UX | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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). ↩︎

[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

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\[Blog post\]

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Kalloniatis, C., Mouratidis, H., Vassilis, M., Islam, S., Gritzalis, S., & Kavakli, E. (2014). Towards the design of secure and privacy-oriented Information Systems in the Cloud: Identifying the major concepts. Computer Stan- dards & Interfaces, 36(4), 759–775. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2013.12.010

Krok, A. (2016, June 6). British security firm hacks Mitsubishi Outlander via mobile app, Wi-Fi - Roadshow. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from

Lohr, S. (2016, June 9). Tony Fadell steps down amid tumult at nest, a Google acquisition. Technology. 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/)

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

openHAB. (2016). OpenHAB. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from Rogers, C. Martha Lane Fox interviewed by the house magazine Retrieved from

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

Wollerton, M. (2016, May 23). The best smart hub. Retrieved from

Woods, B. (2016, January 19). Hippocratic oath for connected medical devices. Retrieved June 12, 2016, from

My current personal hero:

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.

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!

UX | Fiona MacNeill | Macknowlogist

LTUX Brighton presents, Talk UX: Redesigning Place

Talk UX Stats

Personal Reflection

The UX of Self-Defence at LTUX Brighton

Research Hacking at UX Camp Brighton 2024

Literature review

Creating truly accessible forms at SD in Gov (Virtual)

UX Camp Brighton 2023 - Game on!

Today is UX Camp Brighton!

What is UX Camp Brighton?

Why do I love UX Camp Brighton?

What do I do at UX Camp Brighton?

What am I doing instead this year?

Get to the point Fiona…

UX Brighton 2022 - 4th November

The brilliant return of UX Brighton

The level of a problem

When a product stops solving a problem

Defining a problem

Defining a collection of problems

Defining plans to address each problem in your collection

Defining a strategy as a collection of plans

Making decisions and actioning plans

My decision to use Evernote back in 2013

Recognising when your plans are not working and correcting the course

To conclude

Random closing thought

Cufflinks - Edition 2 - 23rd October

Welcome back to Cufflinks

Reading highlights

Some things I did and things that I am doing

I was a guest on the UX Coach Podcast

I completed some career firsts

My first Sprint

Learning campaign based on user research

I have been volunteering for Ladies that UX Brighton

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

Activities to feed my mind

Moving my body

Curating my space

Something I made or fixed

References

Extra features

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

Reflecting on designing a watch party for UX Brighton

Edited Vlog Transcript

Discover

Three key problems to solve

Facilitation and watching other people ‘watch’

Define

Software requirements to address the challenges

Thinking about ‘ViewX’ or the Exerience of Viewing

Defining a format or schedule for the event

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

References

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

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

What are we going to do?

Why are creating a plot?

Why are we using RStudio with ggplot2?

Step 1: Collect the Data, Show me the Data

Collect the data

Download the data

Step 2: Do the Maths

The Opportunity Algorithm

Create R Food

Step 3: Get Sta(R)ted

Step 4: OoooH aRrrrr

Now for the plot part:

Step 5: Aesthetics

Further Reading:

References:

Code

[Talk] Factors of Trust in IoT App Interfaces Redux

Talk presented at UX Camp Brighton 2016 - Redux on 14/06/16 at 68 Middle Street

Session description:

About SenSe

Preliminary recommendations:

References