Insights from UX London 2024
In June 2024, I attended UX London, a conference focused on the state of user experience and digital design. I attended the first day, dedicated to UX research, which is the bulk of what I do for many arts and culture clients at One Further.
UX London has been a fixture on the UX scene for the last decade, though this was my first time. The day was filled with insightful talks on various aspects of user experience and I certainly learnt a lot.
I couldn't help but notice the absence of anyone from the cultural sector. I did meet people working in education, including universities and the education wing of the Home Office, but there were no GLAMs or culture-related speakers, at least on that day. More on that later.
I have many thoughts on UX London and the state of UX more generally. Here are six of them.
1. Use research strategically and embrace change
The first talk of the day saw Tom Kerwin advocating for complexity, and how embracing it would allow us to do more. Companies, including museums, don’t know their customers well enough and need to speak to them to understand their wants and needs.
However, customer needs change constantly and there is a requirement to adapt dynamically. Even when an organisation has implemented new features on its website, it must still continue to engage with visitors, listen to their feedback and ensure they continue to iterate.
A lot of people and companies working in digital struggle to understand that nothing is ever truly finished. Even if the perfect solution to a problem is implemented today, who is to say it will still be a suitable approach in five years?
2. Manage research efficiently
The cultural sector is no exception when it comes to research and understanding the market. Unlike larger companies, though, cultural institutions often lack the budget to do it properly.
The issue, according to Emma Boulton, is due to many companies working in silos. The solution is to develop a knowledge management strategy, which can be a gateway to elevating the application of UX research.
The key is to build a community, identify the right questions, combine research methods, and collate everything into a single point of access to avoid repetition and ensure efficiency.
3. Sort your priorities when designing web pages
Stephanie Walter’s exercise during the afternoon workshop proved useful when designing a mock up of search results on a website: what is the most important information? She used the analogy of air travel, asking us to think about what information would be needed for a customer to understand hold luggage, overhead luggage and hand luggage.
During the exercise my group and I had to ensure that we were prioritising the right information and naturally we wanted to display everything. Having to sort all the information into priorities helped us understand that not everything has to be displayed right away, especially when considering a full page listing, search results, and mobile search results.
I recently worked on a project where each search result was too long to even fit on the screen of a mobile phone, because too many details were displayed. Just because some information is delayed until the next page or the next paragraph does not mean it’s not important, and that’s what I was struggling with when doing Walter’s exercise (and what my client struggled to balance when considering their mobile listing).
When it comes to web design, the clichés are often true: less is more, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
4. The state of UX is drab, but it can be salvaged
It is no secret that the entire sector of user experience, be it research or design, has suffered over in recent years. Often we blame companies for their lack of budget (or a lack of desire to invest their money in other ventures), or for asking very small UX and design departments to work as if they had many times as many resources.
Emma Boulton also noted that “User Experience research is dying” and that the main cause is that we are drowning in information, working in silos, and repeating the same studies over and over.
To help everyone avoid the ‘research graveyard’, she presented three pairs of Cs to remember:
Collaborate & Connect – bringing knowledge together, which is what the Department for Education does really well
Communicate & Consume – transferring knowledge
Curate & Control – managing knowledge.
The way Boulton looks at research and creates stories by joining the dots to other data made me think about how we work at One Further: we often take a holistic approach to research and incorporate previous projects, building up a larger picture and combining methods and data sources whenever relevant and useful.
5. Inclusivity applies to the research as well as the product
Inclusivity was a common theme at UX London. There were three talks touching on the topic, including Aleks Melnikova discussing inclusive research studies. She’s researched the process of conducting research and captured my attention immediately (not to mention how admirative I was of her accessible slides).
She found five pain points which really matter to people who participate in research:
Time
Technology
Environment
Moderator connection skill
Value exchange
Moderators have to facilitate research in a conscious and open way, make the space work, and cope with unpredictability, but they also must understand they cannot help everyone. I’ve found this when conducting interviews, and I have always strived to be as open and patient as possible whilst respecting every participant.
Over time, Melnikova says, this approach will help to shift us from inclusion to innovation.
One talk I did not expect to be immediately engaging was the Ethics & Safeguarding in UX Research by Clarissa Gardner (it can be hard to be engaging when talking about ethics, despite its importance!). She shared case studies of researchers who had to deal with ethics conundrums and advised to consider challenges at three levels:
Individual
Project
Organisation
I found her testimony to be very useful for my future research.
It was interesting to compare similar talks from two different points of view: researcher and participant.
6. It’s useful to start at the end to create a sensical user journey
One of the highlights of the day was certainly Stephanie Walter’s workshop on designing adaptive, reusable components and pages. Her coaching on how to design a web page was valuable and well-explained, with useful examples (such as a recipe page or a film rental and rating page).
Often when designing anything we begin with where we expect the user to start. With a website this is often assumed to be the homepage. However, Walter advised to start at the end, on the last step of the customer journey: for her example of the recipe website, that end point would be the recipe page itself.
In groups, we were asked to think of the components of a web page in a specific scenario, then to create a wireframe of that page. We had to think of priorities, what would be the most important features and components to show first, and that task was not easy as it sounds.
It was valuable for me to apply my experience of the cultural sector to the talks at UX London 2024. The whole day was inspiring to say the least, bookended by Tom Kerwin’s opening talk on pitch provocations and Rama Gheerawo’s human touch in inclusive design.
Kerwin’s talk reminded me to not think in too linear a way when conducting UX research as the market is ever changing and we need to be able to adapt. There are too many patterns emerging from research and his way of dealing with them is to launch parallel “safe-to-fail probes”. These are provocative pitches that may sound ludicrous, but which will be revealing.
Gheerawo’s talk at the end of the day pleased me because it was a rare instance of culture at this conference. I was surrounded by people from banking, healthcare, ecommerce…but no one from the world I know and love so much.
Where were the museums? The libraries? The theatres? The galleries? I certainly hope to see more GLAMs at future UX-focused conferences.
Gheerawo reminded everyone that at the centre of research and of design, humans are first and design is second. He shared case studies in which design was approached differently due to observing humans rather than patterns and behaviours. One example was telling a client they didn’t need a new fancy product to hold the workers’ phones, ipads, and other gadgets, but rather that they needed to redesign their high-vis vests to be able to easily transport everything they’d need. How clever.
Often in reports I speak of ‘users’ and ‘visitors’, when I should be typing the word ‘human’ a lot more.