Elevate Your Product Experience and Empower Your Team with UX Watch Parties

Have you ever wondered what happens when you combine the excitement of a movie night with the thrill of improving your product? Enter UX Watch Parties — where our Product and Design teams gather around our screens, armed with snacks and sharp eyes, ready to dissect user recordings like seasoned detectives at a crime scene. If you’re looking for a fun team-building activity that can get your team excited about uncovering user insights and enhancing the UX of your product, grab your popcorn and read on to learn more about how you can host your very own UX Watch Parties!

This image was generated with the assistance of AI.

What’s a UX Watch Party?

At Alcumus, we use a tool called WalkMe to provide in-app guidance to our users. The tool also helps us collect data about how our customers use the product and records user sessions. Many similar tools are available for this, such as Pendo, WhatFix and MixPanel, to name a few.

One of my colleagues recently gave us access to this data and suggested that my design team and I review the recordings. However, we are all swamped with work, and motivating each team member to watch the videos would be challenging. So, I came up with the idea to host a Watch Party where we could watch the recordings together and make it a fun team activity.

During a UX Watch Party, we come together to watch selected user session recordings. It’s not just about watching; it’s about working together to improve our product. These collaborative sessions are where we identify bugs and opportunities to enhance our product’s overall experience. We take notes and openly discuss our observations. After each session, we log action items and create Jira tickets to implement the insights we’ve uncovered. The impact of these sessions on our product is significant, and that’s what makes hosting a UX Watch Party so inspiring.

Why UX Watch Parties are beneficial

Gaining invaluable insights: UX Watch Parties offer a unique opportunity to gain firsthand insights into user behaviour, providing a deeper understanding of how users interact with our product.

“These sessions are highly valuable as they provide insights into user interaction with our product throughout their daily routines. Observing these patterns is essential for enhancing the user experience and conducting more targeted conversations during customer interviews about their experiences.”
- Clement, Product Owner

Understanding user needs: By analyzing user behaviour, we gain insight into their needs and challenges, allowing us to customize our product to meet their requirements more efficiently.

Enhancing user satisfaction and engagement: UX Watch Parties enable us to improve user satisfaction and engagement by identifying areas for enhancement through targeted observations and analysis.

Fostering continuous improvement: These sessions cultivate a culture of continuous improvement and learning within our team, encouraging us to continually refine and innovate our product based on user feedback and insights.

“Watch Parties help me understand how our users interact with our product. It’s important for me to see what I can provide to help users.”
- Jen, Documentation Specialist

Fostering cross-functional collaboration: UX Watch Parties bring together product owners, designers, developers, and other stakeholders to analyze user behaviour and identify opportunities for improvement, encouraging cross-functional collaboration and communication.

Empowering team members: Participation in UX Watch Parties is not just about watching user recordings. It’s about actively involving each team member in identifying and addressing usability issues. This fosters a sense of ownership and accountability for the product’s success. Each team member’s insights and observations are valuable, making them feel empowered and integral to the success of our product.

“Watch Parties have been great for reducing silos within our org. Together, we feel the users’ pain and validate some assumptions regarding our work — we also find some surprises along the way!”
- Marcos, Product Designer

How to host a successful UX Watch Party

1. Select your recordings in advance: You’ll have thousands of user session recordings to watch, but not all of them will be interesting. So, before you start, pick out 2–3 videos where something exciting happens, like a user running into an unexpected problem or using the product in a way you didn’t expect. Then, jot down the best parts of the video. Sometimes, the most exciting bits are just a few minutes long, like 5:30–7:30 of a 20-minute video. And if you want to get to the good part faster, some tools let you speed up the video playback.
2. Set some context: Before playing the recordings for the team, it's helpful to give them a quick intro about the session they’re about to see. Let them know what type of user this person is —new or experienced—and what they’re trying to achieve from the session. My team gathers this information and presents it in slides before playing the recordings.
3. Assign a note-taker: Each session should have a facilitator (responsible for facilitating the conversation, providing context about the users, and playing the videos) and a note-taker. This person should keep track of key themes, comments, issues, and action items identified during the session. Try to make these rotating roles if you can. We log our session notes in Confluence so anyone can access them anytime.
4. Be mindful of time: To encourage attendance, it’s better to keep sessions short and sweet, like around 45 minutes. The facilitator should monitor the clock and keep the conversation on track so the meeting doesn’t drag on. Sometimes, we get carried away chatting about a recording, so we might only have time to show two of the three videos we planned to share. No worries; we can save the last one for next time!
5. Follow-up on action items: At the end of each session, I review the notes and ensure that Jira tickets or action items have been created and assigned. In future sessions, I’d like to start by spending a few minutes checking in on their status to ensure we’re making progress.
6. Gather feedback and iterate: Ask attendees for feedback and work with your team to continuously improve. Check in to see how they feel about the duration and frequency of the meetings. Do they have any suggestions to help make Watch Parties more engaging and valuable in the future?

An example of a context-setting slide that we would present before playing a recording. This helps the team understand who the user is before diving into the video.

Wrap-up

UX Watch Parties have been a great way to bring our Product and Design teams together. We have all contributed to refining this practice, and the results have been fantastic. Our team’s brilliant idea of sharing context slides and documenting session notes and action items in Jira has been a big success. The fact that our product owners choose to actively participate in these sessions despite their busy schedules is proof that we’re doing something right!

Hopefully, this article has you feeling excited about hosting your first UX Watch Party. Or maybe you’ve hosted similar sessions with your teams and would like to share your experience. If that’s the case, I would love to hear more about your approach to conducting these activities and keeping them engaging for your team.