Labs Review: UX Design Festival

Many of the events on the day were already sold out, or overlapping, but we got to attend three that we really loved.

In the first event, Elliot Prince from Geeks Ltd started us off with an overview of the prototyping and design process that his organization uses. We were then split up into groups and given a small brief that forced us to dive right into the deep end of Object Oriented UX Design as a way of tackling a project.

Some kind soul has uploaded that talk here so that you can watch it for yourselves.

Next, Terika Seaborn-Brown from Foolproof walked us through the top 5 Formative Research Methods she uses in her UX practice. And while that talk isn’t online yet, the main areas of focus were:

• On Site-Surveys – the focus was on the 1% completion rates and how you should aim to be unobtrusive with the pop up messages, experimenting with the timings of when it comes on the screen.
• Contextual Interviews – where she discussed the importance of being silent even if it is uncomfortable.
• Competitor Analysis – where you can keep your sanity by comparing with only a small number of competitors.
• Call Centre Analysis – where you have to get beyond the stats and talk to the people on the frontlines.
• Stakeholder Workshops – where she discussed the quickest ways to map who your stakeholders really are.

The final event of the day was a UX Escape room, run by Karmarama. After the serious business of the rest of the day it was great to have a little bit of fun by being locked inside a small room in a stressful situation.

We were split into four groups, locked in different rooms and then given a brief. We had to find clues in our room to fill out details of our persona and the scenarios that we were tasked with improving. We then had to solve more clues to unlock boxes full of supplies so that we could do the necessary work to design a new product. We were all in our element, but the ticking clock forced us to throw any ideas that we had on the table.

As the end of our hour ticked closer and closer we had a video call with a user where we had to frantically test our prototype, conduct a one on one interview and iterate our design all at once. Finally we got the final clue that gave us the code that let us escape the room! Needless to say, we all did well, otherwise we would still be in there.