25th October 2016

UX Journeys with a Chatbot (and cake)

Digital Events

Reading time 10 mins

UX Journeys with a Chatbot (and cake)

NUX5 was the 5th year of the North of England’s largest UX and design conference at the Royal College of Music in Manchester.

Taking place on 7th Oct, the A&P digital design team went along to soak up some knowledge and enhance the user journeys we plan into all our digital projects.

The line up this year featured some top UX designers from worldwide brands travelling from all over the world to pass on their knowhow and findings to us all.

1.Boon Sheridan “Rules, hunches and coinflips” @boonerang 

Boon started the conference with a fast paced, funny and straight to the point talk about the way in which key decisions can be made throughout a digital project, and then to make those core decisions the ‘rules’ of the project, so no further decisions deviate from this. 

Boon expressed the importance of intuitive design, the user must know how to use the online offering, whilst all the time working towards the end goal of its purpose.

2.Lola Oey “For the love of wicked problems” @lolaoye

Lola works at Head Digital in London and her talk followed a similar vein to Boon delving into the theory of a ‘Wicked Problem’, being a problem that resists solution and strays away from being fixed. 

This is because every wicked problem is different to another, and solving one wicked problem usually presents another, and underpins why a strong UX journey is key to a successful project.

3.Karina Van Schaardenburg “Mixing Methods Abroad” @kvanscha

Karina has had a varying career in the Silicon Valley, currently working at Lyft and her talk covered her experience whilst working at Foursquare.  The team at Foursquare looked into their analytics and found out that the usage of the app in Turkey was much higher than other countries and as such research was conducted into finding out why this was. This involved both a lab study and a field study in Istanbul involving a wide range of users discovering how they used the social location sharing app. The research unveiled that the male and female of the species were using the app in different ways, females preferred to use the app more privately than males. Much of this data then helped drive know how for future releases of the app highlighting the importance of data driving decision making and knowledge.

4.Glenn Gustitus “Security and User Experience” @ggustitus

Glenn began his talk by showing how easy it could be to crack 3 security questions from his online banking account. 

Using standard questions like ‘Who was your university professor’, ‘Where did you meet your partner’, and ‘Where is your favourite place to eat’ he was able to open social media accounts to find out the relevant data and gain access to his personal banking accounts. 

Using the example of the recent Yahoo! Email hack, he showed how seriously online security should be taken. 

He then went onto explain up-to-date practices that offer a much higher level of security, such as ‘Multifactor Authentifaction’ where a user will be sent a text or an automated phone call from their provider with a time limited security code. He closed by saying online security developers must work closely with designers to make sure security and UX don’t compromise one another.

5.Sophie Dennis “The art of things not done” @sophiedennis

Sophie explored the limitations of a project against three core elements: Cost, Quality and Scope. Explaining that if one of these areas exceeds the project brief then another one would be compromised. Sophie used an example of a conference she planned, and whether or not having a lunch in her cheaper conference would be damaging to the conference, asking the question of “Is a bad [cheap] lunch better than having no lunch at all?”. 

Using the Kano Model she concluded that people always remember the worst part, the best part and the ending, and that a bad lunch would be remembered as the worst part of her conference opting not to have one, but she did compromise by including cake, which could be seen as the best part of her conference.  Acknowledging the importance of having your cake and eating it.

6.Graham Odds “Let’s have a conversation” @g_odds

After a short break (we had cake, and a lunch) Graham led an interesting talk onChatbots and how they can and are being used to replace apps, being heralded as the future of digital and search. 

Using online services like WhatsAppSlack and Allo; using a Chatbot a user could talk to the service to get what they want to do. 

Graham used the example of the finance world, and has been building a Chatbot in Slack as a personal finance assistant to manage his finances. 

The overall message of his talk highlighted selling service as a conversation, something Facebook and Google are already using. This is also being adopted by SkyScanner using a Chatbot to book flights, simply by asking it “I want to book a flight to New York on the 15th March my budget is £500” and the Chatbot would reply with possible flight choices with a link to book the flight. Also now used in e-commerce, voice is dictated search and is expected to grow substantially over the next two years.

"Instead of making people people download your app, make them come to you and use the apps they already use; WhatApp, iMessage and Slack"

7.Henny Swan “The velvet rope” @iheni

Henny looked into the accessibility of UX using personas and highlighting that sometimes the standard user isn’t always the person using that service.

She heroed design that is accessible for all users, not necessarily the best looking, but always the best to use, whilst finding a suitable medium between them. 

Henny closed her talk explaining that whatever device is being used, accessibility should always be at the forefront.

All in all we had a great time at the conference – helped by the cake  - with Graham’s talk on Chatbots being a particular highlight

Want to talk to us? Contact us or call us on 01772 770770