UX Scotland 2017

John Rooksby
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

I originally published this on my Tumblr blog in June 2017.

UX Scotland is an annual conference held in Edinburgh for user experience design professionals. I attended the first day of the conference.

Jared Spool at UX Scotland

Keynote: Jared Spool

The opening keynote was by Jared Spool who, according to his wikipedia page, “is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a research, training, and consulting firm specializing in website and product usability, and the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world”. Spool’s talk “Beyond the UX Tipping Point” was on how user experience design can become embedded in organisations, and hence how they can come to make better products and services.

Spool’s opening example was Disney, which in 1997 had a terrible website (look it up on the wayback machine). He used this website for years in his training as an example of poor design. He’d set tasks such as “find the cheapest hotel on the monorail line at Disney World”. Few people could complete this task, but worse about one in twenty people would identify a hotel thousands of miles away in Disneyland. This related to a real world problem for Disney who would find that people would arrive at one park with a reservation at another. They actually set aside a quota of rooms for people in this situation. So, how did Disney get from there to today’s highly successful Magic Band given to customers?

Spool spoke about how individuals and organisations go through stages of understanding. From “unconscious incompetence” where they don’t recognise they’re getting things wrong, to mastery and “infused UX design”. He argued that to get there organisations need to be playbook driven rather than process driven.

VUI Design

The first session I went to was a hands-on workshop on Voice User Interface (VUI) Design led by Ben Sauer from Clearleft. This session focused mainly on designing for personal/home assistants such as Siri and Alexa. One of the key challenges in this area is that there are no/few affordances for voice apps — its not apparent what you can and can’t do. People forget what apps they have installed and what devices can do. Also, the technology is still far from perfect and so design needs to continually support “failing gracefully”.

Most voice interfaces are currently transactional or instruction driven — do this, do that. When designing these kinds of systems its helpful not to rush straight into prototyping an app, but to produce wizard of oz style systems. Its necessary to think and work through how people will pose questions and give commands and in what contexts, and so lo-fi wizard of oz studies enable you to rapidly gain insight into what people say. Apparently for designing Alexa apps you need to specify all the ways in which a question or command might be posed.

Behavioural Economics and Choice

Slide from Paul Jervis Heath

After lunch I went to a talk by Paul Jervis Heath on “Bounded Rationality and the Architecture of Choice: Applying Behavioural Economics to User Experience Design” . Behavioural economics is “the science of how people make decisions — how people really think and make decisions”. Kahneman, one of the founders of the field, explained “I’m much more interested in natural stupidity than artificial intelligence.” Jervis Health spoke about cognitive biases, and then “choice architecture” — the ways in which choices can be presented in order to nudge but not force people into making a particular decision and even making a decision at all. One of the key things in this area seems to be not guiding people to a specific choice but ensuring they make a choice — i.e. that they make a purchase.

Myths of UX

Following that I went to a talk by Zoltan Kollin on the myths of UX design. He presented a series of counter examples to what we typically say are qualities of good design (e.g. consistency, frictionless, intuitiveness, simplicity). The examples included shoelaces, which require years of learning; ATMs which only dispense money once the card is retrieved, keyboards which slow you down, and Reddit and Facebook which have cluttered, complex interfaces.

Designing for Closure

Finally I went to a session by Anna Wojtczuk from Scott Logic on “Letting your customers go: Designing for closure”. Wojtczuk explained that opening and on boarding experiences these days are often extremely well designed but closures and endings are not. She discussed the work of Joe MacLeod on closure experiences and recommended a book he has coming out called Ends.

Wojtczuk focused on one kind of closure: withdrawals. This is where you end a subscription or membership of a service. Often its made very difficult to withdraw, for example Virgin used to make you telephone them in order to cancel, and sites including Amazon still make it very difficult to find where to delete an account. However, endings are important and people may want or need to leave for a variety of reasons. A poor ending experience may lead to people not wanting to come back and not recommending you to others. She drew analogies with fairy tales and how customers can end on a “happy ever after”.

John Rooksby

Written by

I’m interested in Human Computer Interaction and User Experience Design. http://johnrooksby.org

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