Ux-Brighton | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

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. ↩︎

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).