UX Scotland 2018
What I learned from my first UX conference
In June Robert, Holly and I had an amazing time at UX Scotland in Edinburgh. Here’s Holly’s write up. I’m going to use the same 3 headings she did, inspired by the University of Edinburgh’s excellent write up.
What were you looking to get out of UX Scotland?
I wanted to meet UXers from lots of different industries. In my experience so far, UX people are friendly, curious and passionate about many of the same things as me, so getting to spend three full days learning from and trading experiences with a couple hundred more of them was just fantastic.
More specifically, I wanted to pick up tips on how to build on the grassroots approach of the UofG UX project. I picked up plenty and they mostly boiled down to SHARE and, when it inevitably comes to governance, START SMALL.
Your top 3 sessions?
Let’s talk about strategy: what it is, why it matters and how to do it well
After Sophie Dennis’s excellent workshop, I feel like I finally understand the concept of strategy, and how I might go about developing a genuinely useful one, when the time comes.
I learned:
- How to spot the signs that we lack a strategy
- Three ways to identify bad strategies: the ‘Yeah right!’ test, the ‘So what?’ test and the ‘Yes and?’ test
- How a good strategy will give us purpose, help us make decisions (or appropriately delegate decision-making), and make us more agile
- How to pick a problem we can actually solve and a solution we can actually implement
While I don’t feel I’m in the right position yet to start developing a whole UX Strategy, I’m certain my UX work would benefit from some more structured thinking about what comes between ‘vision’ and ‘roadmap’.
Further reading
- Extended slides on Sophie Dennis’s SlideShare
- WTF is Strategy? by Vince Law— an article this workshop reminded me of, with a nice analogy to distinguish between Mission | Vision | Strategy | Roadmap | Execution
Changing the remit
Kate Tarling’s keynote was about designing user-centred services: something that’s particularly relevant to UofG at the mo, as we work towards launching a new enterprise service management platform.
University Services that haven’t thought in terms of a service catalogue before are learning to redefine themselves in that way and, while I’m not directly involved in that work, I can feel its impact all around. As soon as the video for this talk becomes available, I’ll be sharing it as widely as I can.
I learned:
- “Good services are verbs”
- That recognising service types and their common patterns can help us anticipate common issues and solutions
- How to help an organisation structure themselves around the end-to-end services they deliver
UX designers vs. climate change
James Christie’s talk blew my mind. I’d never considered the environmental impact of ‘digital’ before — it’s such an ephemeral thing, why would I? But the internet’s carbon footprint is overtaking aviation’s 🤯
Tumblr alone generates 2,600 tons of CO2 per day
In a talk filled with mind-boggling data, James shocked and chilled us plenty, but also shared lots of ways UXers in general and web folk in particular can reduce this harm, save CO2, and help others to do the same.
I learned:
- Ways we can clean up after ourselves through better infrastructure and better behaviour
- Some less obvious methods and tools to reduce page sizes
- How to design to influence good behaviour in others, like defaulting to greener options
I plan to write a separate blog post about this, once I’ve got the up-to-date figures and used them to analyse the environmental impact of the MyGlasgow Staff homepage before and after its recent relaunch. I’m hoping to show that I’m already moving it in the right direction, but if not, I’ll know what to do from now on.
What are you going to put into practice, or learn more about?
As well as the solid gold nuggets of inspiration covered above, I’m going to:
- Listen back to recordings of myself doing user interviews, to check my suspicion that I regularly break at least two of Chris How’s rules on Asking Better Questions!
- Find an appropriate situation to try out the really satisfying visual modelling method Jesmond Allen described in her talk on The Lost Art of Task Modelling
- Learn more about the issues Jane Reid raised in her fascinating lightning talk Let’s talk about sex and gender — working together to get the question right
- Have a go at using Lego in a workshop, like Mike Dunn and Helen Triggs did in User-centred content
- Do whatever it takes to get to go to UX Scotland again next year — what a fun, inspiring conference 😍
