactive form. There is a lot of value in a well-designed form, but not a lot of aesthetic value perhaps.

Like OnStar for your smart home

With aesthetics and functions in mind I decided to return to some of the ideas that I touched upon in my earlier research project for IDM13. During IDM13 I completed a short 10 credit research project looking at 5 consumer-level Internet of Things (IoT) systems, including two smart home systems; Nest and SmartThings (Google, 2017; Samsung, 2017). The research project had provided me with some domain knowledge and at the end of the project I had felt like I would like to do more. One of the ideas which I had come up with during the project and have since learned is not unique is thinking about a management or monitoring tool for all IoT devices in the home regardless of vendor. This would be incredibly difficult to accomplish. Think of it, a management tool which could be used with any IoT device so all of the separate apps would only be required for specific configuration needs. For this you would need a common platform/OS for it to be viable, otherwise you would spend all your time trying to keep up with the platform changes and APIs.

IFTTT.com have it right in this area as they put the onus on the developers and manufacturers to update their IoT related applets so that they “works with IFTTT” (IFTTT, 2017). They have a strong brand, but they were also first to the party. I found myself thinking about whether there could be an app and service which could be more of an aggregator, picking up a log of what each device was doing and when, alerting the user to issues, but having a read-only type relationship with the systems and devices. This service would have a security angle and I felt that it would be like OnStar enhanced breakdown recovery (Vauxhall, 2017) for cars, except it would be for Internet of Things devices. This product would occupy a security angle, although I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it is akin to anti-virus, it can not perceive or diagnose threats but it might be the canary in the coalmine in that it would provide an early warning through it’s holistic overview of all IoT sub-systems in the home, rather than having to monitor each device individually via it’s own app.

Another aspect is that there is currently a large influx of devices on the market and based on observation it seems unlikely that all of these manufacturers will survive. For instance Revolv which was bought by Google’s Nest and then shut down (Hern, 2016) - however if a connection could be made with OpenHAB (OpenHAB Foundation, 2017) a platform for allowing continued use of devices when company support has been withdrawn (e.g. the company has gone out of business) then that could be a compelling piece of functionality, allowing for continued oversight, within the app I plan to design. This is out of scope for this part of the project, but would be something to consider further down the line, if the user base grew to support that.

So essentially the app I would like to build, is for web and mobile, although mobile first and is a utility that allows users to map and monitor their in-home ecosystem. I also envision that the app will include a catalogue of devices currently on the market with their established design and configuration patterns so that each device’s components could be mapped and there could even be a try-before-you-buy dimension to that. Additional devices could be added to the catalogue based on user requests and also possible sponsorship tie-ins from an advertising perspective. The idea of try-before-you-buy also emerged from my earlier research, you can view the design specifications which .

I used this page of sketchbook to explore different ideas related to objects in the home, Internet of Things and word associations.

References

Google. (2017). Nest learning thermostat. Retrieved from the Nest website: https://nest.com/uk/

Hern, A. (2016, April 5). Revolv devices bricked as Google's Nest shuts down smart home company. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/05/revolv-devices-bricked-google-nest-smart-home

IFTTT. (2017). One connection countless possibilities. Retrieved from the IFTTT website: https://partners.ifttt.com

Jekyll. (2017). Blogging platform based on Ruby (Version 3.4.0) [Computer software]. Retrieved from https://jekyllrb.com

OpenHAB Foundation. (2017). Introduction. Retrieved from the OpenHAB website: http://www.openhab.org/introduction.html

Samsung. (2017). SmartThings - smart home system. Retrieved from the Samsung SmartThings website: https://www.smartthings.com/uk/

Vauxhall. (2017). Vauxhall Onstar. Retrieved from the Vauxhall Onstar website: http://www.vauxhall.co.uk/onstar/index.html

Striving for accessibility - Eval pt 1

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 of my final evaluation. This entry outlines key decisions that I made regarding accessibility towards the end of the development period. I am writing and publishing it retroactively as it as represents a very large amount of thinking and work, which I kept notes about as I went along.

Based on observation

Based on looking at a large number of NHS and governmental sites, referenced in former posts I realise that accessibility is crucial, perhaps even more than your average portfolio site. For example, looking at NHS England (2017) site I see that they offer a text-to-speech service. Based on experience in my day-job working with software vendors, some of these solutions can be quite expensive. It was however important to me to make the site as accessible as possible and that has meant some sacrifices along the way.

Keystone texts

While engaging in this in-depth investigation into the accessibility, I found myself referring to the following keystone texts.

- UX accessibility specialists an amazing resource
- a frequent go-to of mine

I feel like I have only scratched the surface with the WAI-ARIA roles, but based on testing I feel that the site is accessible as I could get it within the allotted time. In the end I found a blog post on the subject by a rather brilliant developer, Aaron Krauss (2016) who did a great job of how to practically use certain ARIA labels and roles. What I did find is that there is quite a lot of redundancy in the code, but you need to have it there as the screenreader doesn’t necessarily pick up the semantics in the page construction as you might intend. Here is a video of my screenreader testing in action with tab key only - tabindex (Mozilla Developer Network, 2017)

What the font?

I conducted some reading (Nielsen, 2002; Martin, 2009; Franz, 2014; ) around legible fonts and font sizes and optimal line height. I have tried my best to work with the best practices, although that does get tricky with the mobile screen size. However, the attention that I have paid to optimising the CSS stylesheet for plain readers should help those who use accessibility features on mobile devices. Added a fix to the superscript I found a very helpful snippet for fixing line height for superscript (used for references) and subscript. Thank you to the -ever helpful- CSS Tricks site (Coyier, 2009a). Contrast As much as I loved the white headers along the timeline the contrast was not sufficient. The colour scheme is themed around blues and purples and unfortunately white on blue doesn’t comply with WCAG 2.0 unless the blue shade is very dark or the white font is very large (Snook, 2015; WAVE, n.d.).

The accordion had to go

Upon testing the tab-key only navigation I realised that there was no accessible way (that I could muster anyway) to navigate the accordion (Mary Lou, 2012) and for that reason it had to go. I added two simple tables, which I was trying to avoid, but as they area features comparisons this use us permissible. I was not using the tables for layout, but for the display of information in a standardised way. After the fact I found this accordion example at codepen.io which might have been better, but not without a lot of work:

Sprite fun

I got my sprite on and added sprites for the device images. The device images were drawings that I created in Adobe Illustrator based on photographs. All the photos were apart from the image of jeans, which I have listed below. This was added as an image through the CSS and aria-labelled for descriptive purposes.

The complete sprite for the devices in all of its glory. Photograph used as the basis for illustration of fasten/clip wearable - by is licensed under CC0 images sources from Pixabay:

Fixing the tab svg

I replaced the svg tab to be a proper thing rather than the Frankenstein’s monster-like CSS creation . Once again I referred to the excellent CSS-Tricks (Coyier, 2013) and Mozilla Developer Network resources (2016c), as well as the Implementing Responsive Design book from the reading list (Kadlec, 2012).

Asking myself questions

I tried my best to standardise all the units in the CSS although if I were to do it all again with hindsight I think that I might design my grid to work with ems or rems (once they are widely compatible or older browsers fall out of use). I’m sure that I have missed things in spite of several thorough read-throughs. It all validated okay. CSS code block structure: e.g. div class or id - this resembles the layout of a div .div { display: block; position: relative; width: 90% height: 60% color: #000; margin: 2% auto 2% auto padding: 2% 4%; (shortenings used where possible) } e.g. typography class or id - this resembles the layout h2 { font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.25; font-weight: 300; } In the HTML where white-space pre-line formatting was needed for the Goals and the references sections, I included comments to help indicate why the formatting was different in the markup. Also regarding the CSS as I was going through it, to weed it a bit, I asked myself a series of questions to help determine which units to use and such. I have included these below.

Is it text? = ems
If it moves it is em or %. If it doesn’t or cannot move it is pixels
Is it in a column in the grid - then margins and padding are percentages (unless there is a very good reason for them not to be)
Is it in the grid - then margins and padding are percentages
Is it used in the html? No, then get rid of it Could it be consolidated in any way? Does it share the same values as another class and/or id?I would have liked to do more on this, but I ran out of time. Did my best to do it as I went along.
Does it need to be a negative value (particularly in the media queries)? Then it is in ems.

Rationale:

When it is something that needs to have set dimensions such as a button, I am using pixels.
For text I am using ems to ensure compatibility with older browsers
For table related items and blocks which reside in divs I have used percentages.
Used hexadecimal shortenings when it made sense to do so and it did not change the hue of the colour (three digits rather than the standard 6). I prefer digits rather than word descriptions, due to colour precision.

Media queries

Did a lot of work on these, again I found the Implementing Responsive Design (Kadlec, 2012) and the Introducing HTML 5 (Lawson & Sharp, 2011) books particularly helpful. I also added a arrow keys image and tooltip to help explain the navigation of the timeline. You will notice for the tabbed navigation of the site in the screen reader demo that the timeline is skipped over initially and I added to the JavaScript in order to allow the tab key for navigation in addition to the arrow keys. The arrow keys allow for greater freedom though, as once you have started tabbing through the carousel/timeline, you cannot get out of it with another tab press. Thus leaving it to the end and this is something for me to raise with the original developers to see if they can address that in future versions of the widget.

References

Coyier, C. (2009a, August 10). Prevent Superscripts and subscripts from affecting line-height

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Coyier, C. (2009b, October 24). CSS Sprites: What they are, why they’re cool, and how to use them

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Coyier, C. (2013, December 4). SVG tabs (using an SVG shape as template)

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Donut. (2011). Re: What are the most common font-sizes for H1-H6 tags. StackOverflow website. Retrieved 19 January 2017, from

Franz, L. (2014, September 29). Size matters: Balancing line length and font size in responsive web design – smashing magazine

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Kadlec, T. (2012). Responsive Media. In Implementing responsive design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (pp. 95–127). Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.

Krauss, A. (2016, September 8). ARIA roles and attributes: How to actually use them | Aaron Krauss Retrieved from

Lawson, B. D., & Sharp, R. (2011). Introducing HTML5 (2nd edition) (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.

Martin, M. (2009, August 20). Typographic design patterns and best practices – smashing magazine

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Mary Lou. (2012, February 21). Accordion with CSS3

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Mozilla Developer Network. (2015, July 23). Using the aria-describedby attribute. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Mozilla Developer Network website:

Mozilla Developer Network. (2016a, December 15). WAI-ARIA basics. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Mozilla Developer Network website:

Mozilla Developer Network. (2016b, November 17). CSS values and units. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Mozilla Developer Network website:

Mozilla Developer Network. (2016c, December 3). Background-position. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Mozilla Developer Network website:

Mozilla Developer Network. (2017, January 16). Tabindex. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Mozilla Developer Network website:

NHS England. (2017). About NHS England. Retrieved January 23, 2017, from NHS England website:

Nielsen, J. (1996, October 1). Accessible design for users with disabilities

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Nielsen, J. (2002). Let users control font size

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Snook. (2015). Colour Contrast Check

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved 19 January 2017, from

Stanford University Online Accessibility Program. (2016, August 1). Screen reader testing. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from Stanford University website:

W3C. (2016, October 27). Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.1 W3C Candidate Recommendation 27 October 2016. Retrieved January 23, 2017, from W3C website,

W3C. The Roles Model. Retrieved January 19, 2017a, from WAI-ARIA website:

W3C. WAI-ARIA role definition model - image. Retrieved January 19, 2017b, from WAI-ARIA website:

W3Schools. CSS Tooltip. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from w3schools.com website:

Watson, L. (2014, August 4). Using the tabindex attribute

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

WAVE web accessibility tool.

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved January 19, 2017, from

The weekend of doom

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my last entry I talked about the suggestions that Theo provided from his perspective as a nurse and researcher. They were very helpful, but lead to some rather major layout changes. In particular, the to do: “I will need more space in the carousel/timeline”. This led to what I nicknamed in my GitHub posts as the Weekend of Hell, I am softening this within the context of this journal entry to be the Weekend of Doom.

. An image showing how the site looked prior to the changes to the carousel.

Altering the Flickity Carousel/Timeline

So changing the height of the Flickity carousel used for the patient timeline meant that the “dot” buttons had to be moved upwards otherwise they would be off the bottom of the visible area on most standard screen sizes. For reference, I have included a long screenshot that I made of the site prior to this work, on the right. So I decided that the dots should reside on-top of the carousel and then they would also be spatially connected to the navigation of the timeline. This is not really how Flickity carousels are really designed to exist (metafizzy, 2016), but it is closer to the original inspiration for my site the DuckDuckGo about page (DuckDuckGo, 2014). The main issue that I ran into was that the carousel needed to resize itself dynamically and I had media queries which hid the dots on mobile devices (as they were no longer very useful as buttons at that size). However, as the dots themselves are rendered automatically by the JavaScript, they were rendering much more quickly than the resizing. So I upon sizing-up a responsive browser window the dots and timeline appeared on top of everything and looked awful. I tried everything I could think of to fix this issue. I attempted to delay the dots in the JavaScript. I also tried writing a script which watched for the window size. I tried positioning the dots so that they moved upwards. I also tried creating condition code which watched for various conditions to be met prior to triggering the dots. Things I wrote worked to an extent, but not sufficiently or reliably enough to depend on them. In the end I had to temporarily hide the dots by setting them and the timeline to ‘display: none’. I also had to hide the spot where they generated by moving the about section upwards. Essentially the solution’s analogue equivalent is that the rabbit is being hidden in a compartment of the hat the whole time (oh wait…is that how they do it?).

Performance Issues

I am actually grateful that all of this happened as once I had cracked the rendering issue I realised that there were some major performance issues with the carousel/timeline. It took a bit of time to get to the bottom of it, but in the end I realised that it was the long svg that I had included to indicate the patient’s anxiety levels. Through testing in multiple browsers, on Mac, PC and mobile I realised that the image also wasn’t loading anywhere other than in Chrome for Mac. Everywhere it was just gumming up the works. I reassessed the need for the anxiety level gauge/image and decided that it was important to keep it. So through trial and error I ended up loading with an image tag in the html as a very, very long svg. This is the only svg in the site that I could not optimise as it resulted in optimisation errors because it was too long dimensions-wise. Also, I realised that I did not really want to optimise it as I would result in losing the drop shadow detail which I had added to a new version of the design.

The new design

The performance issues highlighted that the design of the patient anxiety-level link was in fact creating an optical illusion and making the carousel look guddery/jerky even once the problems with it were fixed. The new design not only looked more streamlined, but it moved more smoothly simply by virtue of its aesthetics.

Version 1 - This screenshot deliberately shows the progress between two slides. This version of the anxiety level image had a visual effect akin to passing a row of trees with bright light behind them. It became very jarring when viewed at-speed

Version 2: I created a long svg in Adobe Illustrator with a greater level of logic. Attempting to map the story thematically to a graphical interpretation of the patient stress levels. This link is on the one-hand more graph-like but also more oraganic as I made it from scratch by drawing and manipulating a continuous line…Can you tell I went to art school?

Space economy

This entry represents the end of a period where I added a lot of content to the site. This was a good thing, but it also meant that there were areas that felt overly heavy like the devices area. I decided to try adding a collapsible accordion as a container for the information, using a tutorial from Codrops (Mary Lou, 2012). The tutorial was bit old but I liked how it used CSS and I felt that I could build on it. The accordion looked quite nice too, I’m sure that you can sense a ‘but…’ coming on here? Well I will explain it in the next journal entry. I have however included a screenshot the accordion so that it can live on it perpetuity.

. This is where I got to with them. Partially styled, but a nice efficient use of space. I would have added svg “+“s on the right to indicate their interactivity.

The contact form actually works now

I wrote a dev post about the contact form, but yes the contact form is now working as it should. I just need to enhance the warning/alert aspects and add aria labels etc. And so does the back-to-top the button as in it only appears when one is sufficiently far from the top of the page for it to be useful. This took a couple of iterations of code to get right.

Finally…

I had come up with a CSS style for reference sections and I decided to add it to this journal as well as part of my custom child theme. I am going to try (time allowing) to add it to my all my posts retroactively, but it is a big job and I have surprised myself at the sheer number of posts that I have amassed here in the past few months.

References

Coyier, C. (2013, March 5). Using SVG

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

DuckDuckGo. (2014, February 20). About DuckDuckGo. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from DuckDuckGo.com website:

Mary Lou. (2012, February 21). Accordion with CSS3

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

metafizzy. (2016). Options. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from metafizzy website:

Sowmya. (2013). Re: Nesting an svg inside a div

\[Online forum comment\]

. Retrieved from StackOverflow website:

Charty McCharterson

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I knew that all of that work that I did on polls would come in handy at some point. The time arrived, as displaying data was something that seemed important from the beginning, to support the goals for the project. I wanted to support the information about ‘UK smart device ownership’ with some data. Having spent quite a bit of time and trying things out, I felt sure that the the Google Charts api (n.d.) would give me the level of interactivity and customisation required.

Something I changed

Like the tools I had used already (see earlier entries including Flickity by metafizzy (2016), smooth-scroll by cfernandi (2016)) the instructions always say to call the JavaScript package in the header. This is something that my instructor, Marcus, had pointed out as bad practice. Therefore, I created a new eventlistener in my JavaScript file in order to load google’s “loader.js” script. This allowed me to place the ’ tag at the bottom of my index.html file. However, unlike the other widgets and code snippets that I have used, I cannot compile Google’s JavaScript as part of my own script (Google, 2016a), it has to be loaded from Google servers (licensed under Apache license version 2.0 (2004) ). For this reason I reused the loading GIF from the contact form, to show while the chart loads. The data itself is from Offcom’s report entitled, The Communications Market, 5 Internet and Online Content (2016a, p. 191). What is great about their site is that they make the raw data available in Microsoft Excel format, so I was able to construct the chart based on a subset of data (Ofcom, 2016b). In order to show the age versus ownership I selected a stacked barchart as a space efficient way to show the data.

Prepping the chart for print

I have still to create my print stylesheet, which is something that I will do towards the end of the project. In the meantime it made sense to make sure that the chart was prepped for printing to png. I am not going to make a link to the png available as that function will run in browsers which support the HTML5 element (Google, 2016c). However, what customising this script did do, was create a static view of the chart showing it in suitable format for printing.

Tab clear

I decided that I needed to highlight the User Experience section of the portfolio page design, as it was all very wordy. There is still a lot to consider in this area, but I decided to add a tab image on the top-left of the UX factors (formerly scenarios) section. I started by creating an svg, partially inspired by a post on CSS-Tricks (Coyier, 2013). However, I really wasn’t happy with it in terms of formatting and scaling. For now I have replaced it with a tab which I created using pure CSS. The tab is actually made of two divs, one for the the main tab shape (rounded rectangle) and one for the slant leading up to it using the skewX transform option. However, I will have to replace this as it is only compatible with IE11 or later (Can I use, 2016). It is a shame, but it was good to learn about the transform option and again I used the ::before pseudo element to add text content on the div.

The first attempt at the tab using an .svg

Second attempt at a tab using two CSS divs - one skewed 40deg - sadly it will need to be replaced due to the need for background compatibility. Ultimately, I will need to go back to an svg solution, but I will draw it to look like what I came up with using the CSS.

References

Apache Software Foundation. (2004). Apache license version 2.0. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Apache Software Foundation website,

Can I use… (2016, October 23). Retrieved January 7, 2017, from

Coyier, C. (2013, December 4). SVG tabs (using an SVG shape as template)

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

cferdinandi. (2016, December 11). Cferdinandi/smooth-scroll. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from

Google. (n.d.). Charts | Google developers. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Google Charts,

Google. (2016a, September 12). Load the libraries. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Google Charts,

Google. (2016b, September 12). Bar charts. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Google Charts,

Google. (2016c, October 12). Printing PNG charts. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Google Charts,

metafizzy. (2016). Flickity. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from

Ofcom. (2016a). The Communications Market 2016: 5 Internet and online content. Retrieved from

Ofcom. (2016b, August 4). Data downloads. Retrieved January 7, 2017, from Ofcom.org.uk,

Accessibility and responsive bits

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This journal entry represents a mammoth effort to add high-quality content to the site.

I developed and added the patient story. This was based on a characteristics list which I worked through rather vigorously on the afternoon of the 25th. This is still in handwritten form, so I will link to it as a google doc later on. I have included some key references for that process below. I want to highlight the National Joint Registry (2016) data, which was particularly helpful during the process of defining the patient story. Also the specific images that I used will be cited on the portfolio site (including cc0 works; royalty-free works) as I feel it is always very important to include the provenance of images in any context, but especially when engaging in a thought process based on a fictional patient/nurse interaction.
I added images to support the patient story. These images were sourced from pixabay and one of my all-time faves, Creative Commons search as a means to filter Flickr images by license ( ).
I recreated the images that I found for the patient story as drawings in Adobe Illustrator. I wanted the images in the timeline to be small (100px x 100px); this is a limited amount of ‘bandwidth’ to communicate a visual concept. For this reason I decided to use Adobe Illustrator to trace the images and then re-paint them, so that I could accentuate certain aspects through the use of selective colour. This worked well and I did investigate whether these images could be included as svgs, but the visual information was too complex as they were based on photographic materials. As a result I stuck with .png format as the final output.

] .svg version of a timeline image - quite a bit of artifacting (tech-speak for mess) in the image render and it looks too sketchy

.png version of the same image in Adobe Illustrator - more of the visual information from the original photograph is retained. This version has the right level of abstraction.
All of the images were optimised using . Honestly, I absolutely love this tool and will be using this from now on for all my images. Their algorithm somehow trims off the excess while keeping the core visual information.
Accessibility. I ran an accessibility analysis on the site using the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool ( ). It is pretty good, I still have a few aria, alt and title tags to include here or there but I have made progress in this area.
Infuriating. As someone who uses Reader View (I found out that this is the official name for it) mode in Firefox and the equivalent in Safari, I was very frustrated by the restrictive and arbitrary local style sheet implemented by this mode. I have spent way too much time customising how the site looks in this context, but it really mattered to me as this would really put me off a site. Also, focusing on it has highlighted the importance of the semantic web; the reader mode taps into the and other html5 element definitions. With a bit of hardcore tweaking, I finally have something that I can stand behind. The tweaking is outlined in a development post, however I found out by digging into the reader displays in the respective browser stylesheets that they will ignore certain css classes. Specifically I needed to implement a class called .hidden which is the container for the flickity carousel dots. The ‘dots’ are completely useless in the reader view and just look like an orphaned ordered list. I also instituted a .sr-only class which is applied to loading GIFs and other elements which should not be shown in the reader mode. All of this digging will serve me well for the print stylesheet, no doubt…
I ran the Google mobile accessibility test on the site - It passed! Here is the proof: There is still a lot of content to add, but it is great to know that I am on the right track.

References

BBC (2013, January 16). Going paperless “would save NHS billions.” BBC Health. Retrieved from

BBC (2016, September 7). NHS: Health apps to inform patient records. BBC Health. Retrieved from

Booth, R. (2016, December 13). The doctor on your Xbox? The NHS needs more digital ambition. The Guardian. Retrieved from

BS EN ISO 13485:2016 Medical devices. Quality management systems. Requirements for regulatory purposes. (2016). Retrieved 22 December 2016, from

BS ISO 13606-2:2008 Health informatics. Electronic health record communication. Archetype interchange specification. (2008). Retrieved 22 December 2016, from

Choices, N. (2016, November 1). Health and fitness trackers. Retrieved January 2, 2017, from

Dolatabadi, E., Babak, T., & Alex, M. (2014). Vision-based approach for long-term mobility monitoring: Single case study following total hip replacement. Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 51(7), 1165–76.

Farmer, A. Wearables sector grows as smartwatches increase in popularity. Retrieved January 2, 2017, from

Heartfield, R., Loukas, G., & Gan, D. (2016). You are probably not the weakest link: Towards practical prediction of susceptibility to semantic social engineering attacks. IEEE Access, 4, 6910–6928. doi:10.1109/access.2016.2616285

Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (2014). What can help relieve anxiety before surgery? - PubMed health - national library of medicine - PubMed health. Retrieved from

Johansson Stark, Å., Charalambous, A., Istomina, N., Salanterä, S., Sigurdardottir, A. K., Sourtzi, P., … Bachrach-Lindström, M. (2016). The quality of recovery on discharge from hospital, a comparison between patients undergoing hip and knee replacement - a European study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 25(17-18), 2489–2501. doi:10.1111/jocn.13278

Nasr, N., & Enderby, P. (2014). Redefinition of life experience following total hip replacement: Analysis of narrative as performance. International Journal of Orthopaedic and Trauma Nursing, 18(2), 89–98. doi:10.1016/j.ijotn.2013.07.005

National Information Board. (2015, March 4). National information board’s workstreams. Retrieved January 2, 2017, from

National Joint Registry. (2016). 13th Annual Report 2016 National Joint Registry for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man Surgical data to 31 December 2015. Retrieved from

NHS Choices. (2015, November 3). Health Apps library - NHS choices. Retrieved January 2, 2017, from

Press Association (2016, September 7). NHS to have one website for appointments, prescriptions and advice. The Guardian. Retrieved from

Pulkkinen, M., Junttila, K., & Lindwall, L. (2015). The perioperative dialogue - a model of caring for the patient undergoing a hip or a knee replacement surgery under spinal anaesthesia. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 30(1), 145–153. doi:10.1111/scs.12233

Rudolfsson, G. (2013). Being altered by the unexpected: Understanding the perioperative patient’s experience: A case study. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 20(4), 433–437. doi:10.1111/ijn.12195

Wilson, D. (2016). An overview of the application of Wearable technology to nursing practice. Nursing Forum. doi:10.1111/nuf.12177

Wilson, C. J., Mitchelson, A. J., Tzeng, T. H., El-Othmani, M. M., Saleh, J., Vasdev, S., … Saleh, K. J. (2015). Caring for the surgically anxious patient: A review of the interventions and a guide to optimizing surgical outcomes. The American Journal of Surgery, 212(1), 151–159. doi:10.1016/j.amjsurg.2015.03.023

Image source: “ ” by is licensed under

On the importance of self-discipline

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Update on the previously mentioned to-do list:

Task scenarios to reflect the decision to present all of the content on one long page.
General characteristics for user groups - I went a bit more in-depth and produced a user characteristics list for the primary user group of health professionals
[Tentative plan] create a UML diagram - I am not going to do this, as it is primarily a tool to communicate with developers and as I am UXer and developer here I think that it is more important for me to crack on with the development (although if I had been more self-disciplined and followed a UML I probably could have avoided the feature creep outlined below).
An paper online prototype – in the end this was a prototype version of the actual site. Delivered to Dr. Theo Fotis on the 12th of December.

Adding polling aka feature creep 16/12 - 24/12

In my last post I mentioned that I had decided to add a poll as I felt that some further interaction might be needed. I now realise that really a bit of a superfluous feature and upon reflection I have spent too much time on it.

What I can take from it, is that I learned a lot about JSON and PHP in the process. This activity was really the textbook definition of feature creep or scope creepA handy definition from wikipedia just in case you need it: . Here is a consolidated account of what I did and what I found out in the process. I thought about using the fantastic Google charts tools. I could not, however figure out how to feed data into the chart, based on clicks of the options and then also how to store that information. Here is an image of a mock-up that I made during that particular phase.

Initially, prior to the radio buttons, I was just using buttons to visualise the poll options. It looks nifty, alas it had no functionality whatsoever.

Then I thought about creating a custom Google form skin as the front-end for a Google chart. There was some documentation on this ( ) and I referred to the excellent documentation from Google as well, but it wasn’t the right thing. Then as I use , a web application for polling, in my day-job I thought that using might be a good way to go. Especially as their poll visualisation is very nice. I must highlight at this point that I wanted to avoid using an iFrame and have a solution that was integrated with the site. This is largely due to the fact that the iFrame content would almost certainly be blocked on NHS Trust computers (again this knowledge is based on my professional experience). The PollEverywhere API highlighted the use of JSON (Javascript Object Notation) for the configuration of polls. However, I have to admit that their documentation was a little beyond my own knowledge and I felt unsure of where to start. I asked Marcus for his advice on the 16th of December and I also found a . Normally I’m not a huge fan of the w3schools tutorials, but this seemed like the perfect solution. I was able to build the poll, but the issue with it is that it is that it stored its values in a standard text file and this is a very insecure method. Marcus advised that I look at writing the values to a JSON file via the PHP and then pulling said values through html for the poll visualisation.

So I decided to see if I could adapt the script to read from and write to a JSON file instead. Easier said than done as the syntax from PHP to JSON confused me a bit. Marcus did a bit of troubleshooting on it too and this was very helpful to get on the right track. I finally decided that it was time to join StackOverflow and start asking and answering questions, here is the question that I asked: . The community were great and I got a lot closer to a solution. However, echoing data back via html in the php file proved too tricky and issue to surmount. I could get the one option to display, but I couldn’t pull the previous results to display. This was immensely frustrating, to be so close and yet missing at the final hurdle.

Animated GIF showing the issue where I could only display current data not pull the existing data from the JSON. The values update in the JSON but the html based on echoing the PHP does not.

It was also really hard to debug the issues as a small change could take a few re-runs (despite hard reload and clear-cache reloads) to actually manifest and break it all. Then I stopped and thought, why am I doing this? Sure, it looks pretty and adds an element of interest, but after working on , it hit home that I had been the victim of my own self-inflicted feature creep. The end users have very limited time to look at this site and probably wouldn’t have time to contemplate the poll question. Furthermore, the poll question detracts from the content of the site. Finally it introduces additional security considerations and affects the life-span of the code in the site. So I have decided to archive what I did offline and continue from where I left off on the 16th. You live and you learn. I shall now be focusing on an prioritised to-do list and I will deviate from my Trello board no longer.

Something that I have had on my list for a while was to add a skip to content link for screen readers and keyboard navigation users. I looked at how a few sites did it and settled on advice from the WebAIM site ( ). Although instead of positioning the content off-screen by 1000px I positioned it above with top:-20em. Although the WebAIM site recommends against positioning above due to the fact that this may cause a scroll off-screen, based on testing I have not found this to be the case and as Mozilla use this method (e.g. here: ) and I am trying to convert all my units to dynamic values (ems or percentages) - it seemed like the way to go.

References

Heaversm/google-custom-form. (2016, August 5). Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Macascot. (2016). JSON Newbie - permanently saving values to JSON between browser reloads. stackoverflow. Retrieved 25 December 2016, from

Mozilla Developer Network. (2016a, September 13). Getting started. Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Mozilla Developer Network. (2016b, June 1). HTML forms guide. Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

PHP AJAX poll. Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

PHP Group. (2001). PHP: File_get_contents - manual. Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Poll everywhere. (2016). Retrieved December 27, 2016, from

Populating data using server-side code. (2016, January 28). Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Scope creep (2016). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from

Strawpoll/strawpoll. (2016, June 28). Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Task analysis. (2013, September 6). Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

The poll everywhere API. Retrieved December 24, 2016, from

Cellular concerns

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I have been plugging away at the portfolio site with the primary aim of getting a semi-functional prototype version to Dr. Theo Fotis on Monday 12th of December. There is a still a huge amount of stuff to do, fix-up and streamline I will add these tasks to my Trello board. This journal entry provides a rundown of the decisions that I have this week.

Flickity carousel

I decided to make the carousel-cell 100% width due to the need for a more immersive timeline. What I mean by this is that I felt that the cells were too modular before and the greater width (formerly 66%) makes more sense in terms of showing the long anxiety levels .svg file. I still have lot of work to do in terms of consolidating my JavaScript and CSS files into one of each and then also minimising my JavaScript file. One of the things that Marcus brought to my attention was that my script sources should not be loaded in the header of my index.html and that this was bad practice. They now reside under the footer, but this presented some new challenges. For example the smoothScroll function had issues loading so I added a new main.js file (this is will become the final master js file) and added a window EventListener and then added an init function - to initialise SmoothScroll after the load is completed. The other issue is that Flickity Carousel for the timeline started to flash up momentarily as a column until it found it’s brain (aka the script actually loaded). I actually only discovered this due to using my mobile broadband stick in a cafe and noticed the latency. The Flickity Carousel is currently initialized at the bottom of a unique flickity.js fileI needed to keep the smoothScroll.js and flickity.js separated while I figured out how to get things working harmoniously.. What I needed to do to solve this was to set the carousel opacity as 0 until the window has loaded and as the carousel is not a function in the same way as smoothScroll it was a bit trickier for me; there wasn’t something straightforward for me to work with. What I ended up doing was adding a new variable for carousel immediately after initialising flickity (entails designating the css selector as a flickity carousel) and then applying a style to make the opacity 1I had to consult github for help with this as I was at a loss for a bit: .. This is working nicely, however the delay or a white screen may be improved by a momentary loading GIF in order to explain what is going on for a slower connection - one to add to the to do list! I quite like the Buffer GIF animation and this helpful tutorial explains how to code something like this with an SVG file as opposed to GIF, I’ll give it a go: . Also due to the audience of this site, I think that it is important to include the word “Loading” alongside any GIF or animated SVG. As part of the process above I added the cellSelector option to the carousel in JSON format, as initially I thought that I might want an EventListener. It seems that this might be useful later on, so I have left it in place for now. e.g. data-flickity='{ "cellSelector": ".carousel-cell", "freeScroll": true}' Another issue was with the customised Flickity dots (used for timeline navigation) was that I had set the position of their container to absolute and the overflow to hidden as a solution for smaller screens or browser windows (the dots disappear entirely on a mobile phone sized screen). However, I noticed a sort of ghosting issue as a consequence of the overflow.

[

] It is quite subtle, but can you see those little grey lines between 2 and 3 and also between 3 and 4? There be the ghosties! I fixed this by adding “white-space: nowrap;” to the dots themselves so that the wrapping was disabled. Result!

. Yay, no more ghosties!

Here be the stuff of nightmares…

I have to admit that I spent way too much time on this issue, but it was honestly driving me to distraction. So having fixed my grid so that it was had even widths and looked lovely as I started to use my grids I found that I needed to add unique classes for the blocks that appear in each

of the html file. The grid structure is left in place as a logical point of reference. Then I found that my written content in the grid was overflowing beyond the height of the sections. This was relatively easy to fix by setting the classes for the sections to have relative positions and have overflow set to auto. Phew. However, as I added some placeholder content to my grid blocks I found that the widths were still perfect but the heights of columns were not okay. What I mean by “not okay” is that if a block had more written content then it was longer to contain this content. Therefore blocks positioned adjacent to each other looked askew.

/* tried this and hated it .is-table-row { display: table; } .is-table-row [class*="col-"] { float: none; display: table-cell; vertical-align: top; border: solid 7px #EEEEEE; border-radius: 0; } */

This was strangely very hard to fix. I tried several methods. First I tried fool it into thinking it was a table, but I lost my gutter and I worried about responsive accessibility. I also tried CSS pseudo classes (which I now have a little bit of experience with after customising the dots), but it didn’t provide the desired look either. I also tried adding attributes to the section container and the “One True Layout Method” (Coyier, 2010) where the margin-bottom is set to -99999px and the padding-bottom is set to 99999px and the overflow is hidden. This feels like brushing the problem under the carpet and it looks like it too as it cut off the bottom of my block outline and I like the outline. In the end I used row class for my grid defined to display flex and and then use the flex-wrap wrap setting. Alas, with one fell swoop my dream of full functionality in Internet Explorer is dashed as Flexible Box Layout module is not supported in IE9 at all ( ).

In an earlier journal entry I had cited this fixed navigation example on codepen ( ) as being close to what I would like for the navigation on my site, however I have also been devouring a book on web accessibility, Inclusive Design Patterns Coding Accessibility Into Web Design and anything fixed in the CSS was identified as a no-no in the book (Pickering, 2016). I had also found that the fixed header height meant was causing issues with the distance of the smoothScroll function. I was able to fix this by checking their documentation and adding the labeling the header as data-scroll-header and then specifying this in the initiation script. Previously I had defined a spacer div for this purpose, it didn’t work perfectly for the smoothScroll function, but it ended up being handy for defining white space between the timeline and the about area (in addition to the use of margin settings it was helpful to have something that was independent). In the end I didn’t need most of this work as due to the advice in Pickering’s book, I decided that the navigation header needed to have a relative position instead of being fixed.

Anxiety levels

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I wanted to give the carousel/timeline a long image that continued along the base of cells showing the anxiety levels of the fictional patient during the story (this was shown in ). I started by testing with a .png image and as I anticipated it looked awful but I was most interested in getting the positioning setup correctly. The issue was that the image kept showing up above or in front of the text inside the description div. Also as the window was resized the image floated upward from its initial position. The only way that I could fix this was to use z-index and a fixed position for the image container (I already broke the rules about fixed items - see above) and then added a unique style id called #anxiety to specify how my image was shown in the container (as a background image). Initially I thought that I might need to specify one strip of the image per cell in the Flickity, but they kept overlapping and having layering issues. The logical approach in the end is to have one very long SVG. I need to optimise the SVG prior to the final release of the site, but at the moment I am still adding to it in Adobe Illustrator as I need to finish writing the patient story prior to finalising the graphic. As this graphic only serves an aesthetic purpose I think it is alright that it is both fixed and defined as a background image (and therefore cannot have an alt tag applied for accessibility reasons).

Bios section

I added box-shading to the photos - they needed a little something to differentiate them against the background. Once again this is not supported in IE9 although it is less critical than the flex-box issue outlined above.

Responsive adjustments

I worked on the mobile phone break point for the media queries first. Specifically, @media (max-width: 414px) I based this size on the Google Nexus 6P and the Apple iPhone 6 plus as although these are both phablet sized I certainly need the grid blocks to be shown in a single column at this size not in rows. In general I would like to steer clear of too many device specific breakpoints as it is better to think about the legibility of the design rather than get too obsessed this (an article by Justin Avery (2013) supports this view: - not everyone agrees on this). Also, I realise that I need to go through the code and consolidate my classes and ensure that my units are standardised as % and em prior to doing too much work on this. So the rest of the styling and layout needs to be completed first, based on a desktop first mentality.

Thinking about the patient

I found myself rethinking the fictional patient’s name, based on the ever helpful Wolfram Alpha. It seems that women named Ruth are demographically older than the fictional patient should be (roughly 55-65yrs although I need more data on this - more on this in my next post). Although Wolfram Alpha is based on demographic information from the United States it is a good basic litmus test for this. Here is my comparison, Carol may be a better name:

References

Avery, J. (2014, October 28). Why you don’t need device specific breakpoints. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Background-repeat. (2016, December 3). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Background-size. (2016, December 3). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Blender. (2016). Force a div to contain floated child divs. Retrieved 11 December 2016, from Bos, B., Etemad, E. J., & Kemper, B. (2014, September 9). CSS backgrounds and borders module level 3. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Box-shadow. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Can I use… Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc. (2016, October 23). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from cferdinandi. (2016, December 11). Cferdinandi/smooth-scroll. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Cope, S. (2011a, September 6). Z-index. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Cope, S. (2011b, September 6). White-space. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Coyier, C. (2010, October 8). Media queries for standard devices. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Danilo, A. Splash vector graphics on your responsive site. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from Kraken.io image Optimizer. (2013). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from LePage, P. (2016, December 16). Responsive web design patterns. Retrieved December 16, 2016, from Lumsden, A. (2012, June 27). Getting started with Scalable vector graphics (SVG). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from metafizzy. (2016). Callback when Flickity is initialized? · issue #269 · metafizzy/flickity. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from metafizzy. Options. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from

Pickering, H. (2016). Inclusive design patterns (Kindle ed.). Freiburg, Germany: Smashing Magazine GmbH.

Quick and simple image placeholders. Retrieved December 11, 2016 (UPDATED: May 5, 2019), from Salloum, N. (2014, April 4). CSS equal height columns, Three different ways. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from van Gemert, V. (2013, March 1). Logical Breakpoints for your responsive design – smashing magazine. Retrieved December 12, 2016, from Design,

Progress on the grid and layout

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This week I completed some major fix-up on my grid. Remember when I thought that it was almost fixed? Well I was wrong. In fact I ended up recalculating the whole thing and basing it on a single column being 65px or 6.5% in width. Happily it is now working exactly as I need it to (Mozilla Developer Network saved the day again - I am going to up my donation this year).

I am feeling griddy

Now that my grid is in situ, I am able to base layout elements on it. I do think that in most cases I will need to make unique versions of the columns and tweak the row layout, but keeping the grid architecture in place and temporarily adding the rows/columns to the html has been really helpful for planning out the sections (as shown in the screenshot below). I used my grid to start planning the layout of the content on the Flickity carousel cells - as it turns out this took quite a bit of work (more on that in my next post). I also had my first go at creating an SVG, albeit a very simple one as a placeholder for the first cell in the carousel. The SVG shows the outline of a head and I made it in Adobe Illustrator, this will need to be replaced by more of a photographic image for needs of the project.

about-About

Adding in an About section as the timeline really jumps right into talking about the fictional Patient. I will need to update the to reflect this, but it remains within the bounds of the tasks as task scenario 1 included, “Read introductory information”, this needs to become task scenario 2 and the others need to be bumped up. I also need to revise things where they are areas as opposed to pages, it is bit too specific at the moment.

Testing in Internet Explorer 9

I was astounded to find that pretty much everything on the site is working as one would expect in Internet Explorer 9. This is fantastic and vindicates some of the script selections that I have made in terms of browser support. I was very concerned that the z-index settings would not be respected, but thus far it is looking good. Safari is still a problem though…

Screenshot of the site on 9/12 shown side-by-side in IE9 and Chrome. I am now kicking my myself for not recording the exact browser version numbers on the PC I was using at the time! The majority of my day-to-day testing takes place on a variety of Mac, so I have to check on Windows whenever the opportunity presents.

Toying with the notion of animation

One of the sites that I have mentioned before, has some pretty gorgeous and playful animations on it. I took a look through the code and the javascript attributes and most of it is managed via CSS. This is good, although I would am concerned about browser support and also performance rendering. As a consequence I probably won’t add these features. As a pre-check I used the Chrome timeline tool to record the processes on an older computer that I have at home and I felt that the impact on performance would be a problem the new features operate at the limits of what I want, timing-wise so I will need to see if I can optimise them further. I have already removed aspects of the code that is not used..

References

Basques, K. (2016, December 8). How to use the Timeline tool. Retrieved December 8, 2016, from Common CSS questions. (2015, October 26). Retrieved December 8, 2016, from daneden. (2016, September 27). Daneden/animate.Css. Retrieved December 8, 2016, from Grids. (2016, October 7). Retrieved December 8, 2016, from Lewis, P. (2016, December 8). Rendering performance. Retrieved December 8, 2016, from SVG and CSS. (2016, January 2). Retrieved December 8, 2016, from Z-index. (2016, December 2). Retrieved December 8, 2016, from

Timeline tool identified

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After a lot of consideration, struggle and annoyance I finally gave in and decided to use a pre-existing tool for the timeline section of my front page. I looked a few different contenders in this final pass. Essentially, I came to the realisation that I would not be able to learn the requisite Javascript in order to build something sophisticated enough from scratch. I did a bit of trying out in this jsFiddle project, but kept running into deadends (this project is in a partially built state - so please do not judge me - the javascript is largely erased by this point): Initially I found only jQuery examples - but as I have previously stated, I really wanted to work with Vanilla Javascript, due to load times, future proofing the code content. I also feel that it will be more beneficial to my learning to stick to learning Vanilla Javascript (or rather Ecmascript 6) so that I truly get the language prior to becoming too invested in specific frameworks. Also having looked at these two resources: and then the From - vanilla makes much more sense to me.

jQuery example 1: horizontal timeline ( | )
jQuery example 2: vertical timeline ( | )

After looking at these and searching quite a bit, I came across a tool called lory ( ). It is essentially a code package or widget for creating interactive slideshows or gallery. I thought that there might be some milleage in creating a slideshow or gallery and somehow customising it as a timeline. After testing I found that lory also was overly complex for my needs. Then I came across a really helpful article about a widget tool called on css-tricks.com ( ). It was love at first sight! Here is an example on codepen showing how the Flickity slideshow originally looked: - Flickity is both responsive and touch optimised and had a vanilla option in addition to jQuery. It seemed like a good solution. Before my modifications:

After my modifications:

Main modifications were: - the timeline-line- size of slides - outlines for references - big dots on the timeline (need to figure out how to label these) - overflow to ensure that the content doesn’t wrap strangely on a mobile device. There is still a lot to do and I need to fix an issue when the keyboard keys, when used for navigation make the web page scroll-right in a strange way. I also need to unite this with the other parts of the page that I have started to build. Finally, Flickity is a paid solution unless it is used under a . I am passionate about open source and was already licensing my work under an so I have decided to set the rest of my project to . This means that the license information needs to be included in the header of each source file. As the portfolio site will not contain any original research and will only provide an overview of the project this will also comply with the University’s Intellectual Property rulesAs a student and employee I need to be aware of the university’s Intellectual Property rules, which are available here: . However as portfolio site will not provide software with potential for commercial value and the project information itself is in the early stages it complies with the rules.. Also in the markup of the html, CSS and Javascript I have indicated where pieces of code have come from and if/when licenses apply. Update: Shortly after writing this post I solved the issues outlined above (see: “There is still a lot to do…”) and these discoveries are outlined in the next couple of posts. I realise that I forgot to mention how I solved the issue of the number labels on the dots below the Flickity carousel. This problem turned out to offer me a very valuable lesson in the . I have used the former, “before::” as this was introduced in CSS3 and is compatible with IE9 based on my testing. I figured out that the dots themselves could be used as a counter-increment for the addition of the number labels. .dot { position: relative; overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; width: 40px; height: 40px; margin: 0 20px; background: #a9a9a9; border-radius: 50%; cursor: pointer; counter-increment: flickity-page-dots; } .dot::before { display: block; text-align: center; content: counter(flickity-page-dots); padding-top: 11px; font-size: 20px; color: #FFF; } As the dots themselves are automatically produced by the Flickity Javascript, this meant that my number labels were now produced too. A nice solution.

References

Coyier, C. (2015, March 5). Creating responsive, touch-friendly carousels with Flickity

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from Flickity - freeScroll. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Flickity License. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Flickity. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Free Software Foundation. (2007). GNU General Public License. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Heinz, M. (2015). Lory minimalistic slider. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Horizontal Timeline in CSS and jQuery. (2014, February 28). Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Mozilla Developer Network. (2016, July 24). :Before (:Before). Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Open Source Initiative. The MIT license. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from Saunders, S. Intellectual property (IP). Retrieved January 4, 2017, from Vanilla JS vs jQuery. (2017). Gist. Retrieved 26 November 2016, from Vertical Timeline. (2014, June 12). Retrieved November 16, 2016, from Way, J. (2012, January 19). From jQuery to JavaScript: A reference. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from

Building the grid

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

After starting my initial experiments/prototypes for the portfolio project from a boilerplate I decided that I wanted to build my own responsive CSS grid from scratch. The grid turned out fairly well although there are some very slight issues with the column alignment which I need to sort out. I also still need to add the mobile device break points. I did find it very helpful to make use of the CSS calc() function to actively resize widths in percentages based on window size (calc()., 2016). This is a fantastic function although the support for it isn’t universal yet (82.73 according to caniuse.com). Having said that I did try my grid in Safari to see how it behaved in an unsupported browser and I was pleased with how well it resized.

The coloured overlay is included to highlight the issue with the column alignment.

I will attempt to use the power of Photoshop to fix my mathematics - here is a newly sized grid overlay using Photoshop guides to figure out the correct calculations. Just putting these calculations here for future reference. Columns: Columns = 12 Gutter = 15px Rows: Rows = 12 Gutter = 15px Margins: Top = 10px Left = 20px Bottom = 10px Right = 20px

References

Calc(). (2016, May 17). Retrieved November 22, 2016, from

Can I use… Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc. (2016, October 23). Retrieved November 27, 2016, from

Drewniak, J. (2014, November 6). Creating your own CSS grid system. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Gamache, D. (2016) A dead simple, responsive boilerplate. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Imling, M. (2016). One% CSS Grid. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Rand-Hendriksen, M. (2015, July 16). Making sense of the CSS box model. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

H5bp/html5-boilerplate. (2016, November 17). Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Wireframes 2+

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post displays iterations of wireframe 2. In this wireframe, I took ideas from wireframes 0 and 1, but removed the next buttons in favour of a timeline at the top of the page. The top section of the page, containing the timeline, is shown as overflow (beyond the width) of the page to indicate the dynamic content. Clicking on the years, and circles on the timeline is intended to swap out the slide content and information in the centre of the timeline section. The arrow buttons on the left and right were also intended to switch between the content slides. These buttons ideally would also be operable via arrow keys on the keyboard.

Version 1 - the top timeline is shown double-width in order to indicate the movement of the information.

Version 2: this version of the felt too blue - although I did like the way that the anxiety levels traversed the sections linking them together.

Version 3: similar idea except this wireframe includes the colourful anxiety levels visualisation under the timeline. This works better as the anxiety levels directly relate the the narrative. If the anxiety levels under the timeline could be animated to appear as the timeline is navigated that would look great. I’ll have to think about how best to do that (CSS3 I think).

Version 4 - this wireframe shows both versions of Anxiety levels (they look more like waves!) overlaid. It is a bit busy.

The new iteration of the design seemed cleaner and more focused in the sense that any page visitor would be immediately be shown the patient’s story as an interactive narrative. However, this also meant that all my prior work on the smooth scrolling was for naught. I did try to see if I could tweak it to go from left-to-right or rather back and forth, but that was a futile effort. A related attempt at this was to look at transition whether I could build the timeline itself in CSS by creating a

for the line itself and a

for the timeline circles but adding them as squares and then using the border-radius at 100% made them into circle. As you can see from the video below, this is ended in a vomit-inducing interface.

Don’t get me started on how dreadful this looked when I looked at it on my phone.

Mobile responsive fail

Further to this as I was influenced by the DuckDuck About page’s interactive timeline (Titlow, 2014) I recreated it locally on mydevelopment computer. I then added it to my web space using the source files - stripping all that I could until it was only the timeline. However, I discovered that the coding and structure was not idea for this project. The code (CSS and Javascript particularly) had a lot of vague naming making it hard to follow and there was a LOT to strip out. So, the search for a solution continues, I think that I need to take a different approach to this problem…

Considering colour

Upon looking at a number of medical websites for journals, professional bodies and organisations including:

(blue/orange/green)
(dark blue, aquamarine, pink and lavender purple)
(dark blue, two hues of light blue, white, purple and grey)
(dark blue, aquamarine and white)
(scrubs green, two hues of dark blue, grey and orange for callouts)
(purple, blue, green - a lot of white space)
(red and blackAn outlier with the red and black theme, however this would underline the critical nature of the work they do providing aid in emergency situations.)
(blue and white, orange callouts)

The colour schemes contain a lot of blue and this influenced me to look at some different colour combinations. I used the palletton colour selector web application ( ) to try a few bold colour combinations. I also tried it with some vision simulations (available on the bottom right) to see how the contrast behaved for different types of colour blindness. The swatches below show one of the better combinations I came up with, although it still needs work.

Paletton colour scheme 1

The challenge with this medical site is that I feel I need to avoid a number of colours that may evoke negative associations. For example, hues of red might suggest blood and certain hues of yellow should be avoided due to the hospital-yellow association. The blues above seemed a bit dark, so I tried some lighter hues for Wireframe 2, paying attention to the contrast between the text colour and the background colour.

References

These are resources that I referred to beyond what I have linked to in the content above.

Border-radius. (2016, November 13). Retrieved November 27, 2016, from

Crockford, D. (2008). Functions. In JavaScript: The good parts: Working with the shallow grain of JavaScript(pp. 26–45). United States: O’Reilly Media, Inc, USA.

Titlow, J. P. (2014, February 20). About DuckDuckGo. Retrieved November 19, 2016, from

Wireframe 0

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post shows the initial low fidelity wireframe that I created after meeting with Dr. Theo Fotis on 16/11/16. I decided on a 12 column layout due to the need to have different formats in each section. It seemed to offer a high degree of flexibility.

The first wireframe showing the 12 column layout.

References

Drewniak, J. (2014, November 6). Creating your own CSS grid system. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Gamache, D. A dead simple, responsive boilerplate. Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

H5bp/html5-boilerplate. (2016, November 17). Retrieved November 25, 2016, from

Wireframe 1

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post shows the second iteration of the initial wireframe. This version is slightly higher fidelity and is still based on the idea that users would make use of the smooth scroll “next” buttons to transition from section to section. Navigating the information in chronological order.

A higher fidelity version of wireframe 1 - also featuring the anxiety levels visualisation, which is both decorative and function.

Screenshot showing wireframe 1 with 12 column grid overlay

References

Schoeffel, S. (2011, November 9). Establishing your grid in Photoshop – smashing magazine. Retrieved November 27, 2016, from Graphics,

Wireframing sketches

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Initial wireframe sketch. Click on “Continue Reading” to see a larger version of this image.

This image shows a piece of acetate as an overlay for the floating navigation buttons that were demonstrated in Prototype 2.

Business Model Canvas and more tweaks

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A shorter journal entry for today. I am going to provide a brief outline of what I have been working on, as I need to crack on with planning materials and more development work this week.

I have completed an initial version of the Lean Business Model Canvas, as mentioned referencing UX documentation and design artefacts. I obtained the template recommendation in Cao & Bank’s (n.d.) book on UX documentation.
I have asked my friend Jason to take a look at my code for the arrow button navigation, so I will work on some more tweaks to that tomorrow.
Due to extremely limited time this week as a result of some unanticipated work commitments, I haven’t got as much development work in as I would like. So I have focused on a few fixes on this site as they were smaller thinks that I could achieve in the time that I had.
- I removed a superfluous hyperlink in the footer.php - it was a copy and paste mistake.
- I decided not to “provide a choice of fonts” as it felt like it might offer too many options.
- I decided to install the - I have worked with it before and found it to be one of the best plugins in this area. It offers user-facing tools and some javascript additions to fix common issues in WordPress. Even though I have an accessibility tagged theme, there are additional tweaks that can be completed such as removing title attributes in areas where they aren’t needed and enforcing alt tags. It also allows you to add an active link highlight, which I am initially trying out with a contrast tested purple colour (essentially it puts a box around any active element).
- I worked on a few customisations of the plugin:
  - I added it to a sidebar widget instead of the toolbar that is typically used with the plugin. This is mainly due to some issue with the display of the toolbar and also it made sense to present the accessibility options above the background colour options.
  - I customised the font-family and font-size of the text in the accessibility widget.
  - I enabled the high-contrast and font-size (large text) options as part of the WP Accessibility Plugin.
  - I customised aspects of the large text display so that it worked better with the theme, initially some text was too and some was too small. For example, H2 was a too small in comparison to the paragraph text and stylistically and readability-wise it wasn’t great.
I also changed the text-transform settings on the widgets header text as I noticed that these were all uppercase. This is not the best for Dyslexic readers according to Gov.uk’s recent accessibility posters ( ). I find this series of posters to be very helpful cheat-sheets for accessible design.
- Related findings:
  - Gov.uk Accessible Blog:
  - Gov.uk Government Digital Service:
  - Gov.uk Advisory:
Also in my travels I found the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) - this was recommended both by the WP Accessibility Plugin authors in the documentation and on the Gov.uk page above on the “making your service accessible” page.
The report (although it will change as the site is being updated) WAVE highlighted some more bits that I need to work on and I do still need to look at the contrast of the text in comparison to the background in the different colour schemes. The “making your service accessible” page states that automatic tools like WAVE can only detect a proportion of issues (around 20%-30%: ). So I need to ensure that I don’t regard these tests as exhaustive moving forward.

I feel that I have learned quite a bit about accessibility through my work on this journal site, as well as honing my existing skills. So I will take these ideas and techniques forward with me as I continue to work on my portfolio project.

More to come on the to-do list:

concept document
Task scenarios
Business Model Canvas
General characteristics for user groups
\[Tentative plan\] create a UML2 diagram
A paper prototype – the prototype may actually need to be made in a prototyping tool so that Theo and I can discuss it via email. So probably a change of plan on this one.

References

Cao, J. & Bank, C. (n.d.). The guide to UX design & documentation process. Retrieved from

Portfolio site concept and other news

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past three weeks since the start of the module, I have been working away on the development of my portfolio site concept and gaining domain knowledge to support the development process. I have found myself in a situation where I have been torn between completing the UX procedures and design artefacts that I learned about and implemented during previous modules and starting to code. It is like standing at the edge of an exciting, and slightly daunting, precipice wondering whether to make the leap. The good news is, I am close. I must also at this point, state that I aim to make a real and useful website. It will be short and sweet but it will, hypothetically at least, fulfill a real-world purpose. I also hope that it will be possible to use the site to support future research work that I plan to undertake.

Process: A minimalist approach influenced by LEAN UX

I have found that I cannot bypass the UX design artefacts and documentation entirely as they have become part of the fundamental fabric of my thought processes! So I have decided to complete a very stripped down version, to ensure that I have a solid architectural foundation for what I am about to build. This approach will be composed of the following elements.

A concept document in a bare bones form aka this journal entry!
Task scenarios - is the first version.
Business Model Canvas¹ - an artefact template that I found via Cao & Bank’s, The Guide to UX Design Process & Documentation (n.d.). This will be in a forthcoming journal entry.
General characteristics for user groups - this will also be in a forthcoming journal entry. Due to time contraints and available information, it is not possible to build thorough characteristics lists for all potential users. I am however, fortunate to have a real stakeholder who can provide feedback on my work and it’s hypothetical usefulness. (more on this later on in this entry).
\[Tentative plan\] create a UML² diagram to ensure that each page and section of the site includes the correct information and functions. I personally find UML diagrams to be very helpful for archictectural planning. It can be a fairly basic model for this project, but I do find that the process of making the models uncovers things that you haven’t thought about! I may find that this isn’t needed, but I won’t know until I start making it.
A paper prototype - as I am working with a real stakeholder, I want to show him something quick and easy so that he can visualise the concept and ensure that my representation and approach to the domain is accurate. I think that a paper prototype is the best way to do that, in order to move to the coding phase as quickly as possible.

Concept

The wait is over! Here is the concept. The project’s working title is patient pre-op anxiety infographic. It is a website structured around a central page, which leads the viewer through a fictional narrative of a patient’s experience of anxiety while awaiting a medical operation or procedure. In the narrative the patient will be using an electronic wearable device to track their own vital signs and also for logging their anxiety levels - the influence of this countermeasure will be explored. The narrative is represented through a navigable timeline enriched with the use of graphical, written and statistical information. The underlying project, to use wearable devices to measure patient pre-operative anxiety is attributed to and courtesy of Dr. Theofanis Fotis (School of Health Sciences, University of Brighton), whom I am collaborating with at this time.

Scope

The patient pre-op anxiety infographic will:

deliver an approachable overview of aresearch project - the proposed research project is to design a user interface for a medical wearable device to measure anxiety;
explain the issues that can result from pre-operative stress in patients;
provide a point of entry for those with little or no knowledge of the subject as well as explain the potential benefits of the project to experienced medical professionals.

The patient pre-op anxiety infographic will not:

provide indepth medical information;
provide any fully formed solutions or recommendations for implementation of wearable devices in a medical setting;
provide advice or suggestions for the production of patient care plans. As a narrative scenario it is exploring a hypothetical scenario in which a wearable device is used.

Benefits

The patient pre-op anxiety infographic will provide the following benefits:

it will provide a valuable resource for explaining the research project to potential funders and future stakeholders;
it will help to raise awareness of the potential issues related to patient pre-operative anxiety;
it will highlight potential ways that increased knowledge of a patient’s vital signs and self-reported anxiety could improve patient care;
it will provide an accompanying contextual information for the proposed future interface design project;
it will be a publicity tool, that can be used to explain the project within the academic and medical online communities.

Goals

The following goals are related to the successful creation of the patient pre-op anxiety infographic:

provide a valuable portfolio piece, not only in terms of web development, but also as a tool for the research team and collaborators;
contribute to the approval and ethics approval of this as a concept for F.MacNeill’s final graduating project;
stimulate dialogue around the issues and ideas raised by the patient pre-op anxiety infographic;
encourage potential funders and stakeholders to invest in the project.

Objectives

Create an accurate portrayal of a possible patient care scenario.
Provide information highlighting the benefits of the proposed project.
Pose the project concept as an open question in order to gauge feedback and interest from the medical community and potential funders and/or stakeholders.
The user audiences for this are diverse but have one thing in common, they have very limited time to engage with a website of this kind. This website should take no longer than 10-15mins to navigate, the equivalent of a typical coffee/tea break.
To be shared via social media between interested parties.
To be adaptive and easily viewed and navigated on mobile devices.
To be accessible to those on older web browsers (as far as possible).
To be accessible to users with disabilities, allowing for personal customisation (as far as possible).

The Research Team

Right now this is just me, however Dr. Fotis has agreed to review the materials and my hope is that if the site meets his approval then we will be able to use it to promote the real project. In the first instance it is a hypothetical project site, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot aim high as I have outlined in the objectives above.

Audience

More detail on this in a future entry. The user groups are: funding review panel members, academic staff at multiple Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), medical professionals.

Stakeholders

Intially Dr. Fotis is the main stakeholder, however I would take this site forward as evidence to support my final project proposal. In that sense academic staff in the School of Computing are also future stakeholders.

Research of the domain and existing websites

I have been using my as a place to collect links and resources. On the one hand I have been looking at the specs for potential wearable devices, it is out of scope to suggest an actual solution but I would like to supply some possibilities in terms of device form so that the project is tangible. I have also been reviewing materials that Dr. Fotis provided to help gain domain knowledge of a patient’s pre-operative experience. I have listed these sources in my reference list below.

Sketch of patient journey ideas.

Existing websites

As a general observation medical websites tend to be firmly on the utilitarian end of the scale. This is understandable as information is usually important and needs to be delivered quickly. So it will be important to strike a balance between something eye-catching, which is also substantive. Here is are few examples that I came across and wrote notes about (transferred from my trello board).

Notes/Observations

This . Some of the examples are a bit old and don’t work as well in contemporary browsers. This is something to consider. Most of these sites are in a long-form vertical format. This is great and modern, but considering the audio for this site, this obscures some key aspects of the journey. Viewers will be time-pressured and need to see the journey/timeline elements as succinctly as possible. The following sites are closest to what I want to design:

. This example is not very responsive, so that would be something to consider.
. This blog is quite nice but the scrolling right function would need to be made much more obvious.

Vertical timeline examples:

I like the intro page segment on . It isn’t keyboard navigable though which is not great in terms of my accessibility goals.
and it aesthetically simple and user-friendly.
I quite like , it is text heavy, but it gets the message across quickly.
I like the use of months on the timeline on , although accessibility and control might be an issue here.

Many of these are quite old or have changed format since the post was written. I found myself considering a horizontal layout due to the need to display data and the need for it to be readable, however horizontal layouts pose some real accessibility and navigation issues.

. An oldie, but a goodie …and some justification for my concept!

This site uses the , which I have used many times, mostly in WordPress sites. This is , but I want something a bit more contemporary.

This site has the kind of section feel that I am looking for, although I still wonder how I can visualise anxiety in a vertical layout versus horizontal. [This site](( ) has nice comment mark-up and makes clear use of the
element.

Journal development

A quick run down of learning journal development activities. A full rundown can be found on my github development page, I have added a handy link to to this in the “social menu” on the right-hand footer of this journal site (circular icon with octo-cat logo).

Created an iframe embed in a widget for my trello board so that I can display it in the sidebar. In order to create this I referred to this example on and . Tomorrow I am attending a in Brighton and as part of the event they will offer user testing. I thought why not add some functionality that I have always wanted to include AND get some tips.

I have added the option for visitors to this site to change the colour of the background (behind the text) for accessibility reasons. I did this as by creating alternate child-theme style sheet and by installing the . This idea is inspired by software like of Adobe Acrobat Pro and GoodReader App (for iPad) which allow you to customise background colours. I referenced for colour-palette inspiration. Visual stress when reading and/or perception of colour contrast are reasons why a user might wish to alter background colours.

hexidecimal colours used for initial function:
- blue 1: #dfeced
- blue 2: #9ab8fc
- green 1: #a6f8e3
- green 2: #aaf2a0
- yellow 1: #ffff8f
- yellow 2: #ffde75
- purple: #bf95df

I’ll write about any resulting feedback and actions on this site later. I added Google Analytics code to my version of the header.php file, this was not added to GitHub as it is specific to my version of the child theme. I decided against a plugin as I looked at a couple of options, but I didn’t feel that having access to a Google Analytics data on the dashboard of WordPress was that important as compared to the account authorisation that plugins require to run (e.g. that I looked at). I like to keep an eye on web traffic for security and publicity reasons.

Coding practice

I have a Lynda.com course to wrap-up and I will post the details here when I finish. In the meantime, collectively I have now completed 200 exercises in Code Academy! I didn’t do them all since the start of this module, but here is a screenshot of my badge

Just putting this here for later reference - found on my travels

10 Commandments of User Interface Design

]( ) Courtesy of:

References

Cao, J. & Bank, C. (n.d.). The guide to UX design & documentation process. Retrieved from

Gothelf, J. (2013). Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience (1st ed.). United States: O’Reilly Media, Inc, USA.

Prichard, M. J. (2009). Identifying and assessing anxiety in pre-operative patients. _Nursing Standard 23(_51), 25-40. Retrieved from

What can help relieve anxiety before surgery? (2014, May 21). In PubMed Health. Retrieved October 15, 2016, from

Business Model Canvas ( ), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses ( ). ↩︎
Unified Modeling Language - more information at wikipedia: . ↩︎

Theme testing

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This journal entry continues on from my first post. In that section I outlined plans to test a number of WordPress themes that had been tagged with accessibility. This led me down a fascinating path of learning with one wrong turn along the way.

The testing process

In my last post I outlined a number of themes that looked like possible candidates, including the following:

(WordPress core theme)
(WordPress core theme)

As part of the testing plan I used a several tools, listed at the bottom of this post, to analyse the best themes. Please note, that some themes did not reach the full testing phase due to issues that I would term as deal breakers; the issues identified were troublesome enough where it was not worth continuing with those themes. I also entered into this testing process with an intention to attain a WCAG 2.0 Level AA (W3C, 2016a) accessibility rating for my journal site. This is largely because accessibility is a budding specialism of mine and I wanted an excuse to delve around in the innards of the newest WordPress themes!

Testing results and observations

I decided not to install this theme. Although ‘afterlight’ had the accessibility tag, I found on inspection of its specifications that it is based on having a background image throughout each area of its architecture (landing page, pages, posts - all had to have a single background image). Upon previewing this with my content, using the WordPress theme preview tool, I found that this negatively impacted readability. As the purpose of this blog is to engage in reflection, it seems important not to distract from that at the design level.
This theme has (or rather had) a lot of potential and is coded according to best practice (e.g. accessibility tagging) outlined in the WordPress Accessibility Handbook (WordPress.org, 2014).

I realised later on looking at in-code documentation that this theme is based on a starter theme, Underscores (or “_s”). A bare bones CSS starter theme (Underscores, 2016).

Unfortunately after venturing as far as creating a child theme, I found issues in the some of the front-page template functionality. I also discovered that the links through to the theme documentation were broken and as a result I decided cease using the theme.
I do like the clean lines and simplicity of enigma, even in light of the negative points outlined in the slideshow below, it is certainly a worthy candidate. However, the dependence on the burger-style menu (the three lines) although often essential on mobile versions of a site, is less effective when viewed in a conventional web browser. I decided to seek out a theme that offered more versatility for delivery of the navigation menu/s.
Initially I really liked the simplicity of this theme design and it is very responsive, however in terms of accessibility it has some problems. Namely, it does not support reader view in Firefox 49 or Safari 10 and also was not good in terms of respecting the heading levels for the screen reader. I did not complete the other tests as these two issues were deal breakers.
The ultimate in clean and simple. Although as a seasoned WordPress user the annual core template always looks like the annual core template, even with customisation. Twentyfifteen is quite book-like in its bi-fold layout and this doesn’t strike the desired tone. As I tend to be quite verbose in my writing, I think that a theme with better except support is better. Having said that, the core templates can provide excellent bases for creation of child themes.
A fresh approach to a traditional blog layout with some very nice built-in features. Highlights include the support of the read more tag for determining the length of post/entry excerpts shown on the front page. I also like the presentation of the author avatar, together with post tags on the left-hand side of each post. This theme has good customisation options and good widget support (the tools that you can place in the aside-style columns in the layout). A solid theme, not the most riveting to look at, but it ticks all of my accessibility boxes!

The final two contenders

I ran an IDI web accessibility check and used Firefox accessibility checker plugin to enable keyboard control on the two top candidates: twentysixteen and chuchadon. Twentysixteen had two flagged elements when I looked at the posts page specifically - one was that h1 header element was nested, so the order of headers was not ideal. Also there was a missing label element in the search field. These would both be very easy fixes.

Chuchadon had the same flag on the header nesting for a posts page, so it is likely that this is an issue that would be picked up for a number of WordPress based blog template. To test this theory I tested my own blog, which is based on the Edublogs implementation of WordPress. Interestingly this was not an issue on my blog (e.g. post: ) or another Edublog that I tried. I took a look at the .entry-title tag in the edublog and it was at h2 level rather than h1. This struck me as an issue with both these themes. So I created a child theme of Chuchadon to try out a tweak on line 353 of the CSS stylesheet. The tweak worked perfectly, but alas this was also when I realised that there were some other things that didn’t work for me in chuchadon (front-page configuration and the documentation links).

The final verdict

I have selected twentysixteen as my theme and have created a child theme to allow more space for customisation.

Image source: WordPress.org,
(Worpress.org, 2016b)

Just to clarify… You may be asking, what is all this talk of child themes. Well in essence a child theme is augmented version of it’s original parent. Essentially a child theme allows you to commit edits to the visual presentation as well as the functions of a WordPress site without editing the original theme’s code. This is a smart tactic for customising a theme, particularly the core annual themes, as because WordPress as a CMS has frequent updates, any accompanying parent theme updates can be safely run without affecting the code in the child theme too much. The use of a child theme will also allow me to replace the parts of the CSS and theme functions that were identified in the IDI accessibility report.

Techie stuff

The server was down this weekend so I used this as an excuse to implement some technical tools which will help further down the line. First of all as I mentioned in my last entry I installed MAMP on my development computer. MAMP, stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP (“MAMP”, 2016) and allows to setup a local copy of WordPress on your computer. I find having access to a local installation to be helpful for two reasons:

I can work on my child theme tweaks without having access to the server and test them out in a controlled environment.
I can test out themes and plugins without muddying my installation. Sometimes everything about a plugin can look good and then you install it and there are things are about it that don’t work or the coding isn’t up to scratch. So again it is good to have a test environment for that.

I also setup a github repository for version control; to track my changes to the theme files. This is the first time that I have setup my own repository, so it was definitely a learning curve for me. However, I think that knowing how to do this will be essential for my forthcoming work on my web portfolio project.

Thinking long and hard about plugin installation is a good idea… I was right to spend time deliberating about the types of plugin to install. The problem with plugins is that you often have to spend time tweaking them for every update and every theme. My carefully considered decision to install the footnotes plugin has already had to result in CSS tweaksWhy not use a footnote to explain what I did! I changed .footnote\_plugin\_text to change the width of the area where the footnotes are shown and the font size. I also had to make the table border elements transparent in the .footnote\_plugin\_link, .footnote\_plugin\_index. Finally I needed to manually change the position of the superscript figures as I wasn’t happy with the distance of the figure numbers from the text characters, for this I changed the .footnote\_plugin\_tooltip\_text class due to how the footnotes were shown in the twentysixteen theme.

Analysis tools used:

IDI Web Accessibility checker (AChecker, 2011).
Snook colour contrast checker (Snook, 2015).
Sim Daltonism colour blindness simulator (Wickline, 2000).
Accessibility evaluation toolbar by John Gunderson (Gunderson, 2011).
Apple and Firefox text-to-speech tools.
Keyboard-only navigation of site.

Guidelines used and referred to:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (W3C, 2016a).
Techniques for WCAG 2.0 (W3C, 2016b).
BBC Future Media Standards and Guidelines (BBC, 2008).
Mozilla Developer Network documentation (Mozilla, 2016).
WordPress Accessibility Handbook (WordPress.org, 2014):
- Specifically I found this page very helpful - Questions to ask - The ‘questions’ are derived from the four principles of WCAG and they are immensely helpful.

Software and developer tools used:

MAMP (appsolute GmbH, 2016).
Github - version control and code repository (GitHub, 2016).
WebStorm - editor: (JetBrains, 2016).
Textwrangler (Bare Bones Software, 2016).
Chrome developer tools (Google, 2016).

References

AChecker. (2011). IDI web accessibility checker: Web accessibility checker. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from AChecker website,

appsolute GmbH. (2016). MAMP & MAMP PRO. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from MAMP website,

Automattic. (2015, October 7). Afterlight. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from Wordpress.org website,

Bare Bones Software. (2016). Bare bones software. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

BBC. (2008, June 24). Future media standards & guidelines - accessibility guidelines v2.0. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from BBC website,

GitHub. (2016). Build software better, together. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

Google. (2016). Chrome DevTools overview - Google chrome. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

Gunderson, J. (2011, August 19). Accessibility evaluation Toolbar. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

Herbert, C. (2016, October 8). Where does “hello world” come from? [Online forum comment]. Retrieved from StackOverflow website:

JetBrains. (2016). WebStorm: The smartest JavaScript IDE. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

Keijonen, S. (2016a, September 16). Chuchadon. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from WordPress.org website,

Keijonen, S. (2016b, December 29). Kuorinka. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from WordPress.org website,

Lüken, A. (2015, October 31). E.Nigma 2015. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from WordPress.org website,

MacNeill, F. (2016, June 14). [Talk] factors of trust in IoT App interfaces Redux [Blog post].

Mozilla. (2016). Mozilla developer network. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

MAMP. (2016, September 29). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 16, 2016 from

Rietveld, R. (2016, March 21). WordPress goes WCAG [Blog post]. Retrieved from

Snook. (2015, January 11). Snook colour contrast checker. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from Snook.ca website,

Underscores. (2016). Retrieved October 7, 2016, from Underscores website,

W3C. (2016a). How to Meet WCAG 2.0. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from W3C Web Accessibility Initiative website,

W3C. (2016b). Techniques for WCAG 2.0. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from W3C Working Group website,

Wickline, M. (2000). Sim Daltonism for Mac. Retrieved October 13, 2016, from

WordPress.org. (2014, October 11). Accessibility handbook. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from WordPress.org website,

WordPress.org. (2016a, December 6). Twenty Fifteen. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from WordPress.org website,

WordPress.org. (2016b, December 6). Twenty Sixteen. Retrieved October 7, 2016, from Wordpress.org website,

[Talk] Factors of Trust in IoT App Interfaces Redux

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Talk presented at UX Camp Brighton 2016 - Redux on 14/06/16 at 68 Middle Street

for the version of this talk given at UX Camp Brighton, 2016 (19/03/16). Video version of original talk. from on .

Session description:

Does your app rely on OAuth to offer connection to other apps and services? Based on my research studying app-to-device relationships in Internet of Things systems (e.g. Fitbit, Jawbone UP, Nest, SmartThings, Glooko), I have uncovered some best practice recommendations when it comes to inspiring trust within your interface. Trust definitions used in this video are from Pavlidis, Islam, Mouratidis, and Kearney (2014). This research is aligned with the SenSe research Cluster at the University of Brighton (secure and dependable software systems).

About SenSe

aims to develop novel and pragmatic ways to assure the dependability of software systems with particular emphasis on security, trust and risk. We focus on theories from model-based engineering and analysis-based assurance to develop methods, models, practices and tools that promote the provision of security and dependability in complex interconnected and heterogeneous systems and information infrastructures that underpin our economy and society.

Preliminary recommendations:

UX Questions to Ask in Relation to IoT Apps

#	Category	Questions to ask
1	System dialogues and Semantics	Are system dialogues consistent? For data permissions for use tips for motivational messages
2	Settings	Are all the settings housed together? Are items like the privacy policy and standards adherence available from this area? Can the Terms of Service (or a shortened format of ToSs) be accessed from within the app? Can connected apps and devices be reviewed/managed from within the app? Can support documentation be accessed from within the app?
3	Checkups for Setup/Workflow/Privacy An essential part of onboarding. Also a method for supporting trust and helping users to invest time in learning the higher-level functions of an app, which promotes realisation of app benefits and long-term commitment to use of the app (Brignull, 2013).	Periodic reminders about setup: Can the setup be improved? What devices could be added safely? What benefits might be available as part of the system that the user may be unaware of? Periodic review of workflow: ask users to review the workflow in the system to add a level of human oversight. If the app is not accessed frequently then email and text message may be effective ways to prompt engagement. Think of it like entering a monthly gas meter reading. Is an automated workflow still operating as intended? Is the function still needed? A possible incentive could be that the workflow will stop/timeout if it is not reviewed a la IFTTT. Periodic review of privacy: privacy overview and audit tools within the app. What information is shared with third-party developers? For what purpose/s is it shared? Non-legalese overview of changes to T&Cs should be included in privacy checks.
4	Role/function of the app Applies to central app and third-party apps.	This sounds really obvious, but a lot of primary IoT apps don't actually explain their purpose within the system. What service does the app offer? What need does the app fulfill? What does the app do? How important is the app to the operation of the system? E.g. is it the primary interface or management tool for the system? What data does it need? - Make it clear what is used and why, in plain English.
5	Health/status of hub/sensor/device At any point in time the user should be able to view a basic log of what is currently going on in the system.	What is going on in the system right now? Is recent system activity accessible? Is it possible to access logs from other time periods? Is it possible to see what communication channels are in operation? What third-party apps are connected to the system, what are they doing? What third-party devices are connected to the system, what are they doing? This should be more like what you expect from your banking app when it comes to overseeing the operation of high-importance health, home/business automation IoT systems.
6	OAUTH and API: secondary app data use	Respect users and prove that your app is more trustworthy by only calling data that you are actually using. What data is needed into order to provide the desired third-party service? How is the data used to provide the service? Note: platform manufacturers/developers need to ensure that third-party apps aren't over-privileged in terms of the data they access and the calls they can make via APIs (See the work of Fernandes, Jung and Prakesh, 2016). Developers need to state their intention when it comes to use of information that they call via the API. This doesn't stop those with malicious intent, but it helps users to distinguish between those who pay due diligence to privacy and those who are either malicious or sloppy.
7	What is shared?	Can data access be allowed/disallowed? Once disallowed from the primary app, is this decision upheld? Ideal world: provide granular options for allowing/disallowing access to data which is not necessary for the operation of the service offered by the app. Better yet, don't ask for the data at all if it isn't essential to operation.
8	Access control	Is two-step authentication an option for the web app and login from a new device? Does the smartphone/tablet app offer biometric authentication? Does the app offer the option of setting a passcode for auto screen lock? Particularly if the app controls home appliances.
9	Dependency and operational relationship	As systems become more complicated it is crucial that the user is aided in building a mental picture of the basic configuration of the system. I [keep thinking of Max](https://cycling74.com/products/max/) when I think of this issue. Is logging available? What is going on in the system right now? What is attached to this system (devices/sensors/users)? Is the system visualised in any way?
10	Try before you buy	Wearables have the right idea on this one, allowing you to trial a wearable companion app using your smartphone's built-in sensors. What if you could try out the perks of the system before you buy the actual device? Is a preview of how the app will operate with devices, provided as part of onboarding? Can you try of some of the functionality of the system without buying a system-specific device?

References

\[alex\]

. (2016, May 2). SmartThings platform security - response from Alex. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from

Aliph, Inc. (2016). Jawbone UP (Version 4.13)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Barcena, M. B., Wueest, C., & Lau, H. (2014). How safe is your quantified self? (1.1). Retrieved from

BBC (2016). Hidden killers, series 1: 2. The Edwardian home Retrieved from

Bilton, N. (2016, January 18). Nest thermostat glitch leaves users in the cold. The New York Times. Retrieved from

Bradbury, D. (2015, November 26). Usability v safety: How to design our way to better security. The Guardian. Retrieved from

Brooks, J. (2016, January 8). Fitbit hit with class action lawsuit over alleged misreading of heart rates

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Brignull, H. (2013, March). Ramp Up. Personalising the experience, Brighton. Retrieved from

Brignull, H. (2016). User interfaces designed to trick people. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from

BS ISO/IEC. (2011). Systems and software engineering — Systems and software quality requirement and evaluation (SQuaRE) — System and software quality models (ISO/IEC 25010:2011(E)) Switzerland: ISO/IEC

Catalyst IT. (2016). Mahara (Version 1.10.5)

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved from

Chen, E. Y., Pei, Y., Chen, S., Tian, Y., Kotcher, R., & Tague, P. (2014). OAuth Demystified for mobile application developers. CCS ’14 Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. doi:

Cluley, G. (2013, February 13). Jawbone accounts compromised by hackers - personal info accessed, passwords disabled

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Cycling’74. Max is a visual programming language for media. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from

Ericsson. (2016, June). Wearable technology and the Internet of things. Retrieved from

Faily, S. (2014). Engaging stakeholders in security design: An assumption-driven approach. Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Human Aspects of Information Security & Assurance (HAISA 2014), Plymouth, 21-29. doi:10.13140/2.1.3997.2647

Feamster, N. (2016, January 19). Who will secure the Internet of things?

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Felt, A. P., Egelman, S., & Wagner, D. (2012). I’ve got 99 problems, but vibration ain’t one. Proceedings of the second ACM workshop on Security and privacy in smartphones and mobile devices - SPSM ’12. doi:

Field, C. (2004, January 23). Danger high voltage! Edwardian electric Tablecloth uncovered Retrieved from

Fitbit, inc. (2016). Fitbit (Version 2.18)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Guadamuz, A. (2015). The monkey selfie: Copyright lessons for originality in photographs and internet jurisdiction. Internet Policy Review. doi:

Glooko, Inc. (2015). Glooko (Version 3.2)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Harrison, D., Marshall, P., Bianchi-Berthouze, N., & Bird, J. (2015). Activity tracking: Barriets, workarounds and customisation. Proceedings of UBICOMP ‘15, Osaka, Japan. doi:10.1145/2750858.2805832

Hess, W. (2015, May 7). Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from

Higginbotham, S. (2016, January 22). Episode 42: These are the two biggest challenges facing the smart home Retrieved from

Higginbotham, S. (2016, March 17). Episode 50: Are your devices being held hostage?. Retrieved March 28, 2016, from

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Krok, A. (2016, June 6). British security firm hacks Mitsubishi Outlander via mobile app, Wi-Fi - Roadshow. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from

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\[Mobile application software\]

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O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith lectures 2002 (4th ed.). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

O’Neill, O. (2013, September 25). How to trust intelligently

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from [http://blog.ted.com/ how-to-trust-intelligently/]( how-to-trust-intelligently/)

Pavlidis, M., Islam, S., Mouratidis, H., & Kearney, P. (2014). Modeling trust relationships for developing trust- worthy Information systems. International Journal of Information System Modelling and Design, 5(1), 25–48. doi:10.4018/2014010102

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Scoseria, I. (2016). MyDevices launches cayenne, the world’s First drag-and-drop IoT project builder. Retrieved 19 March 2016, from

Secure Tropos. (2013). SecTro2 (Version 2.1)

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved from

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Seuss (1999). The cat in the hat (5th ed.). New York: Random House USA Children’s Books.

Spary, S. (2016, January 6). Online criminals are tageting Fitbit user accounts. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from

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My current personal hero:

Capturing live drawing in the digital age

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I am helping to organise a conference later on this month as part of my work on the UCISA Digital Capabilities group. The event is called the Spotlight on Digital Capabilities (May 25/26) and just to let you know, if you find this post particularly riveting there are still spots to attend! You may also recall about the gamification of last year’s UCISA conference.

Well I am more actively involved in designing the gamification of Spotlight this year, so there will be more on that soon too! One of the things that I am most looking forward to, as part of the Spotlight conference is a live debate that will take on the question: Do we still need IT training teams? This session will take the format of a town-hall forum style debate and will have a panel who explore different views on the topic as well as leading audience discussion. Part of the inspiration for the debate came from my experience attending New Media Consortium conferences from 2010-12 in the US. I remember the sheer energy of the townhall meeting events and the brilliant live drawing visualisations of the discussion, supplied by Rachel Smith. So with this in mind we are working with Brighton artist, Eve Turner-Lee to consider the best ways of visualising our discussion! Back in March, Eve, my colleague Tucker and I met up to test out the best ways of visualising drawing. Our criteria were that whichever solution we ended up with would need to capture the drawing live and provide a video feed to the projection system somehow so that attendees could watch on screen. A bonus would be if attendees could also watch live from their own smartphones, tablets or laptops. Here are the results of our investigations. Although Eve put it much more succinctly in her comic strip embedded at the top of this post!

Option 1: Eve drawing on paper with live video capture

Trying out drawing with pens on a standing whiteboard

Proposed scenario:

Eve would draw on paper while wearing an iPhone camera harness or a to video-capture her work live on paper using . Fiona simulated this by recording with the Periscope app on iPhone. A computer connected via adaptor to the conference projection system could display the action from Periscope. Audience members could choose to watch from their own devices for a closer view via the Periscope app.

Pros

People can watch the drawing from their personal devices
Eve could wear the phone on a chest mount and that could capture the drawing well
Get lots of attention - broadcast and promote the conference
Nice Twitter tie-in

Cons

Can’t turn off the microphone - everyone would have to turn off their devices.
- tried covering the microphone
- tried external mic on mute
Only have portrait orientation
The quality of the video is not great
Hard to get a good filming angle at the right difference to show how the drawing will take shape.

Verdict:

Do not use. Although we could turn the sound off from the projection system feed, that does not stop the mic in Periscope from picking up sound. This could result in a veritable cacophony if everyone in the room, decided to watch on Periscope via their mobile devices.

Option 2: Eve drawing on iPad Pro

Proposed scenario:

Eve draws on the iPad Pro using an app like Tayasui Sketches ( ) the iPad is mirrored to Fiona’s Mac laptop (using ) which is then connected to the projection system via adaptor (VGA or HDMI). For the sharing to mobile devices, we tried a live Google Hangout broadcast which was simulcast to YouTube. Something to note is that the Refector 2 the software which allows your laptop to broadcast the screen of an iDevice (or an android, via Chromecast technology) features the option to include an iPad visual frame in the video. We have decided to include this on the day, as it will put the origin of the drawing into context. From the laptop we shared the screen via a Live broadcast Google Hangout and YouTube * Video from the YouTube broadcast: Not only is the video great quality, but the settings in Google Hangouts were fantastic and we were able to turn any potential microphone sound off.

Verdict:

Use this!

Setup:

Connect Fiona’s laptop to the projection system
Make sure that the laptop and the iPad Pro are on the same Wi-Fi network
Mirror the iPad to Reflector 2 software on the laptop
Start recording the iPad in Reflector 2 so that you have a backup
Launch Google Hangout on air and tweet link to live YouTube channel and hangout
Make sure that hangout is set to mute audio and video of attendees (cameraman settings)

Option 3: Eve drawing on paper on the document visualiser/document camera

Verdict:

Do not use - Too old-school! Just paled in comparison to option 2!

Final verdict:

iPad Pro > Laptop running Reflector 2 > to projection System > whilst running google hangout broadcasting to youtube

Eve’s final drawing on the iPad Pro

Eve Turner-Lee Drawing created on iPad Pro

[Talk] Factors of Trust in IoT App Interfaces

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Talk presented at UX Camp Brighton on 19/03/16

from on . Trust definitions used in this video are from Pavlidis, Islam, Mouratidis, and Kearney (2014).

FAQ: the iPad app that I used for my #IoT talk was @explainevrythng @UXCampBrighton #uxcb16 #appswap"

— posted on Twitter on March 19, 2016 by Fiona MacNeill (@fmacneill)

Session description:

References

Aliph, Inc. (2016). Jawbone UP (Version 4.13)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Barcena, M. B., Wueest, C., & Lau, H. (2014). How safe is your quantified self? (1.1). Retrieved from

Bilton, N. (2016, January 18). Nest thermostat glitch leaves users in the cold. The New York Times. Retrieved from

Brooks, J. (2016, January 8). Fitbit hit with class action lawsuit over alleged misreading of heart rates

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Brignull, H. (2013, March). Ramp Up. Personalising the experience, Brighton. Retrieved from

BS ISO/IEC. (2011). Systems and software engineering — Systems and software quality requirement and evalua- tion (SQuaRE) — System and software quality models (ISO/IEC 25010:2011(E)) Switzerland: ISO/IEC Catalyst IT. (2016).

Cluley, G. (2013, February 13). Jawbone accounts compromised by hackers - personal info accessed, passwords disabled

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Cycling’74. Max is a visual programming language for media. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from

Feamster, N. (2016, January 19). Who will secure the Internet of things?

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from

Fitbit, inc. (2016). Fitbit (Version 2.18)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Glooko, Inc. (2015). Glooko (Version 3.2)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

Hess, W. (2015, May 7). Onboarding: Designing Welcoming First Experiences. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from

Higginbotham, S. (2016, January 22). Episode 42: These are the two biggest challenges facing the smart home Retrieved from

Higginbotham, S. (2016, March 17). Episode 50: Are your devices being held hostage?. Retrieved March 28, 2016, from

Mahara (Version 1.10.5)

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved from

Malik, O. (2015, December 30). In Silicon valley now, it’s almost always winner takes all. The New Yorker. Retrieved from

myDevices. (2016). First IoT project builder - myDevices cayenne. Retrieved March 19, 2016, from

Nest Labs, Inc. (2016). Nest app (Version 5.2.2)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith lectures 2002 (4th ed.). United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

O’Neill, O. (2013, September 25). How to trust intelligently

\[Blog post\]

. Retrieved from [http://blog.ted.com/ how-to-trust-intelligently/]( how-to-trust-intelligently/)

Sasse, A. (2015). Scaring and bullying people into security won’t work. IEEE Security & Privacy 13(3), 80-83. doi:10.1109/MSP.2015.65

Scoseria, I. (2016). MyDevices launches cayenne, the world’s First drag-and-drop IoT project builder. Retrieved 19 March 2016, from

Secure Tropos. (2013). SecTro2 (Version 2.1)

\[Computer software\]

. Retrieved from

Sempers, P. (2015, October 19). Samsung Smartthings app tour on galaxy s6 - #ThinkSmartThings Retrieved from

Seuss (1999). The cat in the hat (5th ed.). New York: Random House USA Children’s Books.

Spary, S. (2016, January 6). Online criminals are tageting Fitbit user accounts. BuzzFeed News. Retrieved from

SmartThings, Inc. (2016). SmartThings Mobile (Version 2.0.7)

\[Mobile application software\]

. Retrieved from

[Talk] Gamification in Higher Education

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

References and resources

Games and Gamification for Learning and eLearning

Talk given at the Brighton Gamification Meetup on the 9th of March, 2016.

Slide 1

Image source: image of Awele board game by rkit on Pixabay (image link). CC0 Public domain.

Slide 2

Image source: @NMCorg on Twitter. Original Tweet embedded below. Visit the Educause site for archived NMC reports. Reports referenced in presentation: Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Estrada, V., Freeman, A., and Hall, C. (2016). _NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition. _Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

Linden Research, Inc. (2016). Second Life [Computer software]. Retrieved from

Slide 3

Image source: image of auditorium by . CC0 Public domain.

Kahoot. (2016). Kahoot [Computer software]. Retrieved from .

Poll Everywhere. (2016). Poll Everywhere [Computer software]. Retrieved from

Nearpod. (2016). Nearpod [Computer software]. Retrieved from

Additional related links:

. .

. Special thanks to Santanu Vasant for sharing these resources.

Moscrop, C. (2015). Improving student engagement in lectures through the use of free mobile applications. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Barcelona, Spain (EDULEAN15). Retrieved from

Text message gamified quiz system slide

Reimers, S. (2015). Text message gamified quiz system [Computer software]. (Dept. of Psychology, City University London)

Slide 5

“ ” by is licensed under

BBC (2011, December 11). The apprentice used by Brighton students. BBC Sussex. Retrieved from

Clouston, T., Westcott, L., & Whitcombe, S. W. (Eds.). (2010). Problem based learning in health and social care. United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell (an imprint of John Wiley & Sons Ltd).

Schild, E. O., & Boocock, S. S. (Eds.). (1968). Simulation games in learning. Retrieved from

about Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab.

Sadlo, G. (2014). Creating interactive multi-media Problem-Based Learning cases to enhance student cognition. Evolving experiences: Articles from the learning and teaching conference: 2013. 36-47.

Willmer, M., Stanley, H., & Cheales, C. (2014). The Apprentice – you’re hired!. Evolving experiences: Articles from the learning and teaching conference: 2013. 68-75.

Slide 6

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

De Freitas, S. (2006). Learning in Immersive worlds A review of game-based learning prepared for the JISC e-learning Programme learning in Immersive worlds: A review of game-based learning. Retrieved from

FutureLearn. (2016, April 18). Introduction to forensic science. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The gamification of learning and instruction: Game-based methods and strategies for training and education. San Francisco, CA: Wiley, John & Sons.

Macdonald, K. (2014, January 6). CSI Scotland: Learning lessons from an online murder mystery. BBC Glasgow & West Scotland. Retrieved from

Williamson Shaffer, D., Squire, K. R., Halverson, R., & Gee, J. P. (2005). Video Games and the Future of Learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(02), 104-111. Retrieved from

Whitton, N. (2016, February 22). The importance of play: What universities can learn from preschools. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from [https://theconversation.com/the-importance-of-play-what-universities-can-learn-from-preschools-53007] ( )

Librarygame slide

Gamification for public and academic libraries. (2015). Retrieved March 7, 2016, from

Lemontree - university of Huddersfield. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from

OpenTree. (2016). Retrieved March 7, 2016, from

Tay, A., & profile, V. my complete. (2009). Musings about librarianship. Retrieved March 7, 2016, from

Slide 7

Image source: . CC0 Public domain.

McGonigal, J. (2012). Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage.

Sclater, N. (2015, April 29). What do students want from a learning analytics app?. Retrieved March 8, 2016, from

Chou, Y.-K. (2015). Actionable Gamification: Beyond points, badges and Leaderboards. United States: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Wireframes slide

McGonigal, J. (2012). Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Vintage.

Sclater, N. (2015, April 29). What do students want from a learning analytics app?. Retrieved March 8, 2016, from

Chou, Y.-K. (2015). Actionable Gamification: Beyond points, badges and Leaderboards. United States: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Slide 8

Image source: . CC0 Public domain.

Using gamification elements with careful planning but not necessarily with lots of technology involved (referred to the work of Hannah Frith).

Gordon, N., Brayshaw, M., & Grey, S. (2013). Maximising gain for minimal pain: Utilising natural game mechanics. Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 12(1), 27–38. doi:10.11120/ital.2013.00004 Available at:

Slide 9

Image source: . CC0 Public domain.

Scramboo. (2016). Playmaker [Computer software].

Actionbound. (2016). Actionbound [Computer software].

Slide 10

Image source: “ ” by Elizabeth Godspeed licensed under

Computer Gamification and instruction - university of hull. (2015, October 19). Retrieved March 9, 2016, from

Welcome to the serious games institute. (2016, July 21). Retrieved March 9, 2016, from

Slide 11

Plug

Playful Learning Conference, Manchester, 13-15 July, 2016

Wireframes: Are friends electric

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The title of this blog post is a nod in the direction of . It felt like the right time to get some simple mock-ups ready in Adobe Fireworks; thus we became electric and moved away from paper, but only temporarily as this will speedup some of the low-fi paper prototypes that I plan later on. Fireworks seemed like the best choice as it is javascript-centric and I think that in all likelihood the final product would be coded in (but that would be up to my hypothetical developer). This is going to be a very long journal entry as there were a lot of decisions involved in taking the jump to the new format. Bear with me. So first on my list, although I did it second (as I ’think’ in colour) was to create a flexible frame-based mock-up of a topic page where learning content would be delivered. The frame size is set to 805 X 604 as this is the size of the window typically specified by , the University of Nottingham’s Learning Object creation tool. The specific Xerte example that I drew inspiration from can be found at the following link: . You will see that my progression buttons at the bottom of the page bears some resemblance to theirs, as I felt that it was an elegant solution to the problem in both a browser window and on a mobile device. I would be sure to cite this in my final code! However, I do think that a bit of polishing is needed and possibly an alternative for testing purposes; I think that the “2 / 4” looks like a button too, which could lead to confusion, so that is something to fix.

First simple grey scale version

Several key decisions have gone into the wireframes:

I decided to use icons in order to minimise the size of side tabs (rather than text alone). I did not take this decision lightly as icons can be problematic due to individual interpretation. I looked through a cross section of modern icon collections online and I felt that the icons shown above were modern and appropriate for the user group of the learning object. The Index and Save icons are directly from the collection, Glossary/Help button is my own unique icon taking some inspiration from the icon set. I found the icon set . The icon set is originally from the and is licensed under a ). So, the source of these icons would need to be cited in the code and site attributions. However at this point in the design process they are really just placeholders pending the decision of the Graphic Designer on the eventual (hypothetical) design team. I did try out an alternative save button from the icon set, just to test. However it did not work as well as the conventional floppy disk icon as shown below.

The cog on the bottom left, as a button to access settings feels correct in terms of positioning and I think that it stands out as an interactive tool without adding too much distraction to the learning environment. This cog is my own Adobe Illustrator drawing based on a cog designed by under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 unported license] ( ) - as this is student work I am definitely not getting any commercial gain from this). I found the cog at . The positioning and style of the cog was a result of my earlier on-paper sketching, so I feel that, that process was particularly valuable.
Revisiting the wireframe above it seems that the audio mute button might want to be bigger in order to be more symmetrical with the settings button. I liberated the audio from the “settings” area; I have yet to fully define how the settings area will look. I did this because if an end-user were accessing the Learning Object from a mobile device they would want the default to be mute and then they could choose to turn on the audio narrative if they had headphones plugged into their device. Based on this I felt that making the audio settings more present and clickable/tapable would benefit, both users on desktop computers in office environments where computer noise might not be preferable and those on mobile devices.

A closer inspection of the web site’s terms showed that the icons cannot be transformed in any way and have to be used as-is. The colour is inverted but other than that there are no structural changes. This suggests that these icons will need to be replaced in the final version of the site. .

Experiment Time!!

Then in reference to decision 1 above, I wondered if the icons could stand on their own without the titles. So I gave that a go…

But then I thought how do you deal with any uncertainty about the icons. Perhaps a JS popover? I explored how that would look, just out of interest. I don’t think that it was successful (click on the image below for the interactive version).

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I started with colour prototypes. The colour scheme was loosely inspired by the University of Exeter’s blue, as outlined in their although the branding for university-x needs a bit more thought.

Colour hex values annotation is included for later reference.

As part of the accessibility settings it is necessary for the user to be able to change the font in the interface. I tried a few experiments to see how this would look, as different fonts take up differing amounts of space on the page. It would also be necessary to provide a contextual preview of these settings as users altered them, so they could see how the fonts and other adjustments would manifest. I chose the fonts very carefully as although it would be great to offer a font like Verdana as a legible sans-serif, particularly because it distinguishes letters which often get confused “I” and “L”, there are some font licensing considerations to bear in mind. I liked the where they use the word “Illustration” to show the legibility difference between Arial and Verdana: e.g. in Verdana: Illustration and Arial: Illustration. I have included this word in my examples below to help show differences between the fonts. With regard the licensing issue mentioned above, as the ethos of this learning object is open source and having checked font distribution licensing for Verdana, Arial and others and finding that they were not ideal, I sought open source alternatives. Examples and annotation is provided below. It is also important the the selected fonts provide language support for translation engine purposes.

Font 1 - PT Sans

Font 1, the default, is PT Sans (shown in all visual examples above) a family licensed by .

Font 2 - Liberation Sans

Font 2 - Liberation at 12pt - license: . Partial language support, stated 99% at fontlibrary.org

Comments: this font does distinguish between I and L and is quite a standard sans-serif. A bit more compact than PT Sans.

Font 3 - Encode Sans

Font 3 - Encode Sans at 12pt - license: . Full language support.

Comments: this font uses height to differentiate, I and L. It features more curves than some of the other fonts, and doesn’t have a lot of white space, so although it is condensed it might be better for some dylexic readers as this will limit the ghosting effect.

Font 4 - Crimson

Font 4 - Crimson at 12pt - the serif option. - license: [SIL Open Font License] ( . Full language support.

Comments: my own personal tendency is to go for sans-serif fonts, however some users may prefer a serif font designed for screen reading. This font bears some similarity to both Georgia and Lucinda, I have found to be particularly informative in this area.

Font 5 - Earthbound

Font 5 - Earthbound at 12pt - license: . Full language support.

Comments: this is quite a curvy font, which once again uses character height as well as curved L to differentiate between L and I.

Font 6 - OpenDyslexic

Font 6 - OpenDyslexic at 12pt - a font specifically designed for Dyslexic readers - .

Comments: Stylistically I find this font to err on the side of the 1970s, however at least personally I have found that it does increase my personal reading speed. I believe there is value in including it as an option in the settings.

I also wanted to explore how the font would look if the size were increased and how that would be tacked with formatting.

Fonts that I decided against and size decision

I took a look at some Google fonts, but felt that they did not fit the licensing needs as well as the SIL OFL fonts. Here are some of the fonts that I reviewed:

.
I also looked at an open font called however when I looked at the word Illustration there was no differentiation between L and I. In terms of the default size, I decided on 12pt based on some of the guidance included in the Web Style Guide 3rd addition. Specifically the section.

Some influential sources for this process

The incredibly helpful resources at the WebAIM site:
- .
- , which would prove useful for both the execution of, and the content within the Learning Object.

Further treatments - looking at the background colour options for the settings

NB. the default colour is the cream colour shown in the images above.

Alt background 1

Alt background 2

Alt background 3

Alt background 4

Example of background colour change and font change

Further inspiration

In terms of further development of the settings and help/glossary, I found the following blog posts from the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) to be particularly helpful.

. What not to do!
. The example of the Google Play and AdWords help tools could offer an elegant solution for the glossary/help pop-up. Settings may be too involved to be a pop-up, as previously a preview of how the settings adjust the content would be helpful.
The case against flat design. There are some helpful tips in .

References (in addition to websites listed above)

Goodyear, P. (2005). Educational design and networked learning: Patterns, pattern languages and design practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 21(1). Advance online publication. Retrieved from

Green, S., Jones, R., Pearson, E., & Gkatzidou, S. (2006). Accessibility and adaptability of learning objects: Responding to metadata, learning patterns and profiles of needs and preferences. Alt-J, Research in Learning Technology, 14(1), 117-129. Retrieved from

Smith, R. S. (2004). Guidelines for authors of learning objects. Retrieved from NMC: New Media Consortium website:

Wireframes: Pondering Topic Pages

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

References

Van Duyne, D. K., Landay, J. A., & Hong, J. I. (2007). The design of sites: Patterns for creating winning web sites (2nd ed.). USA: Prentice Hall PTR.

Wireframe sketching: looking at the index/home

Wed, 30 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

References

Van Duyne, D. K., Landay, J. A., & Hong, J. I. (2007). The design of sites: Patterns for creating winning web sites (2nd ed.). USA: Prentice Hall PTR.

Notes

The website I mentioned.

I particularly like the quick reference tabs on the left of the site, which slide out on hover. Also the type enlargement tool on their site, it is easy to use and very effective. which provides an overview is really fascinating, showing the decisions that they made and why. I have also watched their webinar about the revamp of the site, featured on the page above. Some key questions, funnily enough I keep coming back to these too!

What are the goals of this website (in my case web application in the form of a Learning Object)?
Who is the audience and who are our users?
What are their goals?

Major discoveries, minor anguish

Mon, 21 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You may ask, what happened to you Fiona, between 6/12 and 20/12? Well this is what happened. I was teaching an online course called the 12 Apps of Christmas (a satellite of course run at Regent’s University, London) and it was ALL consuming. I was also working on my Learning Object project during this time (and you thought I was slacking!) however, for the most part I have to admit to reverting to paper reflections for a while, due to sheer convenience. Currently my notes are collectively living on bits of scrap-paper, serviettes/napkins, and Evernote entries. I plan to pull them together here over the next few days, a process that I have started with the inclusion of , I will include more on that later in the post.

First a few relevant reflections from my experience working on 12 Apps of Christmas

After the course we ran a completion survey. Although there is only a small number of responses so far (11 respondents out of 192 course subscribers; survey is open until the end of January), the responses do correlate with some of the observations that I had made. As the course was designed as an opportunity for academic staff, the insights into that population are helpful as I move forward with the Learning Object design, that is geared to the same community. Course subscribers really appreciated clear image-based instructions with accompanying step-by-step written annotation. Commentary: This could inform aspects of user documentation for the Learning Object. Specifically, the idea to include accompanying PDF guides for topics is supported by this anecdotal evidence. Four learning activities or exercises is about the right number to minimise time and interest drop-off.

Commentary

We had a structure of 12+ exercises due to the preexisting structure of the 12 apps course, but interest did drop-off sharply after the 4th day (1 exercise per day). However, when considering a learning object this would seem like a pertinent observation. Also the topic of the learning object is probably (lets be honest) less interesting than learning about mobile apps presented with a festive theme.

Beware of the inverse Field of Dreams (1989) effect…If you build it, they won’t necessarily come

Getting as much web traffic as we did took major effort

Building and maintaining the blog where we delivered the content; promoting the content via Twitter and keeping to our self-imposed publishing deadlines. In spite of this effort, the traffic dropped off after the 4th day, as documented in the screenshot from the site analytics above.

I think that it is important to admit that learning resource content and therefore the Learning Object that I am designing has a very limited shelf-life, both in the sense of consumable shelf-life and continued relevance. This does not undermine the reusable goal of the Learning Object and it’s Open Education ethos, but it does mean that it is more of a reusable template as opposed to being completely reusable in and of itself. I think that best way of considering the reuse aspect is that this Learning Object can be reused through a simple hyperlink to it, but is not geared towards being part of a open learning object repository (it would continue to live with the client university, university-x). Furthermore with my learning technologist hat on, driving traffic to the learning object would require a clearly structured publicity plan so that it was viewed as a timely tool in relation to the changes to DSA funding.

Finally, this point really speaks to the importance of the delivery environment and how it portrays the importance of the Learning Object. As the Learning Object is academic staff-focused it is not best placed within the Virtual Learning Environment, a more centralised site with a focus on learning and teaching guidance at the fictional client university may be more appropriate. This will help to ensure that our main target audience have ready access and memorable access. So this is the spot in my thought process where I revised the purpose sentence slightly, as it wasn’t quite right:

Changes to funding for support of disabled students, necessitates the need to increase academic staff knowledge of best practices involving technology, to help disabled students and to fill areas of deficit created by the reduction of funding.

The act of doing this resulted in a crucial thought…

This Learning Object is to promote awareness of DSA and accessible practices. How on earth did it end up being about Microsoft Word? I realised that by narrowing the scope, as my prior ideas were too expansive for the project prescribed by my instructor, I also undermined the purpose of the Learning Object. However, I was relieved to realise that this was largely a matter of semantics and learning content rather than an issue that would affect the “structure plane” (Garrett, 2011) of the Learning Object.

To summarise, the Learning Object will still focus on accessibility in documents but this will be presented alongside information about DSA and increasing awareness of different student needs, so the new provisional title is: Making your documents accessible. The only aspects that still look at software-based techniques are the guidance PDFs and the offline exercise, which are easier for university-x support staff to update independently and then add new versions to the Learning Object’s back-end storage.

Another thought that I had in relation to this point, is that learning video repositories like Lynda.com might be provided at university-x, so software training in my Learning Object would be a poor relation when compared to the quality of such repositories. Therefore the key features that set the Learning Object apart are the bite-sized and context specific learning topics, the option to complete it anonymously and its enhanced accessibility. The Learning Object may also be more approachable for users who find the vast choice of videos that are available in a service like Lynda.com to be overwhelming as a starting point.

Other major discoveries

After I undertook , I decided to take a shot at . However, as soon as I started to do it my fears were realised and it became clear that I would need to revise the scenarios and then change the UML model diagram accordingly. This was a lot of extra work, but worth doing as it is important to me that I create something that hopefully equals or improves upon existing Learning Objects.

Here is my first shot at sketching around about 20th of December:

As a result of this I decided to…

I removed one of the Topics, Readability. As it would be covered in Fonts & Legibility and was redundant. It would also add to the time that it would take to complete the Learning Object and this cannot exceed 30mins (a usability requirement).
Removed view feedback from the Topics as feedback is built into the proceedings of a learning activity - previously called Quiz and then later Lesson in the UML iterations.
Established the use of a learning activity, based “programmed instruction” as defined in the IMS Learning Design Specification (2003a, 2003b). This model features questions, presented alongside information; these will take the form of multiple choice questions with built-in feedback. This is based on an established design pattern outlined in the IMS LDS (2003b, Section 4.1, para. 1).
I have worked on standardising the language within the scenarios and Learning Object in the wake of what I have learned through study of the IMS Design Specification.
I added a centralised topic index page. I had something like this very early on, but it became clear to me after I worked though a Learning object myself that users need a clear overview of the contents of the learning object from the get-go. This also displays the test and certificate, although not available immediately, to give users an idea of the narrative flow of the proceedings as well as the internal end goal; obtaining the certificate.
I added a glossary as a global component of the Learning Object. This was based on a needs from the user characteristics that I had not picked up on for users external to university-x. I also felt frustrated by the lack of a glossary when I was using a Learning Object as a user.
I added settings and help as a global component of the Learning Object. This is based on the ideas from my , when I felt that use of the accessibility settings needed to be built into the task scenarios.
Having quizzes for each topic, no longer made sense and as an incentivizing measure I added a central test that becomes available once the three main topics are completed.
The introduction became a tutorial rather than slides. Slides were too visually prescriptive and I want to provide a step-by-step guide so that users can learn how to use the interface quickly.
Plus there is the glaringly obvious oversight… in addition to the normal objectives of software this Learning Object requires Learning Outcomes. This is the reason why I am no longer referring to the Learning Object as LO, as this is a common shortening for Learning Outcomes in educational terminology and may lead to confusion.
I took out task scenario 2 where the user could return to the saved Learning Object via a hyperlink in an email. This is not great practice as it encourages behaviour on the part of the user that could lead to them becoming victims of phishing in the future (Van Duyne, Landay, & Hong, p.555). The solution is to provide a clear link to a university domain parent page, rather than a user-specific URL and instruct the user to copy and paste the parent URL into the web browser address bar.

After all this, I ended up with the following - I feel MUCH more positive about this as the structure makes more sense.

Half of this image is contrast-adjusted as it was drawn in pencil.

A few notes about IMS LDS

I have mixed feelings about my discovery of the IMS Learning Design Specification. I came across it as I searched the ALT (Association of Learning Technologists) wiki, as I was curious what standards and specifications exist for Learning Technologies as these technologies have been around for a long time. Initially I came across information on Educational Modelling Language, which has folded into the IMS standard (original information from the ALT wiki which no longer exists as of 2022 when this post was revisited).

On the one-hand the specifications feature learning design patterns, which are immensely valuable to this project and also within my day job. The specifications also include a very comprehensive outline of the XML metadata requirements that are needed to create a Learning Object that is truly reusable and also searchable; the following article some some good annotation of the XML to demonstrate the metadata properties (Ragbir & Mohan, 2009). However, as a specification it is too complex for this project, so as much as I would like to create a perfect learning object, in order to be compliant with the standard I would need to start from scratch and create something with multiple roles (student and support) and far more complex taxonomies.

I also looked into whether I could adapt it and use it as a documentation standard, as a perhaps more appropriate alternative to the NASA documentation standard (1991), however as I started to map the necessary concepts over the contents page and it became clear that would not be possible within the scope of this project.

Trying to map the IMS Learning Design Information Model to my existing work and concepts that I need to cover. It didn’t go well (screenshot from 2003a).

So what am I going to use from IMS LDS?

I have tried my best to use the language outlined in the IMS LDS as this will provide a common way to describe the processes, architecture and learning design using terminology that is understood in my professional field.
I will reference some of the learning design patterns (as found in Section 2. Use Cases in 2003b) as they are very helpful and provided some positive validation of the work that I had done so far, in terms of the structural make-up of a Learning Object.
I absolutely love the stage-play metaphor that the IMS LDS standard uses to explain a learning object. In short a Unit of Learning (UoL), as defined in the standard, is a package that includes the learning content, including code and physical files alongside the specified metadata. This content is “played” and is compatible with different delivery “environments”. The actions or method within the UoL are a series of “Plays”. Those plays are structured as “acts” and within the acts the “Roles” perform their requisite “activities” within the “environment” (2003b, Section 3.2.3). The most succinct description of the standard that I have found is a PowerPoint presentation by researchers from the University of Vienna, Introduction to IMS Learning Design (Derntl, Neumann, & Oberhuemer, 2009).
Having looked at the NASA software documentation standard (1991) again I felt that an adapted version of the IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications (1998) will actually be more suitable in terms of outlining the final concept document. This standard has more common group with the IMS LDS.

As for the “minor anguish” of this post’s title, as you can tell from the my writing above, discoveries have resulted in substantial work and with limited time available this has certainly led to a certain level of anguish. This was largely due to the need to back-track in certain areas. However, I now feel that I am almost back on-track, with the aim of completing my wireframes before the Christmas holiday is out.

References

Derntl, M., Neumann, S., & Oberhuemer, P. (2009). Introduction to IMS Learning Design

\[PowerPoint slides\]

. Retrieved from

Garrett, J. J. (2011). The elements of user experience: User-centered design for the web and beyond (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.

Gordon, C., Gordon, L. (Producers), & Robinson, P. A. (Director). (1989). Field of dreams

\[Film\]

. USA: Universal Pictures. Retrieved from

IEEE. (1998). I_EEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications_," (IEEE Std 830-1998). doi:10.1109/IEEESTD.1998.88286

IMS Global Learning Consortium. (2003a). IMS learning design information model (Version 1.0). Retrieved from IMS Global Learning Consortium Online.

IMS Global Learning Consortium. (2003b). IMS learning design best practice and implementation guide (Version 1.0). Retrieved from IMS Global Learning Consortium Online.

NASA-STD-2100-91. (1991). NASA software documentation standard. Retrieved 29 November 2015, from

Ragbir, D., & Mohan, P. (2009). Creating reusable lesson plans for e-learning using the IMS Learning Design specification. International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 5(4). Retrieved from

Van Duyne, D. K., Landay, J. A., & Hong, J. I. (2006). The design of sites: Patterns for creating winning web sites (2nd edition) (2nd ed.). United States: Prentice Hall PTR.

Real-time reflection: experience of completing a Learning Object

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My sketchbook has always been a place to figure out the most tricky of problems.

As part of my day job, I had to complete a Learning Object (as a learner/student) and decided to take the opportunity to reflect on what the experience was like from an end user perspective. Throughout the process, I considered what went well, what could have worked better and what I felt was missing. This exercise resulted in something of a structural epiphany. I realised that I had missed some vital steps in the conceptual model, this was further borne out when I started my wireframe drawings and found that there were things that simply did not add up. Below is my, step-by-step written account of my experience in the Learning Object, I have highlighted sections of particular significance. My next post will outline some of the decisions that took place from December 16th onward.

Note: this Learning Object has a longer duration than the one that I am building (about an hour in total). I took some screenshots for personal reference, but I cannot include them in this narrative as it is a proprietary system protected by copyright.

Includes a title page
Opens in a new window and features an audio narrative that matches written information on-screen
Has a keyboard shortcut clearly defined for navigation through the learning object. The keyboard shortcut is “c” this is not the most comfortable key on the keyboard to use. For right-handed people the arrow keys are in a better position. I am interested in why they chose “c”. I think that spacebar might offer a better experience for right-handed and left-handed people and also has an association with start and stop, due to its use in YouTube and other video streaming services as a start/stop video option.
Has a menu which persists throughout the LO with settings options clearly visible.
Allows the option to replay each section or skip to the next.
Has integrated accessibility tools to adjust: colour scheme (background colour for the most part), audio on/off and subtitles. Also has a zoom and menu for accessing all settings that shows in each view at the top-right of the window.
visual pointers are shown to guide the user in the first screens.
Includes an initial tour of the interface. How to save - how to adjust the view, sound settings etc.
After that there is a welcome video outlining the content of the LO and the learning outcomes.
Topic menu is shown on one page with a brief description of each topic and the time that it will take to complete the topic.
Certificate is included on the topics menu which is something that I have been considering for my LO.
Within the learning topics or lessons - multiple choice questions are included for comment and then follows up with integrated feedback. Most of the questions state, “what’s your opinion…”. This is helpful in terms of the soft side of considering accessibility issues.
Once you have answered the questions the narrative voice of the LO either agrees or partially agrees with the answers which are given by the user. Providing definitions and points to remember along the way.
Uses display of very basic pie charts to show performance in certain areas, this is not particularly effective.
Important to show progress through the lesson.
There is not a test for each section - they have a test at the end.
In each section the pages have the same layout, but the content on the page is flexible.
Help question mark button goes to an online help guide about the generic use of the LO. However I was hoping for more of a Glossary to support one of the questions that I am being asked. NOTE to self- “I need a GLOSSARY” (said in the voice of the Knights who say ni).
When you get something wrong, you kind of what to un-do it and then get it right. I think that building in a replay function for each question section is essential.
Final test - is accessed from the main menu. This is not a timed test. Feedback is provided on a per-question basis.
It is important to give people the option to take the test more than once to allow them to improve their score.
Answers are shuffled the next time that you take the test.
Scenario-based questions are shuffled, so one question is different from the first time.

Bits and Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My blog title is a direct quote of Lawrence Weiner’s Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole (1991) an artwork installed at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN, USA.

1.1 Purpose

The problem (in one sentence): Changes to support-related funding for disabled students necessitates the need to increase academic staff knowledge of best practices involving technology to support disabled students.

Well I have been working away on a number of things and they ARE starting to resemble a whole, which is encouraging. For a while there, I felt like I was in a sort of limbo struggling to see the connections between my activities.

I decided to start work on the concept document. I looked at a few different documentation standards, however I finally settled on adapting the NASA software documentation standard (NASA-STD-2100-91, 1991). The activity of starting to pull together some of the project background information, as previously explored on this blog, has been really helpful. That work is summarised in the problem sentence above. The idea of producing a sentence-long summary is influenced by LEAN principles as applied to UX (Gothelf, 2013, p.20), although not having an original interactive system that I am being commissioned to replace it is more about having a succinct statement to sum-up why what I am designing is important.

I decided that it was time to look back through the characteristics, hierarchical task breakdown and task scenarios in order to check for any inconsistencies and as a means to validate aspects of my UML diagram. I identified a number of naming differences that are now revised and standardised conventions have been established across the design artifacts. The main realisation about the hypothetical Learning Object (for university-x; a fictional university) was that for a tool with the primary goal of promoting accessibility, there was no accessibility built into its interaction. Part of offering responsive accessibility options is allowing the user to specify their needs and I realised that this needed to feature in both the tasks and the interaction design for new users entering the Learning Object. This is now included and reflected in the UML diagram below (version 5).

Another realisation, also on the accessibility front, was that I had previously stated that PDF guides would be made available, related to each of the Learning Topic quizzes in the Learning Object. I noticed that I had not included an interaction to allow for the download of ‘said’ PDFs.

Another aspect that was missing, was the gamification element which I had so painstakingly thought about during the characteristics phase. Due to the constraints of the project, these features cannot be sophisticated, however some features should still be there! Namely there was no ending to the learning object and I conceived that staff would be expecting some kind of conclusion, however basic. Therefore I have included a finale, which will feature number of participants per school and school rank. Very basic, but it may motivate users in university-x to encourage colleagues to take part in order to promote their place on this leader board. For non-university-x users then the finale will be a simple “thank you” page.

Now I need to get back to the requirements and wireframing, but I had to get that stuff out of the way first. As previously mentioned, I think that I have realised that Learning Objects are fairly hard to design from scratch as there are some built-in expectations about how they work and how users interact with them. On the one hand it is good, as the user knows what they are getting with a learning object, the same way they do when buying their favourite brand of cereal. On the other hand it is fairly constraining from a design perspective as it means that there are certain things that need to be included even if they feel redundant (the user marking completion of activities for example; this is pretty essential as it unlocks or allows progression to other areas of the LO, but it feels like it should be automated).

This activity has really helped me to think about structural aspects of all eLearning systems, which very often seem more like vessels for a collection of functionality rather than unified products. This Learning Object is no different, the illusion of cohesion will be the mission of design; such a large proportion of educating is about design.

UML Version 5 - 6/12/15

References

Gothelf, J. (2013). Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience (1st ed.). United States: O’Reilly Media, Inc, USA.

NASA-STD-2100-91. (1991). NASA software documentation standard. Retrieved 29 November 2015, from

Perplexed...or why we iterate

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have a confession to make, I am pretty perplexed by Unified Modeling Language (UML). If you were to look at this blog, based on the lack of posts, you wouldn’t think that I had made any progress over the past two weeks. We covered User Conceptual Modeling as a topic in class back on the 6th of November and in my last post on the 11th, I made the grand proclamation that I would complete my UML diagram by Friday (13th). Well I did create a UML diagram, and then I created another iteration and another; I became obsessed with understanding the syntax…not a healthy obsession, but a frustrating one. During the past week I tried to read everything that I could in order to aid my understanding. Tonight I came to the realisation that Learning Objects are pretty hard to build in UML. I also made the decision to leave this part of the project for now and move on to writing some commentary on user requirements. I feel that by moving on, I may miss some error in the system design, but also if I continue to work on the diagram I am going to stall my progress further. This was paralleled early on in the other project that I am working on at the moment, where I attempted to create a diagram for a hypothetical wearable device as part of the Internet of Things. Four-plus iterations later I finally have something that resembles the operation of a real system. To summarise here is what I have learned from this road-block:

step away from the diagram;
perspective can only be capitalised upon by making some space between yourself and the problem and then walking back towards it;
Make like Andy Warhol, and iterate;
Allow for frustration time - cook on a medium heat and allow to simmer.

Until next time… P.s. I am leaving this note here because these diagrams need a glossary.

Here is the first iteration of the model:

And here is the most recent, albeit not entirely finished:

Version completed on 05/12/15

References

British Standard. (2005). BS ISO/IEC 19501:2005 Information technology. Open distributed processing. Unified modeling language (UML). Version 1.4.2. Retrieved from

Brown, D. M. (2010). Communicating design: Developing web site documentation for design and planning (2nd edition) (voices that matter) (2nd ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishing.

Griffiths, R. (2012, April 2). User conceptual modeling [Blog post]. Retrieved from

Lynch, P. J., & Horton, S. Web style guide, Third edition. Retrieved from

Redmond-Pyle, D., & Moore, A. (1995). Graphical user interface design and evaluation (GUIDE): A practical process (1st ed.). New York: Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference.

Characteristics for the users of a hypothetical OER

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Context

This post is another entry related to a hypothetical user interface design as part of my study towards an MSc in User Experience Design. These blog posts should be viewed as rough and reflective and are concerned with a project for a fictional university. The first point to clarify is, what exactly is an Open Educational Resource and why would a potential client want to build one? I personally find the following definition from to be the most helpful:

What is an OER?

Open educational resources are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. Jisc, from “Open educational resources (OERs)” ( ).

So the point is that an OER can be almost anything, what distinguishes it is the fact that it is an openly available resource. In the interest of being more specific, from this point forth I shall refer to what I am designing as a learning object; a self-contained learning exercise, which in this case is delivered online from a designated server space or Learning Object repository. This Learning Object will be a basic web application with a “choose your own adventure” type learning exercise based on the creation and format of study materials with some interactive gamification elements thrown in. A lot more thinking and development will be required before we can get to that point.

About my hypothetical client

My imagined client for this project is a UK university (enrollment = 20K+) and the intended audience for the Learning Object are their academic staff. The university would like the Learning Object to be openly accessible as it is a mode of publicity (shared via social networks with university branding) and it shows that the university are forward thinking and considering staff professional development and digital capabilities. As the link to the resource will be openly accessible and find-able via search engines, this means that potential users could be anyone with an interest in the accessible presentation of resources, for example: primary school teachers, lecturers, student support tutors, learning technologists, students in teaching training, etc. Potential users could also be anyone who works with a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or a Learning Management System (LMS) and there are many flavours VLE/LMS on the market. Furthermore users may also come from anywhere in the world, which means that if I wanted to serve all potential users the Learning Object (LO) would need to be available in multiple languages. The unique paradigm presented by OERs is explained very nicely via metaphor from Jisc - interestingly , although I came up my definitions independently and found their page after the fact.

OER Metaphor

Hold-up…this is getting really complicated

However that is not the model that I am going for in this case, the LO is not meant to be all things, to all people. It is for a very specific purpose and that is to help academic staff at a university in the UK gain awareness of different strategies for making learning materials accessible as a response to the forthcoming . These changes, planned by the current government will take effect halfway through 2016 and may affect the support provisions available to some students in the UK. This LO serves a specific need, for a specific client so is to a certain extent propriatary, the way that we achieve the “open” aspect is make the URL accessible to external users outside the university; use metadata to support search engine optimisation; license the underlying code with a ; and make the source code available via a repository like which is hosted in France and supports (to comply with ).

On the topic of technical construction…

Upon consideration of how the Learning Object will be created, I think that it will be a custom coded html5 site with MySQL backing (this is subject to change). A facet of the brief is that data needs to be entered by the user in some way, web applications like which allow for the fast creation of html5 Learning Objects are not suitable as the resulting LOs seem to be read-only. So although these LOs can be interactive, no data that is entered is actually collected thus the need for a custom solution rather than using an established LO creator application. As the plan is to make the source code publicly reusable this will need to be considered during the construction process, to ensure that there is sufficient documentation to guide those who may wish to reuse the code. In this model there are two key user groups:

those users from the university who interact with the LO;
those users from outside the university who interact with the LO.

We also need to consider:

those external users who consume first and then move on to create; as in copy and adapt the LO using the source code.

These user-creators fall outside the scope of the design for interaction, but should be considered throughout the design and coding stages to ensure that documentation for the code is sufficient and the design allows for future customisation. For example clear image tags and labeling need to be in place to allow any screenshots taken from Moodle or a different VLE to be substituted for the original screenshots taken from Blackboard (see paragraph below).

As I mentioned before there are many different VLEs out there, however as we are talking about the UK (and anyone else is welcome to go to town with the content) then the two most prevalent VLEs in the UK are Blackboard and Moodle (UCISA, 2014, p.10). As a consequence, those users who consume will fall into two camps - those with an interest in Blackboard and those with an interest in Moodle; the principles presented in the Learning Object will be the same for each system but the visual aesthetics differ between the two. My client is a university that uses Blackboard, so the LO will be blackboard focused but we hope that someone will create Moodle and other versions in the future based on our source code.

Friday, 6th of November 2015 - Update:

I have changed my thinking on the LO, as VLEs are updated fairly often this would limit the shelf-life of the LO. It was also proving to be too complex. So I have decided to focus on the idea that I am building one LO, of a hypothetical many, and the LOs are all about the different kind of materials going into the VLE. The LO I am designing will be about creating accessible documents in Microsoft Word.

General Characteristics
Characteristic	Detail	Design Implications	Practical Design Ideas to keep for later
Direct	Users from the university: academic staff	The design needs to be approachable with goals for the LO clearly outlined. It is quite important that users do not need to login in order to use the LO. A sort of login fatigue is a major issue and some university users may wish to remain anonymous.	It would be helpful to track how many academic staff complete the LO, so a potential method for this would be allow the production of a completion certificate at the end of the LO, this will only be generated after the user logs in (using an existing university LDAP easy proxy). Users will have the option to skip the certificate, if they wish to remain anonymous. External users and anon users will still be able to generate a basic completion certificate, but it won't have full university validation (or something along those lines).
Users from the university: students, admin staff, researchers etc.	Although the intended audience are the academic staff at the university and the LO will be clearly labelled as such, other types of university users will not be prevented from accessing the LO.	At the beginning of the LO the users will be asked to type in their role which will auto-populate an entry cell based on a predefined set of options. E.g. What is your role? I am... offer a drop-down list (e.g. a student; a researcher, an administrator etc.) and autocomplete, if "other" is selected then they will be asked to specify. In order to gain some basic usage stats, users will be asked to self-identify whether they work/study at the client university (to differentiate between internal and external users). This data will not be completely accurate as people may forget to self-identify or an external user may incorrectly identify, however it will give an indication of use.
Users external to the university	External users will have access to the LO. These users could come from anywhere in the world and English may not be their first language.	As login is not required to use the LO, any entry fields must be validated to ensure that malicious code cannot be entered in the LO. The option for a basic certificate, where the external users enter their preferred name and a PDF is generated for download needs to be available. Write the LO in plain English, this will help all users. Where specific technical terms are used, provide a glossary and/or rollover definitions as technical terms differ per country.
Indirect	These are users who access the derivative versions of the LO.	The experience of these users is, to a certain extent beyond our control. However the development documentation should recommend best practices for accessibility.
Remote	Technologist/s responsible for monitoring the use of the LO needs a way to download usage data. These users are also support users.	Require access to a basic online dashboard showing how many academic staff per department/school have completed the LO. Counts of other users should also be included in the dashboard and an option to download the data as a .csv.	It would be ideal for this data to be displayed as a leader board; a graph showing the top school through to the bottom school. However this is really out-of-scope, as that is a separate application. It would be nice to show users school stats after they have logged in for their certificate. E.g. you are 1 of 48 people in Computing who have completed the LO. Computing is now the 2nd most engaged school. However if robust .csv export features are added visualisations could be produced periodically in Excel and other programs and the leader board could be added at a later stage. Any more complex anonymous data about visitors to the LO should be reviewed through Google Analytics.
Collateral	Those accessing derivative versions of the LO via third-party repositories.	The LO may loose some value in its iterations and therefore when it is placed in repositories by third-parties, the owners of these repositories may not want it to be there. The client university's branding graphics will not be included with the source code, as it needs to be clear that derivatives are not still owned/maintained by the university.
Prohibited	Someone who wishes to inject malicious code into the LO in order to target users.	Validate all data entered into the LO according to set parameters; disallow html tags and certain words/characters. There is little that the university can do to prevent this in the derivative versions of the LO, but a disclaimer should be included in the source code stating that the LO should only be used when delivered/served by reputable providers.
Support	Technologist/s (employee/s of the university) who support and maintain the system. These folks are also direct users and	This knowledge and level of access will also be shared with employees of the university. They require documentation/training prior to providing access. As the original creator, of the LO we/I will have a level of involvement in it's continued maintenance, updating the code for an agreed time period.	Supply limited support to external users through the gna.org repository.
Number of Users	Intended users from university: academic staff	1,300 estimate of academic staff across the lifespan of the LO. The lifespan is estimated at academic years 2016-18 (24 months).	Need to identify how many academic staff would be expected for each school at the client university.
Additional users from university: other staff and students	300+ across the lifespan.	Of limited interest to these users, so we expect only those users who have a specific interest. It is likely that, for example, an inquisitive student who ran across the LO will not complete it, as it is not aimed at their needs.
External users	720+ - around 30 users per month across the lifespan of the LO (14 months).	Hard to tell how many external users will access the site

References

UCISA. (2014). Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK. Retrieved from the UCISA website.

. Articulate does allow templates to made and re-used, but it is proprietary software so not ideal for the open nature of this project.

Re-Blog: Reflections on using Rise to support conference-based gamification

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Guest blog I wrote for the Rise Blog 22/10/15

Reflecting on my experience using Rise Leaderboard to support conference-based gamification.

In early June I had the pleasure of implementing a conference-wide gamification activity in support of the UCISA Digital Capabilities event. The event took place at MediaCity, Salford; a vibrant and engaging venue for an event stocked-full of innovative ideas. The event focused on showcasing successful practices for supporting academic staff and learners in their use of technology within further and higher education. Another goal of the event was to highlight findings from the recent Digital Capabilities survey. So when a member of the event organising committee, Iain Cameron (University of Aberdeen, and UCISA Digital Capabilities committee), mentioned the idea of a Twitter selfie (or Twelfie) competition as part of the proceedings, Rise immediately came to my mind as the right tool for the job! I had encountered Rise before at a demo at the International Confex event in 2013 and then again during the Mahara 2014 Hui held at the University of Brighton.

Read the rest of this post at the via this .

User characteristics are coming out of my ears

Tue, 20 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

So to recap, my quest for last week was to look at the following and comment. I did look at the following but this is the first chance that I have had to comment as I have been deeply ensconced in putting some of what I have learned into practice within my IoT research project (sorry, I’m deliberately not providing a lot of detail on the IoT project, just reflecting on what I have learned).

’the following’: Read and think about BS EN ISO 9241-210-2010 – Ergonomics of human-system interaction (ISO, 2010).

I suspect that I shall mainly use the ISO 9241 document as a reference tool. The document itself, in a way, takes the form of several checklists. I particularly like the way that design principles are so neatly summed-up as a helpful list on page 14! The pragmatic advice offered in relation to sources that designers might investigate, when direct contact with users is not possible (pages 16-17), has also been helpful for the IoT project where working with users falls outside the scope. The same will be true of this project, so I really need to get into the mind of my potential users!

Read and comment on user profiles and personae or personas

Since last week I have created 5 draft personas and have started to flesh out three proto personas. The preparatory process of sifting through the user characteristics is time consuming, but it truly does mean that you are covering almost every angle and gaining valuable domain knowledge in the process. My next task is to come up with personas for this project! Which I shall start on in my next post (in draft phase at the moment).

Read and comment on Scenarios

I actually jumped the gun with this one a bit as it is this week’s reading (not last weeks). However, I have already been starting to create scenarios for my IoT personas and I am hoping to refine them based on some of the further reading that I do this week on the topic. I found the distinctions made by Lauesen (2005) to be helpful, when considering tasks and scenarios. For example Lauesen (2005) offers the analogy of a hotel; the act of checking in is a “general case” as that could apply to any guest; the personification of the act where a named persona checks into a numbers room is a “case scenario” and a story which encapsulates both these factors in a real-life situation is a “vivid scenario” (p.162). This book is written from a software engineering viewpoint, which may mean that it does not apply in all situations. In the UX Book (2012) I feel like I may have found a new mantra to repeat to myself…“Did it all seem too easy? Did the story seem a little too perfect?” (p.266).

My Project plan Idea

One of my tasks for the second session was to come up with a project idea for the module. I have decided to that my project will focus on designing interaction for an Open Educational Resource (OER) in honour of , taking place this week (19-25th) internationally. My OER will be a self-guided web application for academic staff. The application will take a tour of a typical Blackboard or Moodle course/module and explain how to make study materials as accessible as possible and how to signpost materials to students. The activity will include some quizzing and sorting elements and will focus on presentation and structural considerations. I also think that it would be immensely helpful to simulate how text and colours are seen by say dyslexic folks or those who are colour blind.

I have experimented with this in some of my own programming in the past and it really helped to promote better understanding (code sample originally here, no longer available - coded in Processing.js).

If you are interested in seeing some examples of how this might look in the end, here are some of my favourites - although I should say that this project is more of a planning exercise, so it may only ever exist in prototype form.

British Prime Ministers 1783 - 1852: [link no longer available]. This is a fantastic choose-your-own-adventure style OER created in which is an open source tool from the University of Nottingham.

Interactive Ear - A Guide to Human Hearing: This one is quite sophisticated and one of my all time favourites.

References

ISO. (2010). ISO 9241-210:2010 Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems (1st ed.).

Lauesen, S. (2005). User interface design: A software engineering perspective (1st ed.). Harlow, England: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers.

Pyla, P. S., & Hartson, R. P. (2012). The UX Book: Process and guidelines for ensuring a quality user experience. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

New project = New category

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Well almost…

I have had a #UX category on this blog for a while, but I have decided to formalise it as I embark on a grad school module, Interaction Design and Evaluation Process. The UX category will be a place to collect my thoughts in relation to what I learn on the module and can be viewed in a collated format via the “UX” tab. Things to comment on this week:

Read and think about BS EN ISO 9241-210-2010 - Ergonomics of human-system interaction
Read and comment on user profiles and personae
Read and comment on Scenarios

All of this will also feed into my personal research project, looking at analyses of #IoT systems. See you soon!

Re-blog: Using an iPad for Research – Tips Q and A

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published on March 10th at the .

Last week, I received an email featuring questions about how to use an iPad to support qualitative research fieldwork. I have explored many facets of using an iPad, but thinking about the device in relation to research pulls together some of the most useful functions into a neat contextual package which you can tap-into (pun intended!). Essentially for new users, research can be a gateway to get more out of your device and for established users…research can also be a gateway to get more out of your device! I owe a debt of gratitude to the person who sent me such good questions; as not only have they inspired this blog post, but they have also laid the trail for today’s #appswap.

Please note: much of the tips below also apply to newer iPhones and there are some good apps for recording on Android devices as well. Android devices sometimes produce audio file types which require conversion, iTunes can be used as a quick and free converter for many audio file types (instruction video). Much of the information covered in this post pertains to 3rd party hardware and apps, these are currently classed as emerging technologies and are not supported by Information Services.

Q: Can I use the iPad to record the interviews and focus groups?

Absolutely, iPads have a good amount of internal memory and it is easier to manage your recordings and associated notes (and metadata) using the graphical touchscreen display.

For recording and notes only I can recommend Recordium and SoundNote.

Having tested both of these apps I have come out firmly in favour of Recordium (iPhone/iPad) in tandem with Dictapad (iPad only – see transcription below). At £7.99 Recordium doesn’t come cheap, but it has bags of functionality which is intuitive and useful such as: editing the audio; highlighting sections of audio; adding tags to sections of the audio; placing notes and photos throughout the audio; recording levels and quality adjustment options. This is made all the more compelling by the ability to use the “open in” option to backup your files to the staffcentral app, Evernote and Dropbox (University privileged information and research needs to be backed up using the staffcentral app).

If you want your recordings and transcribed notes in the same app, SoundNote is an option. I have tested this and I felt that although it is alright I felt that then recording quality was not as good as Recordium and also you couldn’t slow down the playback for ease of transcription, as you can in Dictapad (described below).

Q: Should I get an external mic for the iPad for conducting interviews?

The internal microphone in an iPad or iPhone is actually very good. I recommend testing the internal mic in a situation similar to your final interview setting and see how well it picks up voices in the room.

There are however a large number of iPad/iPhone compatible external microphones. For iPads specifically I would avoid mics which are attachment specific (such as 30 pin or lightning i.e. your power charger attachment on the device) as when you upgrade your device the mic may be incompatible. I recommend seeking out a USB mic and connecting it to the iPad using the Lightning to USB Camera Adapter¹ (£25.00 rrp Apple – cheaper generic versions for this adapter type can be unreliable or are unsupported). There are a number of USB microphones recommended for use with iPads, the main thing to bear in mind is that you want an microphone with its own power supply or batteries, otherwise connecting it will rapidly drain your device battery. Essentially if you are going to buy a microphone, you want to go for a good quality option in order for it to exceed the performance of the built-in mic. I recommend Blue’s range including the Snowball and the Yeti microphones as a brand with a good track record (Blue Snowball – £39-50 Amazon). Having run tests, some of the audio quality aspects are contingent on which app you use, certain free apps which have a paid version (e.g. AudioMemos) seemed to have a much lower recording quality, this may be intentional so that you upgrade your app but the difference was quite pronounced between Recordium and other apps.

Q: What about speech-to-text apps for transcribing the interviews?

Sadly there are not automagical apps which will take audio from an interview situation and transcribe it for you. There are apps like Dragon Dictate (free – iPad/iPhone) which have speech-to-text functionality, but they tend to be very dependent on the user speaking in a clearly enunciated way and would not be able to handle multiple people speaking with possible overlaps. I have been working with an app called Dictapad which allows you to slow down an existing audio file for ease of typing your own text transcription. At £3.99 it is an affordable app and has a very helpful instruction video when you first use the app. Also using the the “open in” option from within Recordium to bring your audio into Dictapad for transcription, seems like a good workflow.

Increasingly there are apps which offer low cost human transcription services directly from within the app. There are data protection considerations around interview materials with regard to these services; I advise against their use at this time.

All of the apps covered in this post allow you to save/export your audio files, so you can choose to work with the files on your computer (emailing to yourself or saving to staffcentral app). Transcribe web application is an option which you can try on a computer, it offers some similar functionality to Dictapad with more added features:

Transcribe can be used without an Internet connection (Google Chrome web browser installed). The application has $20 per year subscription fee; a free trial is available

Q: What keyboard/case should I get?

A colleague, who is very happy with her iPad keyboard, passed on this recommendation: the Inateck Ultra Slim (Amazon £18). Dictapad has keyboard shortcut options for scrubbing/navigating through audio so an external keyboard may speed up your typing and your transcription.

Q: What about tripods and attachments for video interviews?

Tripod attachments for iPads and iPhones are available, however then you also need to buy a tripod and they are usually a minimum of £50 (e.g. Grifiti Nootle iPad mount). A table mount may be easier to use in an interview situation (e.g. PureMounts range, which offers different attachment types for different types of iPad to go with their table and wall mounts).

Q: I want to take my dongle further afield where there is no Wifi. Are there any particular ‘pay as you go’ USB dongles I should use for mobile Wifi?

For use with a Wifi-only iPad (as you can get mobile contract iPads) you will need a Mifi device (e.g. E5330 3G) rather rather than a dongle, as standard dongles will not be compatible with an iPad. Earlier in this post I talked about the USB adapter for iPad; sadly the adapter will not allow you to use a USB dongle with an iPad it is a question of the software on the dongle – anything that you use with the USB adapter needs to be ‘plug and play’ – meaning that it is not dependent on any software. As this would most likely be a personal expense, you may want to check with your mobile carrier about what they offer in terms of contracts for mobile Wifi. Also check with your provider that the Mifi device is iPad compatible prior to purchase. It is possible to use an iPhone to tether a 3G/4G connection, but you will want to check your data contract allowances before you do that.

USB adaptor for older iPads. ↩︎

Reflection: The search for the best notetaking -or rather handwriting- app

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

In February I shall be starting an MSc in User Experience Design and as a consequence my thoughts have turned to the study tools, which I wish to make use of as a student. As part of this process I have been considering my arsenal of apps. I’ll likely talk about the full extent of my app choice plotting in future posts. In this post I shall provide my reflections on notetaking apps in-particular. In my experience early preparation has always been the best strategy when considering any new academic venture, so I look forward to sharing some of my findings on this blog in the lead up to and during my forthcoming period of study.

Productivity and notetaking apps that I use

In my professional life I have become a devotee of . I was not by any means an early adopter or rather I was but I got burned by a glitch circa 2009 which resulted in the loss on my web-based notes (at that time using it in-browser). I must stress that such a loss is not likely to happen with Evernote now but back then it was a relatively new thing and when on the cutting edge you may occasionally experience virtual paper cuts (thankfully I only lost a few notes)! However last year Evernote won my heart again when I decided that I wanted a solution with note tagging (keywords), multi-platform compatibility (in my case, Mac, PC, iOS, Android) and OCR capabilities (text recognition). After looking at a few app-based solutions it was the only option which gave me the flexibility I was craving. In my work I have come to rely on Evernote as an excellent option for recording meetings and consultations, being able to send a record of what was discussed and any actions to a staff person immediately after the meeting. I then link this information to my to-dos in (I’ll write about the wonders of Trello some other time). Sometimes when I’m particularly busy I quickly jot ideas or tasks down on paper and then use Evernote’s document capture function to take a photo. I am always impressed by the OCR capabilities of Evernote when it comes to recognising my squiggly handwriting and making it searchable (the detects words in handwriting rather than converting handwriting to type). Also when you add in the photo annotation tools made possible through Evenote’s partner app I am one happy customer. But…and you knew that this was coming, there is something to be said for handwriting and when it comes to deeper notetaking and truly learning concepts; I personally need to write concepts down to retain and understand them. When the iPad first came out in 2010 (Apple, 2010).

Handwriting in apps

File management

I was an early adopter and one of the first apps I fell in love with was . This app lets you draw or write with a stylus or your finger in virtual notebooks, later they added being able to add photos and voila it became a virtual sketchbook! I no longer wanted to carry a moleskin and an iPad and for a while Penultimate served me well for quick notetaking. Penultimate was acquired by Evernote in 2012 (Libin, 2012) and with that came the OCR capability of being able to ‘search’ your handwritten notes. However there were three functions which I have always felt are missing from Penultimate app which eventually caused me to abandon it. The first is the absence of a adequate notebook file management system, in apps like , and , although more strictly for annotation of imported files, these apps allowed a far superior filing system. For example in iAnnotatePDF you can tag files with keywords, create folders and connect to Sharepoint (MyFiles) via WebDAV for backup purposes. In Penultimate, you just have an ever growing pile of notebooks.

iAnnotatePDF, the tagging function is shown.

Background colour

The second issue is the background colour, from my you’ll know that background colour is very important to my efficiency when reading and writing. You do have the option of importing a photo to use as a background, so in theory that is a workaround and you can purchase notepaper types from Evernote Market, there are some good ones but these are more to do with line based layouts than page background colour. I have also found this which allows you to create your own templates for Penultimate as well as use templates which other’s have created, in particular I was happy to find a template after the recent presentation about it. With any drawing/handwriting app, as a workaround, you could draw a template on the page, but then it becomes tricky when you need to cut and paste your written sections as the background gets confused with your written content.

Notes Plus - the background colours and template options available in Notes Plus.

On-screen wrist protector

The third issue is the lack of an adjustable on-screen wrist protector. Penultimate allows you to define your wrist position but as you will see from the image below, it has trouble deciding which marks my stylus is making and which marks my wrist is making. This was the deal-breaker, I’d be mid-flow in writing and half of what I’d written would fail to show up as in Penultimate’s view my wrist had been doing the writing!

Penultimate - the effect of wrist shown.

Cornell Notes template shown above from

So after four years of on and off trial and error, with periodic abandonment of the idea of handwriting on my iPad other than using very helpful PDF annotation apps for small comments (another post about these apps specifically in the future), I think that I have finally come up with my ideal list of functions which a handwriting app needs - and one app fits almost all of them - Notes Plus with Notability taking a close second place.

My ideal list of functions

File management and ideally creation of folders or notebooks for storage of different note types
Background page colour and template adjustment
Adjustable on-screen wristguard

iAnnotatePDF - this is a pretty typical wristguard which you can adjust downward as you fill the page. A simple thing, but important.

Good virtual ink flow
Ink customisation and style
Two-fingered scroll and zoom support
Easy drag and drop customisation of already written text
Dropbox and/or WebDAV backup support - just in case
Hand-drawn shape recognition - I draw a circle or square and the app tidies it up for me automatically
Close-up mode - I not good at keeping to the lines or within box areas otherwise due to my squiggly writing

Two Examples of Close-up mode

Notes Plus

Also shows the excellent Ink customisation options.

Notability

Audio memos - for when my writing isn’t fast enough!
Presentation mode: can this app be shown in a classroom, to demonstrate annotation or to draw quick diagrams?
Good tutorial materials to make the most of the app
- Bonus:
  - PDF and word doc import - is it an annotation app too!
  - Layers - ‘send to back’ and locking options
  - Built-in Cornell Notes template
  - Handwriting to text converter (!) - in app purchase available in Notes Plus

Handwriting to Text Converter in Notes Plus

Select the text by drawing a circle around it. Select the conversion option.

It is accurate even with my horrendous handwriting.

Analysis

I analysed four apps based on these criteria: Notes Plus, Notability, iAnnotatePDF and Penultimate. The results are below, I have awarded 2 point for each “X”, the “+” signs indicate exemplary functionality. Bonus features are not counted towards possible total of 26.

New: Notability have just released a .

Criteria	Apps				Notes
	Notes Plus	Notability	iAnnotatePDF	Penultimate
File Management	X	X	X+		iAnnotatePDF:has excellent file management options - tagging, folders, search etc.
Background page colour	X	X+			Notability: will even allow you to change the background colour of PDFs.
On-screen wristguard (adjustable)	X	X	X
Good virtual ink flow	X+	X	X	X	iAnnotate is not quite as good as the others on this point.
Ink customisation	X+	X	X	X	Notes Plus has highly customisable and rather beautiful ink - it actually improves my handwriting.
Two-fingered scroll and zoom	X	X	X	X
Easy drag and drop of text	X+	X	X+	X
Backup options	X Dropbox Google Drive	X WebDAV Dropbox	X Dropbox Box Google Drive OneDrive WebDAV	X Evernote Dropbox	Of course I would love all these apps to be able to sync with Evernote some how, but I would like to see all of them offer a WebDAV option and ideally also Microsoft OneDrive.
Drawn shape recognition	X+				Notability does offer a nice function for drawing shapes and figures, but no shape recognition. This is where iAnnotate is more of an annotation programme, the ‘stamp’ tool has some shapes but it is limited.
Close-up mode	X	X			iAnnotatePDF: does let you zoom in and type and it also has a signature tool for close-up signing on PDFs, but these are less well suited to original notetaking. Penultimate: has drift mode for this kind of writing experience, but I found the enforced motion quite difficult and also frustrating to get out of.
Audio memos	X	X	X+		iAnnotatePDF: lets you place notes in-context throughout your document (in-place, a microphone icon is shown next to areas of text). Really helpful for formative feedback. Notes Plus and Notability: will link audio notes to the specific pages rather than areas of the page.
Presentation mode or allows projection	X+	X	X		Further testing needed: Notes Plus has a VGA connection view which is great. Notability does not have a specific mode, but does project well, as is the case with iAnnotate. Penultimate in my experience has a strange presentation mode and in prior versions would not show when connected via VGA to a projector.
Tutorial materials	X+	X	X	X	Notes Plus: has a lovely developer website as well with a forum and they have responded very positively to my features suggestions in the past. iAnnotate: also have a superb website with tutorials and FAQs.
Bonus
PDF and Word document import	X Converts to PDF	X Converts to PDF	X Converts to PDF
Layers	X+
Cornell Notes Template (built-in)	X
Handwriting to text converter	X+				Notes Plus: offers an in-app purchase for handwriting to text conversion. It is very accurate for small sections of text and immensely useful.
Totals (26)	26	24	20	12

Conclusion

For written notes Notes Plus wins hands-down and it is also superb for combining PDFs, Word documents and written notes into self-contained notebooks or virtual binders. I have resolved to use it for the purpose of textbook related notes over the next few months. I’ll report back on how it goes. For decent notetaking and excellent PDF annotation Notability has clear benefits. iAnnotatePDF’s clear advantage over the other apps is its excellent file management system and also the ability to place audio comments in context within a document.

References:

Apple, Inc. (2010) Apple Launches iPad [Online]. Available: (Accessed: 28 September 2014).

Libin, P. (2012) Evernote Acquires Penultimate. Evernote Blog [Online]. Available from: (Accessed: 28 September 2014).

The Adjustment Bureau: The Case for Adjustment in Mobile Apps

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Recently I was asked to present at the Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG) event hosted by the University of Sussex. MELSIG is a special interest group originally formed in 2008 (MELSIG, 2014). The group’s focus has evolved, alongside contemporary developments in technology, to include investigation of a wide variety of digital media when applied to the support of learning and teaching. The theme for the University of Sussex event was Digital Media Interaction and Inclusivity and this was exactly the prompt I needed to engage in more thorough research of in-app adjustment functions which has been preoccupation of mine for a while.

Learning as a community

Through my work building ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) on both sides of the Atlantic, and in particular during the development of events at the University of Brighton something always bothered me about apps or mobile applications/software. Namely why, when developers have such rich to work with, isn’t there more attention to paid to inclusivity when designing apps? Both the iOS and Android operating systems have a number of built-in functions which have the potential to greatly aid accessibility in addition to the benefits afforded by the touchscreens and the form factors of the devices themselves. However, due to the unique conditions under which apps are developed a combination of factors including time/monetary constraints, corporate interests and the lack of a common accessibility guidelines seem to stifle the potential of certain apps on the accessibility front. Indeed within app development no equivalent to the seems to have emerged and the rule systems applied to website design such as the have no bearing on the design of apps. On the one hand this is quite liberating for interface designers and has led to something of a Wild West populated by some truly innovative interface designs.

Bringing greater intention to development for accessibility

My intention with this post, I should point out, is not to stifle innovation, but rather I would like to propose that when an app’s primary purpose falls within certain categories of use, ‘categories’ which can be applied to the creation or consumption of educational materials or be used in support of learning, that extra attention be paid to the accessibility features of ‘said’ apps. Perhaps in the future this could resemble a set of agreed standards, but at this time I would like to make more of a humble request rather than a full recommendation. The core idea I put forth in relation to my ‘request’ is the notion of letting the user choose and customise the app through the presence of ‘adjustment’; this I believe is a key facet of the path to accessibility. I shall expand on ‘categories of use’ later in this post.

Using the Kindle app as dyslexic person

A personal experience which prompted this line of enquiry was my use of Amazon’s Kindle app for iPad. In October 2011 Apple introduced support of text-to-speech (TTS) within their iOS5 operating system (Moren, 2012); as a Dyslexic person I was eager to make use of this function and to this day find it immensely useful. Imagine my disappointment to find out that the ‘Speak Selection’ tool is actively blocked within the Kindle app. The ‘VoiceOver’ tool was later allowed within the Kindle for iPad app (Ingber, 2013) and Amazon had introduced its own text-to-speech function to the Kindle 2 device in 2009 but eBook publishers could choose to disallow the function with the viewpoint that it might damage audiobook sales (Schofield, 2009). There is another aspect of the Kindle app which always seems a bit of an oversight; reading background colours. Given the development resources available to Amazon, there are only three options provided for the text background colour: White, Black (X-Ray) and Sepia. Why not make the reading experience as accessible as possible by including customisable background colours as evidenced by apps like , and ? When comparing Kindle to particularly Kobo reader and Goodreader one is reminded of the oft used technological paradigm of VHS and Betamax; VHS won due to market share in combination with other factors rather than viewing quality.

On the topic of background colour more specifically, from a personal perspective this is the number one ‘adjustment’ which I would like to see made available in apps. Particularly those apps which are promoted as ‘readers’. My own perception of black text on a white background has been a persistent barrier to my consumption and enjoyment of reading. To help elaborate on my own experience I even created a javascript web application using to show what this experience is like for me. This is a condition sometimes known as Irlen Syndrome, Meres-Irlen Syndrome, Visual Stress or Scoptopic Sensitivity syndrome. I am hesitant to adopt any of these definitions as an explanation of my experience, as I have never received an official diagnosis. Furthermore there are some sceptical viewpoints in the medical fields when assessing the diagnostic procedures and the original studies which led to the recognition of the symptoms (Coyle, 1995; Lawrence, 2008). I prefer to view it as a complex part of my own dyslexic puzzle and one thing is not in doubt, the ability to adjust background colours, fonts and font-sizes makes a huge difference to my experience of reading.

The Adjustment Bureau

So why the title of The Adjustment Bureau? The 2011 film, The Adjustment Bureau based on the Phillip K. Dick’s short story, The Adjustment Team (1954 - ) which tells of characters whose life choices deviate from a preordained plan set-out by a mysterious organisation. Inspired by this idea I postulated that there may be a parallel between that concept and app developers whose choices are guided or pushed by a combination of external factors and client influences, ultimately I wondered whether this explains why the avenues to accessibility are so seldom followed? With all of this in mind I decided to enter into an assessment of the adjustment functionality available within some of the most prominent and popular apps I have encountered while working in Higher Education. I focused on apps available for iOS for this pursuit as that is the primary device type supported in my workplace and I had access to the devices. This also prompted me to define some basic ‘categories of use’ when applied to app use within academia for the support of learning and teaching.

Categaries of Use

The Categories of Use are as follows:

Category	Definition
Browser	A web browser for navigating web-based information. May include other features such as reader functions and RSS curation.
Composer	In this context for the composition of text-based materials and documents.
Consumer	For curation and consumption of RSS content, blogs and online news sources.
Notetaker/annotation	Apps with the main purpose of taking notes and/or placing notes and annotation on documents.
Reader	Apps with the primary purpose of reading text, eBooks, ePubs, PDF and other text formats. May have limited annotation tools.

When defining the categories I tried to resist the use of pre-existing desktop software definitions such as for example ‘word processing’. These definitions have established associations and many apps reach beyond the format-based outputs which are expected from these former software definitions.

The Adjustment Criteria upon which each app was judged are listed below. If an app includes a feature it is awarded a point for that criterion, it may partially allow a feature which would result in a 0.5 of a point. The total score is a point value out of a total of 8, for the 8 criteria and is shown as a final percentage. Apps which achieve >=60% are highlighted in purple.

Criterion	Definition
Font Size	Font size can be changed specifically, within the app. In the case of ‘composer’ categorised apps this is included in their writing functionality.
Line Height	Line height can be changed specifically, within the app. In the case of ‘composer’ categorised apps this is included in their writing functionality.
Font Style	Font style can be changed specifically, within the app. In the case of ‘composer’ categorised apps this is included in their writing functionality.
Background Colour: Invert/Brightness	Brightness of the display or invert (white text on black background) is a specific option within the app.
Background Colour: Sepia	A sepia background (beige/mild yellow) is a specific option within the app.
Background Colour: Sliders/Colour	A selection of colours or Red/Green/Blue sliders allow the user to adjust and specify the background colour within the app.
Pinch zoom	The pinch zoom is a built-in function of the iOS. Some apps do not make/allow full use of this touch-based function.
iOS Speak Selection	A function which can be enabled in the General > Accessibility functions in the iOS this can be used by selecting text in certain apps and pressing the ‘speak’ option which comes up. This is distinct from the ‘Voiceover’ option which is a complete audio interface and harder use for quick impromptu needs.

The scores as an embedded Google Spreadsheet - a work in progress. NB: this list is not designed to be exhaustive and if you have other apps which you would like me to assess using these criteria, please add them to the comments area below. The “+” next to the app title identifies that the app is available for both iPhone and iPad.

Conclusion

Through this process of investigation and app functionality testing I feel that I have only begun to scrape the surface of how accessibility functions are implemented and the possible avenues for improvement. I think that there is certainly scope to devise a more concrete scoring and testing system with the view to helping teachers and learners make informed decisions about the accessibility functions of certain apps. Such a system would also have the potential to help inform developers about the needs of specific user groups. However the responsibility cannot be squarely that of the developers, as users we also have a responsibility to let developers know what we want and need. One of the benefits of working with apps is that developers are often small to medium sized companies and really benefit from the suggestions from their user-base, this may extend to use testing. In the Wild West of apps we as the user have an opportunity to make a difference and we shouldn’t miss out by sticking to the easy path.

Appendix I - Some particularly successful adjustment interfaces discovered as a result of this investigation

Bluefire reader - this free reader app features some very nice adjustment features. However there is only a small selection of free, public domain ebooks available. The app does allow you to connect a DropBox account so you could in theory use it to read ePub files with the reader functionality.

Feedly - is a free rss feed curator with built-in links to social media services. It is very helpful for the organising categories of news sources including blogs, news sites and trends. It does have some basic and helpful tools to customise the reading experience, such as invert text colour and font size.

Goodreader 4 - an excellent and very powerful reader app. This app includes extensive adjustment capabilities as well as file conversion, compression and on-document annotation. This is the only app to score 100% in the criteria ratings and £1.99 it is a good deal.

Kindle for iPad - somewhat limited capabilities compared to some of the other reader apps, but does allow for a number of adjustments including: brightness, font size, font style, background colour, screen layout and line height.

Index Card for iPad - although this app is limited in terms of altering the background colour when you are composing text it does allow for the display of your resulting Index Cards on tinted backgrounds. This app does allows for text size adjustments and is very helpful for planning out essays and verbal presentations.

Kobo Reader for iPad - Kobo books need to be managed through an account on their website and can also be bought via WHSmiths. The app allows you to search and review free samples. This app has nice adjustment functions and also has a good notifications area which helps users to discover new features which are added to the app.

Microsoft OneNote for iPad - Unfortunately the Microsoft Office apps do not score very highly on this accessibility rating. The OneNote app by contrast has some nice function, including a number of ‘Page Color’ options under the ‘View’ tab.

Notability for iPad - this is a great app for reading, notetaking and annotation. One of its lesser known functions is the flexibility of page background colours and layouts when viewing and annotating PDF files. This app has excellent written and audio annotation options. It is comparable to iAnnotatePDF for iPad with the main difference that audio annotations can be placed contextually throughout the text in iAnnotate.

OverDrive Media Console - a reader app which will allow you to download eBooks from certain public libraries and retailers such as Waterstones. The extent of adjustment depends upon the individual eBook but this app has a lovely intuitive interface both as a local app and as a web-based reader app. The app also allows access to eBooks.

Scribd. - this reader app requires a subscription (£5.99/month) for full access to books and they carry a comprehensive catalogue of both fiction and non-fiction as well as self-published and scholarly works. It is possible to access book samples for free through the app. The text and font related adjustment options are similar to the Kindle app.

(discussed during MELSIG presentation)

This screenshot shows the reader mode adjustments which are available when you turn a page to reader mode. You can save pages to PDF with these settings.

References:

Apple Inc., Accessibility Programming Guide for iOS: Introduction

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 23 August 2014).

Bluefire (2014) Bluefire Reader Apps

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Coyle, B. (1995) USE OF FILTERS TO TREAT VISUAL-PERCEPTION PROBLEM CREATES ADHERENTS AND SKEPTICS. Canadian Medical Association journal, 152**,** 749-750.

Dredge, S. (2011) Top 10 steps towards making your mobile apps more accessible

\[Online\]

. theguardian.com. Available: (Accessed: 23 August 2014).

European Commission (2014) Information Providers Guide - The EU Internet Handbook

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Good.iWare (2014) Goodreader

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Ingber, J. (2013) Using VoiceOver with the Accessible Amazon iOS Kindle App. AFB AccessWorld Magazine, 14.

Kobo (2014) eReading Apps - Kobo

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Lawrence, J. (2008) Research into Meares-Irlen syndrome. Sutton: Reed Business Information UK.

Lewis, T. (2014) Paddy Considine: ‘I was always portrayed as angry, but I was just ill’

\[Online\]

. theguardian.com. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

MELSIG (2014) About MELSIG

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

MELSIG (2014) Digital Media Interaction and Inclusivity

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Microsoft. Guidelines for designing accessible apps - Windows app development

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 23 August 2014).

Moren, D. (2012) iOS 5 Review: Ambitious update rings in the changes

\[Online\]

. macworld.com. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Ritchie, S. J., Della Sala, S. & McIntosh, R. D. (2011) Irlen colored overlays do not alleviate reading difficulties. Pediatrics, 128**,** e932-E938.

Schofield, J. (2009) Amazon caves to Authors Guild over Kindle’s text-to-speech reading. The Guardian Technology Blog

\[Online\]

. Available from: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) (2014) Web Accessibility initiative (WAI)

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wikipedia. 2014. Software development kit

\[Online\]

. Available: (Accessed: 7 September 2014).

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