What animation can do for UX + tips to sharpen your research craft
UCD Bristol was a bit different this month: we had not one, but three speakers and two insightful talks.
Founder of Haior Harry Cobold and user research experts at OVO Energy Ben Cubbon and Jess Dilworth took the stage at this month’s UCD Bristol, on 15th May. Harry was the first speaker on the line-up, making the case for animation as a tool to improve the user experience (when done well!).
According to Harry, “visuals are easier to understand and remember” because “our minds are engineered to be attracted to movement”. A good example of how visuals are processed faster than words: it takes 1/10th of second to digest a visual, compared to 60 seconds to read 200 words.
Animation helps to:
- Give the user visual feedback
- Focus the attention
- Express your brand’s personality (Harry’s favourite reason)
Some tools of the trade that you can use if you are looking to experiment with animation are: Adobe XD, Javascript libraries, CSS and animation libraries, Framer, Figma, After Effects, or event Powerpoint/Keynote.
Harry’s final piece of advice:
“Always animate responsibly, don’t go over the top, be realistic, don’t sacrifice performance and always circle back to the original intention for the animation.”
After Harry’s talk, it was time for Ben Cubbon, User Research Practice Lead, and User Researcher Jess Dilworth to share what they are currently learning as they sharpen their own research craft at OVO Energy.
Benefits of sharpening the research craft :
- Confidence to help others learn our craft and advocate for best methods.
- Personal development: it will help you understand the components better.
- Allows you to renew your focus on delivery.
- Helps you mature and move the research needle from good to better.
The best way to sharpen the craft involves research and analysis methods, according to Ben and Jess, which can be done through:
- Playing with new methods
- Critiquing existing methods
During the talk at UCD Bristol, Ben and Jess focussed on critiques to harness the collective experience, identify what can be improved in the interview process and build trust between team members.
“We think interview critiques are good because demystify research, they create a more reflective practice, they help us to articulate what good research looks like, but they are not perfect. Critiques only look at a subsection of the research and the feedback can feel personal.”
Here’s a recap of the three critiques that Ben and Jess ran at OVO.
Before closing the talk, Ben and Jess shared a framework for interview critiques, based on three simple steps:
- Each round to incorporate critique.
Regular critiques will help us to:
- normalise them
- remove ceremony
- become better critics
- learn more iteratively
2. Take a random small sample of the data collected.
You should face the critiques as experiments. Don’t cherry pick the best bits from your research!
3. Focus on the objective of the data collection, not the research.
We can’t properly evaluate the whole piece of research if we’re only looking at a 10-minute interview segment, so focus on what the objective of that moment of data collection was about.
The UCD Bristol 18 video will soon be available on YouTube and added to this blog. Our meetup will be back on Wednesday 19th June. More information will soon be shared on our Meetup page.
We are currently accepting talk submissions, so if you would like to feature in one of our next meetups as a speaker, complete this short form. We can’t wait to hear about your awesome ideas!
