On the 5th April 2011, I attended Lightning UX: Perspectives on Research. Held at City University of London, it was sponsored by Flow Interactive, Foolproof, Loop11, Balsamiq and City University of London.

Lee Mcivor was kicked things off. He offered some pragmatic advice about doing more than just reading the books. We should do research with rigour, using quant and qualitative, evaluative and generative. We should be careful not to be seen as cowboys and the the best way to do that is focus on the end product, not our deliverables.

Poppy James from Bunnyfoot continued the theme about rigour in our research with a more detailed look at pre-recruitment and recruitment processes. I loved her quote about research participants being like murder suspects - they have to have a motive and a means. Being thorough in the recruitment process makes it easier to identify how your research may have shortcomings and it is important that you communicate those shortcomings to your client or team.

Clive Grinyer, who works for Cisco (through IBSG Innovations) may have made some assumptions that the audience would be full of researchers and not the hybrid model like myself, who sit in between the two. He touched on the common problem about big companies with reams of data and no insight, something which doesn’t (and often can’t) get addressed in a public setting. He had a lovely illustration which showed strategy > decisions > design > experience > people. 

Dr Rachel Jones from Instrata Limited talked about translating research into design and about how our currency is people. She gave a fantastic example of the design of knives. European knives are ergonomic and designed for the hands, where as Japanese knives are designed for the skill of the cook. The Japanese knife leaves a gap between the user and the object. This is a perfect example as design as a process (for delivery) versus action-centic design (for innovation). 

Richard Caddick talked about Stealth Research. There is a children’s book by Richard Scarry called “What do people do all day” which is funnily enough, a fantastic example of this kind of research. Just as in the book, stealth research is all about watching people, listening to people Richard talked about his experience in call centres, train stations, customer forums, Q&A and social networks.

Stefana Broadbent had some fascinating insights about how attention defines status. The choice of communication channel has more complicated decisions behind it and how much attention a channel demands, will determine the number of contacts a person will normally have on it. People only regularly ring a small handful of people but they will have hundreds of people on their Facebook account. The reason behind this is we have only negotiated with a small number of people to command attention and for others we will resort to less obtrusive contact methods. 

Jaimes Nel from Live|Work gave one of the more interesting talks of the night. There was a lot of concepts including string theory and the organic growth of ideas. He also talked about research being archaeology when you combined artefacts and ideas with the dimension of time. It was a lot to cover in a five minute talk and I’m not sure how much of it I managed to absorb. I do hope to see Jaimes present this one again. 

Alex Woolley from RCA Design talked a lot about prototyping, especially product prototyping using Arduino. Not having worked in product design, I’ve never given much of a thought to how much rapid prototyping has improved the process here. 

I was thoroughly impressed by Makayla Lewis’s talk on creating personas, who is currently studying her PHD at City University. Her methodology was absolutely flawless although I do wonder whether she will be able to stick to that method or whether she will have to streamline it in order to meet real world deadlines. 

The final speaker of the night was Mary Cook from Uscreates who talked about designing environments for research and how environments can enable research. I loved then honesty of the talk, Mary discussed how the elaborately designed environments had became too expensive and resulted in their company losing pitches. They experimented with scaling the environments back and found that generally older people didn’t mind (as long as they had a cup of tea!) but for younger people, it made a big difference. Even though the more elaborate environments were more expensive initially, Mary found that it helped build ongoing relationship with their clients. 

This was the first talk in a long time that I didn’t sketchnote, however Eva-Lotta Lamm did some amazing sketchnotes if you are interested.