LTUX London Lightning Talks 2018
The LTUX London community is thriving — if you need convincing, just see how quickly their events sell out. I was able to snap up a ticket to last month’s Lightning Talks, an annual opportunity for members of the community to speak on a topic of their choosing, or as organiser Florence puts it, “a chance for ladies to talk about UX how it is in their jobs and in their lives”. This sets the tone for the evening, and after some time drinks and nibbles, we sit down to hear the evening’s talks. The 12 talks hit on a range of topics which, for me, fell into a few broad themes.
Unexpected sources of inspiration
The first theme I picked up on was the way that our lives and work can inspire each other. Kate Weybret was the first to hit on this with her talk about mindfulness and UX. We can apply mindfulness techniques while at work to get away from the senseless chat going through our heads. Flipping the coin, UX mantras such as “test early and often” can be applied to self-care, by adding things to our routines for a week and seeing what effect they have. If they help, we should stick with them, but if not, we can try something else! As Kate summed up, “we all have the skills to empathise with users, so let’s use those skills to empathise with ourselves”.
Next, Misha Patel talked about how her yoga teacher training helped her understand the philosophy of yoga, increasing her self-confidence. As UX practitioners, we work collaboratively in teams and design for other people, but understanding ourselves is something that can help us understand others better. We can do this by being present and questioning why we do things, but also by realising that we don’t and can’t know everything about ourselves: “Accept the mystery that there are workings in our mind we don’t know, and accept the beauty in not knowing”.
Cristina Vigano was up next to remind us that inspiration can come from bad experiences as well as good. Cristina talked about her recent visit to the Italian Consulate to get some documents… It didn’t end well. Among the comedy of errors (which I suspect only became funny with hindsight) were a baffling queuing system, a monitor displaying random numbers and the request that she provide her own postage stamp. Cristina used her experience as a UX designer to make some very pointed recommendations.
Jaksharan’s source of inspiration was scientists and their approach to problem solving. Designers are expected to have a perfect answer, but in science it’s much more accepted to arrive at solutions incrementally. How can we be more like scientists? By considering design as a process of hypothesising and testing, and strengthening our creativity with data-driven processes and feedback.
Last on this theme, and because it wouldn’t be a tech event without cats, was Gisella Fama. Gisella spends her days hearing stakeholders repeat the same UX myths: “I know my users”, “I know how users will use my product”, and “I know what my users like”. She used a case study of her two kittens to show how these assumptions should never be taken for granted.
UX Methods
What’s great about being part of a growing UX community is being able to learn from each other. Lisa Lyons shared her experience of conducting her first diary study to find out about money management. She shared her practical tips on how to set up a study — make expectations clear to participants from the beginning, write and test task instructions iteratively, keep in touch with participants, and always have a Plan B for when the inevitable tech issues strike.
LTUX London founder Sophie Mitchell shared her tips for running a design sprint — typically spread over five days — in only three. In her role at Rated People, she wanted to kickstart and prioritise the challenge of onboarding tradespeople. In three days, her team managed to define the problem, ideate, prototype and validate a design before wrapping up with an action plan. Among the tips and challenges she shared, it was clear that super-strength communication was key throughout — from managing stakeholders’ expectations to checking in with wider goals.
Up next, Ana Crespo used her five minutes to give five reasons we should be using more paper prototypes to test early designs. Not only are they cheap and flexible, but they can be used to get honest feedback that focuses on the concept and not the finished design. Best of all, participants can draw their own ideas and get more involved in the design process.
Designing for diverse and specialist users
The final theme was around designing for diverse users and specialist needs. Lucy McCullock spoke about her experience of designing for international users as a unilingual person. Her approach was to enlist colleagues who speak another language to be her research partners and help facilitate her sessions. Not only did users open up more when talking in their native languages, but getting team members involved in user research meant they began to embrace UX!
Helena Jaramillo talked about the need to design transparency into money transfers at TransferWise. The design of a transfer calculator needed to inform users of the details and costs without overwhelming them. Helena’s approach was to break the information down so that customers don’t can absorb it in chunks, while keeping the calculator component consistent across platforms so that customers only have to learn to use it once.
Next we heard from Fiona MacDougall about designing a training platform for surgeons, who she says are “the busiest people I’ve ever met”. Key to getting them to open up was working with an expert who could speak their technical language and ask the right questions. She needed to tailor her prototype to every user, as each of them was so highly specialised that there was no ‘standard’ surgery that they would all be familiar with. The time, effort and flexibility she invested into the research paid off with insights that informed a highly specialised product.
Bringing her experience of working in the public sector was user researcher Hilary Chan. Hilary discussed designing a complaints process for the Small Business Commissioner service, which enables small businesses to resolve payment disputes with their larger customers. What seemed like a simple email procedure involved several steps and produced a range of response types. By getting responses from real users, she was able to begin shaping what the whole service would look like. Her takeaway for us was: “The most important part of user research is connecting the service team to its users”.
And that’s time!
That was it for this year’s Lightning Talks. The short but insightful contributions had the audience gripped, and it was refreshing to hear from ladies who are early in their careers as well as more seasoned practitioners. Keep an eye out for the next event!
Lesley Fosh is a Senior UX Consultant at System Concepts. With a PhD in human-computer interaction, she enjoys using creative methods to understand people and bring their stories into design.
