This month, the UX Crunch hosted a meetup at the BBC’s headquarters in Central London. Here are my key takeaways from the evening.
Where we find ourselves in UX today — Colin Burns, CDO @ BBC
“It’s not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do” — Jerry Garcia (The Grateful Dead).
Currently, we’re at peak web UX and late in Kano’s adoption curve:
After analysing all of the web layouts that they use at the BBC, Colin’s team found that there were only really 3 main layouts:
- Things: pieces of content
- Things that point at things: homepages/search tools
- Strings: of content and data
Because of all this, we need to push boundaries a lot more to do really innovative work. Colin broke down innovation into 3 categories:
- Incremental innovation: the kind of iterative UX work done by agile teams
- Sustaining innovation: not remarkable but is effectively keeping up with the tech that your competitors or peers are using, to remain relevant
- Discontinuous innovation: paradigm shifts in approach or the status quo
It is in the discontinuous innovation, where the truly great work is done but as a field, we’re not focussing on it enough at the moment.
Embodiment in VR — Nick Ritchie
Well known and established pillars of achieving a feeling of presence for the user in VR:
- Place illusion: the environment they are in seems realistic
- Plausibility: the events that take place in that environment have believability
- Body ownership
To immerse users into the story, Nick’s team added another pillar of their own — response: how the experience makes users feel.
They tested 3 modes of VR experiences and scored them against these 4 pillars of presence to assess which mode offered the most present experience.
3 modes:
- Embodied as the character in the VR and able to control movement
- Included in the experience but unable to control the main character
- Observing the story
So when users were embodied in the experience, they were much more likely to be engaged and present in the VR experience.
3 elements of designing for voice — Stevey Robertson & Gar Thomas
What are the key areas when ideating for voice experiences?
- Context: when/where/how people are using voice interfaces, changing all the time (used to be just limited to the bedroom or in the home but now it’s being used more on the go, with kids etc)
- Role play: using the “Wizard of Oz” approach to act through conversation and identify a script
- Visualising a voice experience
When writing for voice, UX plays a key role in:
- Content discovery
- Universal navigation
- Storytelling
We don’t yet have an established universal navigation for voice where users intuitively know how to interact with the UI (no version of the hamburger menu or pagination from mobile web design/apps). A lot of their job is experimenting with many ideas of navigation options for voice interfaces.
Prototyping: they use Sayspring - https://www.sayspring.com/
Greatest challenges in voice UX at the moment:
- Establishing a consistent design that works across all platforms (Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana…)
- Providing a seamless experience from beginning to end
- Personalisation
Definition of service design — Karen Ly
“The design of the right service for the right group of people, with a group of people”
Use A-frame to design VR experiences — Alex Nelson, FXR
Using a Google Cardboard VR headset and what looked like some very simple code in A-frame and Google’s library of elements, Alex showed us how to build a simple VR experience. It was absolutely mind-blowing an something that I really need to try soon!
It was a deeply insightful evening, offering a sneak peak at the incredible work that is being done at the BBC in UX. Like most great UX, as consumers we often don’t even notice it, it just fits into our lives seamlessly. As these emerging technologies of voice and VR grow to maturity, it will be really interesting to see where this all goes next.