UX Bournemouth 6
This week I attended UX Bournemouth 6, but it was a bit different this time as rather than just sitting in the audience I was up on stage speaking!
I have been to the last couple of Bournemouth events and always enjoyed them, they have had some great speakers and the community down there is very welcoming, so when I was asked if I would like to do a 10 minute lightning talk I jumped at the chance.
As the massive navigation project at Wiggle was coming to an end I thought sharing my experience would be interesting to other people, so I wrote an eight point guide to changing your site architecture. At General Assembly they had drummed into us how important practicing things like this is, so every night for two weeks before the event I stood in the garden after dinner and ran through it.
And this practice really helped. Standing up there on Tuesday night I felt nervous but composed and think it went really well. It was lovely to have two colleagues in the audience to cheer me on (thanks Emma and Mike).
The other three speakers were all great, however I was not quite as focused as I should have been, so I cannot give you as detailed a run down as I normally would.
Samantha Davies from Monzo started the event off talking about how user research is often misunderstood and how she has combated this at Monzo by including more of the team in the research itself and the changes she has made in the way she captures and shares the results.
Ben then did a lightning talk about running a lot of research sessions across the country in a very short amount of time. I missed some of this talk as I was getting my microphone fitted, however my key take away from Ben was make sure you look after yourself when doing research away from home. Make sure you eat well and get some time to yourself to unwind.
Then it was me talking about the changes to the site architecture of the Wiggle site, hopefully to go live in September.
Last up was Laura Yarrow from ExperienceUX. She spoke about storytelling and how sometimes a good story can be more powerful than a set of personas in getting people's buy-in. It was a whistle stop tour of the main components that make a good story and while I might not be able to remember the correct terminology, she made some great points which I am going to try and incorporate into my work.
So an event with a difference for me, but one I really enjoyed. It was a bit scary but I am glad I did it and maybe I will try a longer session next time.