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Reflecting on designing a watch party for UX Brighton Watch the UX Brighton watch party for yourself using this playlist on YouTube (took place on 13th April 2021) Look at the schedule and information for the event which was provided as a Google Doc Visit the Mural board that I used to guide my design and then reflect on my experiences Check out the video bingo mini challenge (H5P interactive activity) Edited Vlog Transcript Hi folks, I know it’s been a while. So, yeah basically what I can say is I’ve had a couple of really paperwork intensive months. I ran a watch party for UX Brighton because I presented about a few of the challenges I’d found through working on some discovery at my workplace. The suggestion was that perhaps we could do a UX Brighton watch party and that might provide me with an opportunity to experiment to try out some things that I couldn’t try out at work and to get some really helpful critical feedback. So, I’m really delighted to say that I got that opportunity because I really did get amazing feedback and I have since used the learning that I gained from that particular watch party to feed into my professional portfolio, and I’ve also used it to think really critically about how I talk to staff about watch parties how I encourage them to onboard people during watch parties.

What does an inclusive and successful online event look like? Setting a personal challenge \[The short version rather than the 4min vlog\] I work as a Learning Technologist, which means that I help academic staff at a university think about how to use technology to facilitate and augment their teaching and the students’ experience of learning. During the covid-19 pandemic, within the space of days my role as part of a team, was crucial to maintaining delivery of teaching and learning. This has given me the opportunity to experience and continually reflect on the use of online spaces for teaching and learning. Prior to this I have worked with Webinar technologies for 10 years. I have also organised and chaired a range of local and national online events as well as experiencing many as an attendee. Based on all this, I now have a critical mass of experience. From this position, I feel that I can reflect and because my practice is user experience focused, I want to set myself a challenge. To identify the optimal elements when creating inclusive and successful online events. The following factors will be key to this challenge: 

Background This post is a personal reflection in response to a question posed by Tom Langston on Twitter as a retweet of Dr Andy Clegg. Observing that other individuals tagged in the tweet have more involvement in policy and management, I was both humbled and interested in why my opinion might be sought. Deliberately I have chosen not to read the answers of others, such as @jamesclay’s blog post, as I wanted to provide my own perspective. I shall be sure to read that after-the-fact of course and thank you for asking Tom!

From January until May 2019 the eLearning team evaluated the AV1 robot avatar, a telepresence robot manufactured by the company No Isolation, based in Norway. This post aims to provide a brief overview of what we learned during our pilot project.

Why am I here (as in you, at this blog, and reading this now)? I hope you are here because you would like an introduction to using RStudio for data visualisation. I also hope that you are here because you are interested in Jobs-To-Be-Done (abbrev~ JTBD; Ulwick, 2016). This blog provides an example of how to apply one of the approaches that sits under the mantle of JTBD, an Opportunity Landscape (Ulwick, 2016; VIII. Target Hidden Growth Opportunities section).

At the end of my last entry I outlined my discovery that there was an app building company called Bubble, which would likely lead to brand confusion. As a result I decided to go back to some of the ideas on my earlier sketchbook page and consider other possibilities that would tackle some of the same goals. The following company traits need to be suggested by the name:

On this page of my sketchbook I used a dice rolling exercise (Barnard & Briscoe, 2016) to explore different name combinations for the potential company. Initially I gravitated towards BubbleHome as a concept.

Greetings! I have decided that I would like to keep up my reflective writing activities during IDM22. This is due to my recent experience on the web development module and also thinking back to when I took IDM21 (seems so long ago now!). In both cases it was an immensely valuable venture.

Part 1 of my final evaluation. This entry outlines key decisions that I made regarding accessibility towards the end of the development period. I am writing and publishing it retroactively as it as represents a very large amount of thinking and work, which I kept notes about as I went along.

\[caption id="attachment\_381" align="alignright" width="288"\]\[/caption\] Altering the Flickity Carousel/Timeline So changing the height of the Flickity carousel used for the patient timeline meant that the “dot” buttons had to be moved upwards otherwise they would be off the bottom of the visible area on most standard screen sizes. For reference, I have included a long screenshot that I made of the site prior to this work, on the right. So I decided that the dots should reside on-top of the carousel and then they would also be spatially connected to the navigation of the timeline. This is not really how Flickity carousels are really designed to exist (metafizzy, 2016), but it is closer to the original inspiration for my site the DuckDuckGo about page (DuckDuckGo, 2014). The main issue that I ran into was that the carousel needed to resize itself dynamically and I had media queries which hid the dots on mobile devices (as they were no longer very useful as buttons at that size). However, as the dots themselves are rendered automatically by the JavaScript, they were rendering much more quickly than the resizing. So I upon sizing-up a responsive browser window the dots and timeline appeared on top of everything and looked awful. I tried everything I could think of to fix this issue. I attempted to delay the dots in the JavaScript. I also tried writing a script which watched for the window size. I tried positioning the dots so that they moved upwards. I also tried creating condition code which watched for various conditions to be met prior to triggering the dots. Things I wrote worked to an extent, but not sufficiently or reliably enough to depend on them. In the end I had to temporarily hide the dots by setting them and the timeline to ‘display: none’. I also had to hide the spot where they generated by moving the about section upwards. Essentially the solution’s analogue equivalent is that the rabbit is being hidden in a compartment of the hat the whole time (oh wait…is that how they do it?). Performance Issues I am actually grateful that all of this happened as once I had cracked the rendering issue I realised that there were some major performance issues with the carousel/timeline. It took a bit of time to get to the bottom of it, but in the end I realised that it was the long svg that I had included to indicate the patient’s anxiety levels. Through testing in multiple browsers, on Mac, PC and mobile I realised that the image also wasn’t loading anywhere other than in Chrome for Mac. Everywhere it was just gumming up the works. I reassessed the need for the anxiety level gauge/image and decided that it was important to keep it. So through trial and error I ended up loading with an image tag in the html as a very, very long svg. This is the only svg in the site that I could not optimise as it resulted in optimisation errors because it was too long dimensions-wise. Also, I realised that I did not really want to optimise it as I would result in losing the drop shadow detail which I had added to a new version of the design.