Digital North — The Future, Part 1
Last night, Thursday June 29th, we headed out for the latest Digital North event; it was a great evening of beer, pizza and insightful talks!
Toni Phoenix, Director of Digital Gurus, kicked off the evening with an introduction into all things Digital North and explored how the event is all about an interest in the digital techspace in the northern powerhouse.
The first presentation of the event came from Kevin Murray (@Kev_C_Murray), Delivery Director & Head of Business Operations at Valtech who explored competing with Google and CityMapper — meeting user needs with lean UX for the redesign of Transport for Greater Manchester’s digital offering.
Kevin started by pointing out a few different examples of where businesses had created solutions which focused highly on tech but ignored user needs.
He then went on to explore that Valtech have an innovation lab which enables them to do user research at the core and focus on audience needs.
Kevin presented to the audience a recent project for Transport for Greater Manchester where the issue was ‘in the age of Google and CityMapper, is there even a need for a website at all?’ which lead to a short research project which helped to validate the need for investment through speaking to over 2000 people in the first four weeks of the project which helped to learn the basic needs which had to be met and then allowed the team to focus on lean UX.
A key driver for the project was creating outputs over outcomes.
Another key principle was that the team had complete permission not to know everything at the start of the project, allowing them to explore and discover as they went along.
Following on from the initial research phase, the team undertook two, one week design sprints to achieve the best possible output.
For the process, Kevin presented a step of steps to be followed:
- Design
- Hypotheses
- Test
- Research
- Insight
Following this method meant that developers could begin building from day one and each week they could be talking to real users about the outputs with the final day of each sprint being set for data and validation on the assumptions and hypotheses.
The key message we took from Kevin’s presentation; validation is key.
Next up, Llara Geddes (@the_llara), Head of UX at Beauty Bay, explored the topic of ‘Inspiring the Future of Digital’ through exploring a few key themes and asking the question, why should we care?
The digital skills gap is a big problem. Three in four businesses have reported a digital skills shortage in their employees, something which really causes concern for the ever changing and influential landscape of digital. On top of this, 366,000 people aged 16–24 were unemployed between February and April 2017 (not including university students) something which could potentially be fixed if these people were more digitally proficient.
Don’t be a d*ck. Pretty self explanatory. Care for others and don’t make the industry a place people do not want to work in.
‘You should be a wigmaker’. Llara explored how when doing a career aptitude test she was given this result and presented that many people don’t know what they want to be, and many don’t even know what is out there. Without guidance, how will people ever make it into the digital industry?
Businesses have lots they can do. For example, what about partnering with educational institutes and allowing students to see what is actually around.
As individuals, there is also loads we can do to help.
STEM ambassadors. Get people engaged young. Show people what they can really do.
Meet ups. Get involved and see who you can meet. You might meet someone further up the tree than you or you might be able to help people get into the business or even further their career.
Skill share. What can you pay forward?
Mentoring. Upskill yourself. Create relationships and connections.
Llara’s presentation was extremely inspiring when it comes to all things getting others involved in the industry and also made a point of how it pays to be nice and help others. We loved it.
The final presentation before the evening’s break came from Doug Winter, Co-Founder Isotoma, who explored the ‘Future of TV Broadcasting’ after spending two months working with the BBC, which was a huge crash course in TV.
Online TV is relatively easy, all you need to do is follow the Netflix model and you are pretty much onto a winner, but when it comes to live broadcast TV there is much more to think about. Especially as now the landscape of broadcast has changed so widely with things such as live streaming from your mobile.
The team were tasked with creating a browser based vision mixing gallery to allow the correct feeds and shots to be used during live television.
With six weeks to build, they had to really learn anything and everything broadcast. And fast.
One of the hardest challenges? Time. And making sure everything was all in line.
We found Doug’s presentation extremely interesting and were fascinated by learning about all things TV in a quick lightening talk.
To hear more about the presentations at Digital North, check back for our part 2 post! If you were at the event, or would like to talk over any of the topics, let us know on hello@wool.digital or give us a call on 0161 635 0045.
