 Hello there. Can you all hear me? Am I speaking clearly in the microphones on? Great, hi. Kia ora everybody, my name is Lucy Orbell and I have been part of the team who have been beavering away behind the scenes to put together NDF this year. And I also work at Digital New Zealand and I'm introducing this lovely peer who are about to kick off this next series of sessions. And from a Digital New Zealand perspective, I can say that this session about UX user experience is really interesting from my professional perspective. And I think Kate Wonlis here is from Te Papa and Dan Dixon is the Strategy Director at the Digital Arts Network. And they both have a very people-centric—this is my sense from reading your bios— both have a very people-centric approach to user experience and I for one am really delighted to be listening to your session. So please take it away. I think there are some handouts coming to you guys, but they're also going to be available to you online as well. Thank you. Hi everyone, hope you're having a great day. You just had a lovely lunch. It's a little bit unfortunate. This is always kind of like the graveyard slot at the conference so it can often be a bit downbeat or people can be a bit low on energy, but we've got like a tag team talk here, which hopefully will kind of liven things up a bit. So this talk is really, as Lucy was saying, about how you can get easy and simple and straightforward feedback on your ideas. And what we're here to do is give you some tools and techniques and a little bit of a process that you can take home. And as part of that, we've got a handout that's circulating around and that's so you don't have to take detailed notes off all the slides so that lots of the really key ideas are in that handout. But if you want to take notes and add a few bits and pieces to that, then you can just draw away on that. We've also got the link at the end as well if you want to take that away. But who are we? So I'm Dan Dixon. I'm the strategy director at Digital Arts Network. And really my job kind of revolves a lot around trying to get human-centered design into projects and often into kind of slightly abnormal projects or different projects. So we try and apply humans into design in all sorts of different ways. So I've worked in agencies. I've worked in big companies such as the BBC in the UK. And I also worked in academia for about seven years where I taught and researched on interaction design. And I have a kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. I kind of have a long-term view on design research because I spent seven years doing a really kind of deep, detailed ethnographic piece of design research myself when I was doing a PhD. And Kate on the other hand manages to do things really short. So Kate and I worked together at the museum. Kate and I worked together on some projects for Auckland Museum about a year ago, which is where some of these ideas came from originally. So I'm Kate. I work here at Te Papa. I actually originally started off studying graphic design, but I realised quite quickly that people are way more interesting than pixels. And so moved into more of a research and user experience area. I worked at a startup, which is very exciting. I worked at Digital Arts Network with Dan. And now I'm working here doing a lot of prototype testing in the museum with visitors really fast. We've got heaps of projects going on. They're all quite fast-paced. We can't really afford to spend too much time on research. My personal best for fastest turnaround for research is four hours. So I'm hoping to beat that sometime soon. Bear with us. There we go. We're working. So I wanted to imagine that you are working on a project. Imagine that everyone has lots of amazing ideas. It's all very exciting. But then, when the things built, the people who it's made for, they don't get it, they don't understand it, and they don't like it. We've all been on projects like that. I've been on projects like that. But enter, pop-up UX. This changes everything. We're on a mission to help everybody, designer or not, do their own design testing. But why pop-up? Why pop-up store? This appears where it's needed, but can be put away later. It's not always on. This talk will give you the tools to do research before getting an external agency company or even another department involved. OK. So what is UX? So the UX might be a term that's not entirely familiar to everybody. And there's lots of different definitions around for what UX is. UX is a discipline that is really, really broad. So techniques can be used in all sorts of different ways. In the narrowest sense, we could be thinking about UX as really just being about digital experiences, which many of us are probably working on. But more expansively in the way that we try and often apply UX principles, it involves human-centred design across a bunch of different experiences, all sorts of different products. But here, I suppose what we're doing is treating this as to mean that it's really the design of people's interactions, really, with a product or a service. And so what is design research? And we've kind of mentioned design research a few times. And we've talked about bringing design research to you guys, to the people. And what we're trying to do here is not cover all of UX and all of UX as a discipline or a practice. We're just trying to cover a straightforward way to get out there and do a bit of design research. So design research, the intention of design research is to give you a good picture of how your design or how your products might actually behave in the real world before you actually get to the point of actually building something. And really simply, we've got this formula for design research, which is prototype plus context plus people. It's building a thing, creating a thing, taking it out into the context that it will be used in and actually getting the type of people who will be using it to use it. And this is not quite usability testing, which some of you might be familiar with. Usability testing is figuring out kind of the details of things once quite a lot of design has been done. What we're talking about here is trying to figure out what the right thing is to build in the first place, not later on as you're building it, trying to figure out how to build the thing right. But why would we even do design research? We often build things based on our assumptions about what people will understand or what they'll like, only to find out when it's too late that those assumptions were wrong. So it's much better that we learn this earlier in the process before significant time and money has been spent investing in something that's just not engaging. Particularly in museums, we work on experiences that are incredibly dependent on context. If a visitor is tired after spending two hours walking around the museum, that's going to affect how they interact with our products. And it's impossible for us to design for this in our back offices. We have to get our design ideas out into the world. So I'll give you an example of this. We developed this component that translates Māori words in our interactives that are out on the floor. In an early version, we had an underline for the word instead of the bubble. We took this out onto the floor, we showed it to a few people, and multiple people told us that the underline looked like a spelling mistake. So I'm really glad that we called that one early before we rolled it out to all of our interactives. So all of this testing, research, it sounds really hard and expensive. But I will let you in on a secret. It's actually really easy. You can do it and your team can do it, whether you're a curator, a producer, a developer, a project manager, whoever. If you want to test an idea, you don't have to spend thousands on user research. You can do it yourself. It's really shocking. I know this is all of the user research is just appalled that I'm sharing this with you. So one of the things we're going to do is not try and cover everything. What we've done is we've broken this down into three simple steps. Three things that you need to know to be able to go out there and pop up UX, do straightforward design research yourself. The first one is planning, and the second one is doing prototyping, and the third one is doing intercept interviews, so take it out and showing your prototyped people. And here's how we're going to help you by giving you some tips and tools to get through those three steps. So the first one is how to plan by answering just four, I said five, but four simple questions. The second one is prototyping with paper, so you don't need to actually bring in any clever technology. You don't need to necessarily bring in developers. You don't need to bring in people who actually build this stuff as just prototype with things you have to hand. And the third one is actually then how to go out there and actually talk to people. So first off, planning. So planning, we all like to do planning, don't we? Planning sounds really boring, right? But the reason we do planning is that we avoid epic fails, which is too easy if we don't do any planning. And we've got a really simple and straightforward way to help you do the planning. There's just four simple questions that you need to answer as you go through doing this. So question one is what questions are you actually trying to answer when you go out and do the research? And kind of the idea is to keep this very kind of tight and very limited. So just try and find out one, two, maybe three things and not try and find out everything about what you're looking for. And this is the really important one and the one that you kind of start with. The other three questions kind of flow on from this. But the idea with all these questions is you can kind of come back and refine them and refine them as you're going through and get the answers to this. And a good example of this is recently we're working with the Auckland Museum website. Auckland Museum to build a new website, do a refresh of that, do a digital refresh. And we were interested in the way that visitors in the galleries would actually be using the mobile website to find information. So we took a prototype of the new Auckland Museum mobile website into the galleries to try and figure out how people would be using it. And the things that we're kind of really interested in were not to try and test the usability of that but really just to see if people could find information. So we were testing the information architecture, whether people could find a route through to the information they needed to get to. We were testing some labelling in there, so we kind of worried that whether the names on the pages and the terms and the navigation made sense. And to see whether the navigation system that we're designed for mobile would actually work and people would get it so that we're using a burger menu style interaction there and see whether people understood that. So simple questions. Question two is what do you need to prototype to answer that? So you don't have to prototype everything in detail, just the flows that will answer your question. So really to focus in on a few pages that you need to get out in front of your users to actually test the ideas and test the concepts. So when we did the prototype of the museum, we marked up a home page and seven other pages and the menu that would allow people to get there so there's not a huge amount of content, not a huge amount of investment or effort that kind of went into that. And the key point here to this is don't try and prototype too many things at once. Again, go back to answering one simple question, figuring out what that simple question is, working on what the prototype is that you need to answer that. Question three is who is your audience and where will you actually find them? So, and this is kind of important for museums, galleries and archives and things is that the audiences are in different spaces. Sometimes they're actually close to you, sometimes they're not. So when we were doing the museum example, we were looking at trying to see how people found their way to... to information. So families and groups, we need to go somewhere that we can find families and groups so there's a discovery centre upstairs where there are always going to be lots of families. For foreign tourists on the other hand, they don't end up in that space so they tend to congregate down in the Pacifico Māori Galleries downstairs so you go there to find them. So the museum is the perfect place to do this kind of testing. Our audience is right out the door. Although not always. I learnt this the hard way when I tried to test collections online in the museum and I talked to a lot of foreign visitors but very few users of collections online and I just didn't get good data. So yeah, go where your users are. And question four is what do you actually need to record when you go out there and do this? So the idea here is to not try to record everything but the idea is to make all of these intercept sessions and when you're doing the research really lightweight. So for family, when we're testing the Auckland Museum mobile prototype we were just interested in a few specific questions for each of those specific audience groups so for families we're thinking about what content are they looking for and can they find their way to the what's on page and do they understand what the what's on page is for. And for foreign visitors it's things like did they find specific Māori content and was that what they were looking for and could they find that easily enough? One of the important things about this is that you can actually change you can, if you're coming up with some simple questions you want to answer you can change those questions as you're going through your research you don't have to fix them in place and then blindly follow through as you go through the research. It might be after a couple of intercepts, a couple of interviews that you think that you need to actually be looking for something different or something slightly different and usually you kind of start zeroing in on the things you're actually trying to answer and look for as you kind of go further and further through those intercepts. So again just four simple questions and we're going to hand out and all those four questions are on that handout but the first one is what questions are you trying to answer and understand that first and then what prototype do you need to answer those questions so in trying to keep the prototype as small and limited as possible. Number three is who is your audience? Where will you find them? So is it in the museum or do you have to go outside or find another way to get in front of people? And number four is what do you actually need to record? So what kind of things are you actually kind of jotting down? What kind of notes are you taking? What answers are you kind of making notes on when you're actually going out there and doing intercepts? Cool, next step, stage two. So we got that out of the way. Sorry, Dan, but now we're on to the much more interesting bit. Which is DIY prototyping. So when we're prototyping, a little bit of prototyping is really valuable. All you need is just humble, sharpies and paper. You don't need to be able to draw. In fact, if you're bad at drawing, that's actually good. And you don't need expensive design software. The first part is to work out all of the steps in your visitor journey and then decide on exactly what it is you need to prototype in order to answer your questions. You don't have to prototype the whole journey and all of the little parts. So when we were working on the Rongwhakata exhibition, we had a concept for an interactive about the influence of Christian religion on Rongwhakata. In this concept, different symbols would combine together and create a story. So our key question was, was this going to make sense to people? And so we just prototyped a little bit. If we'd prototyped the whole thing, it would have been huge. There we go. And this is what we made. Three screens, low five. Wow. It's good that it's on paper. It's good that it's a little bit shonky. This means that people won't get caught up in the design details. They'll tell you about the concepts. They're not going to tell you that they don't like the orange button. So we took this, as it is, into the museum, talked to some visitors, and what we found is that people didn't get the concept. This was excellent to find out early in the process because we hadn't invested much time producing this prototype, and we could do something different. The one problem with paper is that people sometimes interact with it a little bit like a book, so they'll turn the page to get more content. If you don't want that, an alternative is putting your sketches onto a device. Come up. There we go. There are programmes like Pop or Envision that can let you do interactive prototypes with just sketches, and this makes it feel more real because people actually have to tap on things. So in the museum, you may also need to prototype physical experiences. And in this case, paper and toilet rolls can also do the trick. I hope you paid attention in the garden. There's a bit more making involved, but this is still cheaper and easier than manufacturing objects. All in all, paper is much more insightful than you might think. Paper can tell you whether an idea is good or not. Cool. Next part. So that was the fun, makey part of things, which is, for many of us, really the most enjoyable part. So now the part three is, how do you actually go out and talk to people? And sometimes it can feel like going out and talking to strangers wherever they might be. It's a little bit scary, a little bit intimidating, but it's not quite as scary or as intimidating as you might think. So we've got a really simple process here and a few tips and tricks that will help make that process easier going out and confronting strangers out in a museum or on the street that you might feel like you need to do your intercept. So the first thing to remember and actually probably the most important principle about all of this is actually talk as little as possible. And this is something that often new researchers kind of trip up on. But what you want to do is you want to hear what visitors have to say or that your audiences have to say. So you don't actually want to have to say very much at all. So it's like a little game really that you can play with the people that you're talking to as little as possible. So try playing that little game, trying to consciously not talk. And then you kind of know if you won the game by the fact that you ask a really simple question like what did you think about that? And then your visitor kind of goes off on this huge spiel, this kind of long monologue on all of that. And so you've not actually talked very much. So that's a win. Cool. So we've got a cheat sheet here, like a simple process to go about doing intercepts. This is on the handout we've got here as well. So really all you need to do is walk up to someone. You smile and say hi. Smiling is kind of something that can be easy to forget if you're a little bit nervous. You introduce yourself, you introduce the organisation you're from and why you're doing this and what's going on. And then importantly you tell them how long it's going to take part. And usually these things take five to ten minutes, maybe probably about ten minutes. Usually an intercept when you're starting them will take longer than you expect it to take. You think it'll take five minutes, it'll probably take ten. Then you ask them to take part when you've told them all of that so that they're aware of everything. So there's some consent there. Then what you do is you show them the prototype and as Kate was showing you, we're talking about three to two, three, four pages of something that you're showing them. And you ask them questions as you're going through that. So you're constantly asking them what they're thinking and what's going on. And you observe closely what's happening and you don't want to just pay attention to what they're saying, you want to see what they're doing. People will sometimes report that things are easier than it appears that they're doing it. They look like they're having a much harder time. Then when it's done you ask them if they've got any questions because quite often people have questions for you about what you're doing and why. And then you thank them for their time and move on. Normally when we do intercepts we do intercepts in pairs. That's the way. You can take turns as well which is really another great thing about being in pairs so one of you can be approaching somebody and is that two minutes left or is that okay? Yeah. And I think you expect about three or four per hour and always plan a break afterwards. Sorry. So the key to getting people to talk more than you is asking really good questions and you only really need to remember five. These are the questions that I use all the time when I'm testing. So the first thing that you could ask somebody when you hand them the prototype is what do you think this is? And that will tell you how your design is communicating for itself. The next thing that you could ask is what do you think you can do here? And that will tell you what people think is interactive. The next question you could ask is what would you do next? And that will tell you what people find interesting and what they want to engage with. If they ask you a question you can reflect that back on them. So if they ask what does this button do you'd say, well what do you think the button does? It gets a little bit infuriating after a while but it's worth it. Also if they don't talk and you've got to wait for about eight seconds as much as you want to break the silence you can prompt them with what are you thinking? And that's going to tell you what kind of decision they're trying to make or if they're reading something or if they're interested in something. So all of these questions are open-ended questions that is questions that require more than a yes or no answer. So a closed question might be are you enjoying Te Papa? That's just going to give you a yes or no answer. While an open question could be tell me more about your visit to Te Papa so far. This allows the visitor's perspective to come through and it's not a very natural way of having a conversation. You have to really concentrate but it is worth it Do you want to do this? Cool. So we're going to prove to you how easy this is. I'm going to run through what I would say if I was doing an intercept in the museum. So I would walk up to Dan and say hey, I'm Kate. I work here. We're working on a new design for this exhibition. I'm wondering if you've got five minutes if you'd like to take a look and give us some feedback. No, sorry, I don't have time. I've got to get back to my cruise ship now. That's a really common thing that we get. I'd say no worries, have a nice day. And that is the worst that can happen. That's all you've got to worry about. It really wasn't that bad. So we'll try that again. Hey, I'm Kate. I work here. We've got some designs for something we're working on for this exhibition. I'm wondering if you have five minutes and you'd like to take a look and give us some feedback. Awesome, so now we're in business. And so this is the prototype that we are working on. What do you think it is? I don't know. It's kind of said something about Christian faith. I'm not quite sure. What do the symbols mean? What do you think they mean? Oh, they look kind of religious to me. Yeah, it's something about religion. And what do you think you can do here? Maybe tap on the symbols? I don't know. Yeah, that's... What do you think you'd do next? Oh, I might tap on things randomly until something happened. Again, that's quite common. So that's just the start of an intercept we would keep going with more screens. But very quickly we're learning that this interface doesn't make sense to people and that it's not really clear what to tap on. So, remember, talking to people, it's not scary. But what next? This is not all. You want to look for the themes in your data. So look for the things that have come up multiple times and take notice of that. We could spend a really long time talking about this, but we're going to skip right over it in the interest of time. So, yeah, just to sum up, to recap, easy design research. That's what pop-up UX is. So there's three clear, simple steps. One, do planning so you figure out what to learn when you go out there. Second is to do some prototyping, so build the thing that you want to kind of find out about and make it physical, and do only the thing that you need to do. Number three is do intercepts. So go out and talk to people and show them the things that you're building and show them your ideas. And the important thing in there is do as little talking as possible. So if you're still not sure about design testing, listen to one of our digital producers. It's a sort of reality check. You can have a fabulous idea, but until it's in the hands of the people it's made for, it's nothing more than that. Prototype testing is like a great collaborator. It shows you where to go next and encourages you to carry on. So, what will you test? That's us.