Making a difference: ideas from UX New Zealand 2022

Making a difference through UX was a shared passion among an impressive line-up of 7 researchers, strategists, and designers from the global UX community at this year’s 100% virtual 3-day UX New Zealand conference.

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1. From bombs to bots: the evolving landscape of frontline research

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These days Darya Pilram, Senior Researcher at Twitter, spends her days trying to understand the motivation and techniques of groups who ‘hire’ technology to spread harmful narratives.  The desert of Mogadishu and the urban conflicts of South Africa are just some of the unlikely places she’s leveraged the power of frontline research to create change.

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"I realized the only way to influence change was by bringing folks along with me - and so I did.  I bought them right into the field with me."

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2. Beautifully accessible: why embracing inclusive design shouldn’t hold back your creativity

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Experience Designer Beth McPhail refuses to buy into the mindset that ‘accessibility is a creativity killer’. She challenges her peers to view accessibility as an opportunity to grow creatively while making technology more inclusive.

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“Accessibility is making it possible for someone to attend the party…and lose themselves in the music.”

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3. Innovating within the Justice sector | Part 2: For a fairer start - design’s role in shaping mana enhancing social & systemic change.

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Kelsey Gee is back challenging designers across all levels to think differently about how design can be used across different mediums and constraints to generate meaningful experiences and meaningful change.  In this session, she explores design’s role in creating empowering experiences that break both cycles of crime and institutional racism. (If you missed Part 1 from Mini Con head over here)

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"I truly believe that our superpower lies in our ability to redesign society, especially for our whanau and our most vulnerable communities…and once again explore design’s role in creating equal opportunities across safe, seamless, and healing public services."

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4. First do no harm: make your designs more trauma-informed and survivor sensitive

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In 1985, a researcher botched an interview question which led to a new understanding of trauma and its long-term effects. It grew awareness of the need to be trauma-informed in your work but what’s it actually mean?  UX Researcher Melissa Eggleston explores what it means to be trauma-informed and shares practical advice on how to achieve it.

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"Trauma is everywhere and something for us to think about…regardless of whether we’re working with people we know are dealing with traumatic events…it’s really all over the place."

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5. Changing the way we design high-risk products to make meaningful impact

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One in five people experiences “mental illness or significant mental distress” in New Zealand.  It’s a problem the Government knows needs to be addressed but how? In her powerful presentation, Rachael Reeves reveals what’s involved in balancing the complexities of Government with the need to rethink the way we design health products.

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"Be warned you can’t please everyone and it can be tough to keep product vision aligned when you’re talking about serious consequences for people."

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6. Remote research with new internet users (yes you can!)

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One billion new internet users (NIU) will come online for the first time over the next 5 years. These NIU's are using their first smartphones, with most of their online activities focused on communication, maintaining social connections, and entertainment. Tiane Lee, UX Research Lead at Google outlines the challenges and considerations behind adapting research for varying levels of digital literacy, including practical ideas for planning and conducting remote research with NIU.

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"NIU’s are typically less digitally literate, they may show lower confidence in digital capability, and they may perceive lower value of the internet for things like chatting and entertainment.”

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7. Conditions Design: weaving the invisible threads of service design, value orchestration, and culture building  

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Michael Tam introduces us to the niche field of conditions design and cites a purpose built high diving board on Wellington city’s busy waterfront in New Zealand as a good example of conditions design.  Find out why in this fascinating talk.

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"What really impressed me here…hats off to the council because they didn’t design an experience that would discourage people from doing it. It’s designed for people to have fun (vs Hong Kong where public spaces are designed for Tai Chi not fun like this). The design allows it to happen by influencing human behavior to stay safe but encouraging fun and exploration.”

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For a taste of what even more speakers from UX New Zealand 2022 had to share, head over to our highlights reel

"Dear Optimal Workshop

How do you make a small link attractive to people (icon vs. text)?"

— Cassie

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Dear Cassie,

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I'm going to dive straight into this interesting question with a good old game of Pros and Cons, and then offer a resolution of sorts, with a meandering thought or two along the way. Let's kick things off with Team Icon.

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The good side of icons: A picture is worth a 1000 words

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When shopping online, the number above the little shopping trolley icon tells me how badly behaved I’ve been, and if I click on it, I know I’ll get to gleefully review all the shoes I've selected so far. There’s a whole heap of icons out there like this that people have absorbed and can use without thinking twice. Marli Mesibov wrote a fantastic article on the use of icons for UX Booth on the use of icons that is well worth a look. Marli discusses how they work well on small screens, which is a definite bonus when you’re on the go! Young children who aren’t yet literate can easily figure out how to open and play Angry Birds on their parent’s smartphones thanks to icons. And icons also have a great capacity for bridging language barriers.

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The not so good side of icons: We’re too old for guessing games

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On the flipside, there are some issues that may huff and puff and blow that cute little home icon down. Starting with there being no consistent standard for them. Sure, there are a handful that are universal like home and print, but beyond that it seems to be a free-for-all. Icons are very much in the hands of the designer and this leaves a lot of room for confusion to grow like bacteria in a badly maintained office refrigerator. Difficult to understand icons can also seriously hinder a user’s ability to learn how to use your website or application. When icons don't communicate what they intend, well, you can guess what happens. In a great piece advocating for text over icons, Joshua Porter writes about an experience he had:

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"I have used this UI now for a week and I still have do a double-take each time I want to navigate. I’m not learning what the icons mean. The folder icon represents 'Projects', which I can usually remember (but I think I remember it because it’s simply the first and default option). The second icon, a factory, is actually a link to the 'Manage' screen, where you manage people and projects. This trips me up every time."

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If people can't pick up the meaning of your icons quickly and intuitively, they may just stop trying altogether. And now, over to Team Label.

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The good side of text: What you see is what you get

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Sometimes language really is the fastest vehicle you've got for delivering a message. If you choose the right words to label your links, you'll leave the user with very little doubt as to what lies beneath. It’s that simple. Carefully-considered and well-written labels can cut through the noise and leave minimal ambiguity in their wake. Quoting Joshua Porter again: "Nothing says 'manage' like 'manage'. In other words, in the battle of clarity between icons and labels, labels always win."

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The not so good side of text: Your flat shoe is my ballet pump

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Text labels can get messy and be just as confusing as unfamiliar icons! Words and phrases sometimes don’t mean the same thing to different people. One person’s flat enclosed shoe may be another person’s ballet pump, and the next person may be left scratching their head because they thought pumps were heels and all they wanted was a ballet flat! Text only labels can also become problematic if there isn’t a clear hierarchy of information, and if you have multiple links on one page or screen.  Bombarding people with a page of short text links may make it difficult for them to find a starting point. And text may also hold back people who speak other languages.

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The compromise: Pair icons up with text labels

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Because things are always better when we work together! Capitalise on the combined force of text and icons to solve the dilemma. And I don’t mean you should rely on hovers — make both text and icon visible at all times. Two great examples are Google Apps (because nothing says storage like a weird geometric shape...) and the iPhone App store (because the compass and magnifying glass would pose an interesting challenge without text...):

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So what comes next? (You can probably guess what I'm going to say)

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Whatever you decide to run with, test it. Use whatever techniques you have on hand to test all three possibilities — icons only, text only, and icons and text — on real people. No Pros and Cons list, however wonderful, can beat that. And you know, the results will probably surprise you. I ran a quick study recently using Chalkmark to find out where people on the ASOS women's shoes page would click to get to the homepage (and yes, I can alway find ways to make shoe shopping an integral part of my job). 28 people responded, and...

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...a whopping 89% of them clicked the logo, just 7% clicked the home icon, and just one person (the remaining 4%) clicked the label 'Home'. Enough said. Thanks for your question Cassie. To finish, here's some on-topic (and well-earned) comic relief (via @TechnicallyRon)

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Ahead of her talk at UX New Zealand 2016, Lana Gibson from Lanalytics writes about a project she worked on with Te Papa.Te Papa (a museum in Wellington, New Zealand) created audience personas based on user research, and I used these as a basis to create audience segments in Google Analytics to give us further insight into different groups. By regularly engaging with our audience using both qualitative and quantitative user insight methods, we’re starting to build up a three-dimensional picture of their needs and how Te Papa can serve them.

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Personas based on user research

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At Te Papa the digital team created six audience personas to inform their site redesign, based on user research:

• enthusiast
• tourist
• social
• educator
• volunteer
• Wellingtonian

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These formed a good basis for understanding why people are using the site. For example the educator persona wants fodder for lesson plans for her class — trustworthy, subject-based resources that will excite her students. The tourist persona wants practical information — what’s on, how to plan a visit. And they want to get this information quickly and get on with their visit.We’ll follow the tourist persona through a couple more rounds of user research, to give an example of what you can find out by segmenting your audience.

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Interpreting tourist needs with data

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Te Papa holds information for the Tourist audience in the Visit and What’s on sections of the site. I created a segment in Google Analytics which filters the reports to show how people who visit pages within these two sections interact with the whole site. For example the keywords they search for in Google before arriving on Te Papa, what they search for when on the site, and how many of them email us.Deeper digging revealed that the Tourist audience makes up about half of our overall audience. Because the content is useful to everyone wanting to visit the museum, and not just tourists, we broadened the scope of this persona and called the segment ‘Museum visitor’.

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Why segment by site category — what if the audience goes beyond these pages?

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Google Analytics segments allow you to see all the pages that a particular audience visits, not just the ones you’ve filtered. For example over 2,000 people who visited a page within the Visit and What’s on sections also visited the Kids and families section in July 2016. So, the audience segment allows us to expand our concept of our audiences.You can segment by a lot of different behaviors. For example you could segment visitors by keyword, isolating people who come to the site from Google after searching for ‘parking’ and ‘opening hours’ and seeing what they do afterwards. But segmenting by site category tests the information architecture of your site, which can be very useful if you’ve got it wrong!

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Visit persona wants opening hours information

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What did we learn from these personas? One example is that the most searched term on the site for the Visit persona was ‘opening hours’. To help fix this, the team put the opening hours on every page of the redesigned site:

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This resulted in a 90% drop in searches that include ‘hours’ (May 2016 compared with May 2015):

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Developing personas with Matariki

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After the re-design the team ran a project to increase the reach and engagement of the Te Papa Matariki audience. You can read more about this in "Using data to help people celebrate Matariki". Te Papa holds Matariki events in the museum, such as the Kaumātua kapa haka, and this event in particular enhanced and challenged our ideas about this audience.

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Experiencing Kaumātua kapa haka performances online

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The Kaumātua kapa haka is the biggest Matariki event held at Te Papa, and this year we had 4,000 unique page views to the two Kaumātua kapa haka event pages. Traffic spiked over the event weekend, particularly from Facebook and mobile devices. We assumed the traffic was from people who were planning to come to the event, as they sit in the What’s on section. But further analysis indicates that people were visiting for the live streaming of the event — we included embedded Youtube videos on these pages.The popularity of the videos suggests that we’re taking events held within the museum walls out to people on the move, or in the comfort of their own homes. Based on this insight we’re looking into live streaming more events.

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We’ve taken Te Papa personas through three iterations, based on user research, analytics, then a practical application of these to the Matariki festival. Each user research method has limitations, but by regularly using qualitative and quantitative methods we’re engaging with a  three dimensional view of our audience that’s constantly evolving. Each user research piece builds that view, and allows us to plan projects and site changes with greater clarity about what our users need. It means we can plan projects that will have real and measurable impact, and allow people to engage with Te Papa in useful and meaningful ways.

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Want to hear more? Come to UX New Zealand!

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If you'd like to hear more about how Lana and Ruth redesigned the Te Papa website, plus a bunch of other cool UX-related talks, head along to UX New Zealand 2016 hosted by Optimal Workshop. The conference runs from 12-14 October, 2016, including a day of fantastic workshops, and you can get your tickets here. Got some questions you'd like to ask Lana before the conference? You can Tweet her on @lanalytics00!