Collaborate Bristol 2017-Key takeaways

One of our UX designers recently attended the 2017 Collaborate Bristol Conference hosted by Nomensa. Collaborate brings the best in user experience, information architecture, accessibility, and digital design to the UK’s largest creative hub outside of London — Bristol.

This years lineup consisted of speakers from Sony Mobile, Monzo Bank, NHS Digital, Moo, Volkswagen, Bravand & UCL. It’s a great chance to be inspired, learn heaps and network with like minded creatives to keep up to date with the next years coming trends and problem solving.

I have broken the takeaways down by speakers

Lisa Campana, Head of Design, Moo talks about ‘The power of personality: why just being usable alone doesn’t cut it’.

An empowering talk on how we can engage products/consumers along the entire journey, rather than only testing the service we provide. This was gleaned from when Lisa sent herself one of Moo’s direct mailers and realised that their brand values was not shown it what was the delivered result.

Key takeaways:

  • Areas that should be questioned with a user; what personality came across when you first used the product/service? What do you feel the company is? What are the three characteristics you would describe the company of having?
  • Tone of voice is key! Wether your company is national, international or worldwide you have to accept different markets need different voices! The way you present the information can have a great impact on your users and will inevitably help them convert. This was showed in an example of how the British copy was not altered for the American market and the users assumed that this was going to be a lavish and expensive product.
  • Keep in mind the two ‘selves’; the experience self & the remembering self. This is best demonstrated when you have a great online experience where there is no friction or issue in achieving your intended goal (experience self) but after the purchase/experience has been made if it is delivered late or arrives broken, the user has now lost trust in your product (remembering self)! — You should test the process in all aspects of your intended experience because you never know what is happening outside of just your product!
  • A consistent message —There should be a consistent mission statement / core values across everything which ties into all material produced.
  • Once the consistent message has been chosen there should be a clear set of parameters guiding the business on the do’s and don’ts.

Alistair Campbell, Director of accessibility, Nomensa talks about ‘Future Accessibility’.

An interesting talk on how we should implement and tackle the future of accessibility. It has definitely made me start to question how we integrate accessibility into products, if we start products with accessibility in mind then we can bake it into the product from the get go.

Key takeaways:

  • Recommended that we start to become familiar with the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). This is a handbook which covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible to users. Users being a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.
  • As everything is still up in the air a few of the new suggestions for mobile could be; specific device sensor information is not required for functionality, functionality is operable in any orientation, multi-pointer gestures can also be operated with simple pointer gestures, single-key shortcuts can be turned off or remapped, tap targets to be a minimum of 44x44 pixels, touch functionality still works when assistive technology is on.
  • Make sure you user test throughout the entirety of a product and test regular and individual features.
  • Follow this link to read up on the WCAG2.1

Anne Cooper, chief nurse, NHS Digital talks about ‘The complexities of UX design in health settings and the impact of human factors’.

Great talk around highlighting the lack of communication across departments, understanding the product/features and making sure to user test with the right users.

Key takeaways:

  • Discuss all elements of a new system to make sure nothing is missed as user will not complain but produce a new way of working with the systems.
  • Great analogy about how we always use an F1 team as an example of perfect collaboration but even though it is ‘cool’, it is not the same as the choreography and synergy of a team of medical staff. Ie the process and collaboration of a team working in the birthing area.

Hany Rizk, UX Strategy & Design, Volkswagen talks about ‘Mindful design: building products that matter’.

A humbling talk around how we invest our time into apps rather than life; as a designer whose job can sometimes mean keeping people engaged with products for as long as possible (games, advert based), there was a great point raised about the difference between keeping people engaged and just disrupting, notifying, pulling people into an app.

Key takeaways:

  • Being more mindful of your time with screens and trying to make your digital experience more helpful to your lifestyle rather than being owned by it.
  • Notifications are distractions and it takes us 23 minutes to refocus.
  • A video by Max Stossel & Sander van Dijk: In the Attention Economy, technology and media are designed to maximize our screen-time. But what if they were designed to help us live by our values? There was a movement by www.timewellspent.io — below.

This is empowering and engaging showing some issues with todays digital society, ‘keep you in the app’ approach which is affecting peoples lifestyles and trust of apps. It is in a very modern and digestible manor.

Alison coward, founder bracket talks about ‘Great workshops, great teams’.

With the current product/design sprints that are now happening, it was great to hear an expert in workshops & techniques discuss on top tips and how to own a room to get the best possible outcomes.

Key takeaways:

  • Do not treat workshops as a one off event but more of a means to find out what your desired outcomes are, and decide after if you did or not as you may need multiple.
  • Do not forget about the preparation need to achieve a good workshop, preparation is key and can take up to half the amount of time of your workshop to plan.
  • Make it collaborative; get everyone up and involved, this does not have to be vocally but get people to brain dump on post its.
  • Allow for convergent and divergent thinking, just allow for moments when you will need to bring people back to base.
  • Embrace not knowing where you are going and enjoy the ride. Heres a technique from: Ideo — sailing through the fog.

Tools to keep in mind:

Andrea Picchi, Lead Experience Designer, Sony Mobile talks about ‘Going beyond design thinking: 3 dimensions of a design-driven company’.

Clear passion and relentless determination to create products and experiences with a team, understanding your processes and nurturing those who do not.

Key takeaways:

  • Design thinking or human centered thinking? He suggested that we drop the typically stereotypes of what designers are shown as having.
  • Design thinking is made up of; business thinking, design thinking & engineering thinking.
  • Making sure we can stay current as problem solvers rather than tool experts.
  • Removing the lack of knowledge across an organisation and educating individuals on the user centered process to allow products to become a success.
  • The knowledge funnel; is a process in which we solve problems. Mystery (wicked problem), where we discuss and a define the issues and problems facing a product. Heuristic — hypothesis, where we start to generate solutions and problem solving techniques to achieve an effective outcome. Algorithm — solution, where we now use and apply our human centered process to solve and sculpt the solutions for people to start user testing and adopting.

The questions you should ask a company to create a better design driven approach:

  • Do we have a senior user advocate? Who is our most senior designer?
  • Are we calling it design thinking? Human centered design?
  • Do we have a training programme for non-designers to get onboard?
  • Do we have a team structure and a process that supports the practice?
  • Are we speaking the business languages outside the design team?
  • Are we talking about or demonstrating the value of design?

Sam Michael, designer Monzo talks about ‘Building a bank together’.

Having a Monzo card I feel that we were all routing to hear about how this bank became into existence! For his first real speaking role I was really drawn in from his raw passion and talent for design and user centric approach, this was the only presentation where I genuinely forgot to take notes!

Key takeaways:

  • Creating a frictionless user experience approach to manage your finance due to the issues created from the big banks
  • Making it personal and fun to help users understand and adopt a new banking approach
  • Dedicated team invested around there skills and interests.
  • Using notifications to keep you informed with additional features to allow your bank to work for you when problems occur.

Jilly Cross, Bravand & Sarah Wishart, UCL talks about ‘UCL culture presents adventures in web development’.

Great talk around highlighting the process of a multi-departmental project across various agencies to get to the end goal.

Key takeaways:

  • Multiple agency’s brought into collaborate on industry sectors across the project which brought risk between keeping the overall idea/solution.
  • With so many key people to decide on the direction they used key user testing workshops to validate and lead the project. This allowed innovation around the IA, design and navigation.
  • Being understanding and open to problems throughout the project, but having trust with each industry sector that they will succeed in said goal.

Summary

In summary it was a great day filled with inspiration talks, great knowledge boosters and as always a great deal to action to keep building upon our design process and procedures!

David Higgs is a UX/UI Designer at Mubaloo. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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