Digital Ethnography: What, How, Who and Why with Kristine Pitts, ExperienceLab

For most brands their customer and user base are conveniently located in major cities, yet a lot of user research are often only conducted in those cities. Many experiences cannot be captured in a single interview or group session once the experience or activity is in the past. Some experiences can potentially take place over extended time periods and gathering responses and actions as they emerge would give us a much richer picture of what and who we are designing for. Digital ethnography is a way to reach a wider, geographically spread user group and is also great for conducting research over a longer term. You can probably think of methods you have used or heard of, that enable you to do this. Designing this type of research has several considerations.

This workshop will go through:

• why and when you might consider using digital ethnography
• the options for tools
• how to structure activities and questions
• what type of users this is suited for, etc

Kristine is Head of Practice at ExperienceLab and the current Vice President of the UXPA UK. She has 14 years of experience in designing and delivering user research. Having specialised for many years in conducting ethnographic research in a range of different contexts, over the past 4 years she’s been leading, shaping and refining ExperienceLab’s approach to digital ethnography in response to working with clients such as the BBC who need to cater for and include a wide range of users from across the UK, as well as global brands who want to understand the longer term customer journeys of their target audiences.

Sketchnotes with Chris Spalton, Redgate Software

This workshop will help people overcome the ‘fear of bad drawing’ in order to communicate ideas and concepts in an engaging and interesting fashion, helping take stakeholders and clients along the journey from stage one.

We’ll look at the benefits of sketchnoting, how it helps you retain information, and build up some sketching skills through some activities in order to help overcome the initial hurdles of putting pen to paper in order to express ideas not artwork.

Chris is a UX Consultant / Designer hybrid working at Foolproof. Big visual thinking enthusiast / member of the sketching and UX communities trying to encourage people to embrace doodling in order to help express ideas to colleagues, clients and customers in an engaging visual format. Huge fan of underground rock music, and creator of the Eelman Chronicles comic.

How to run a Design Studio with Leonardo Mattei, Elsevier

The Design Studio is a type of UX workshop that combines divergent and convergent thinking. It helps the entire product team to collaborate, propose ideas and feeling invested in the product.

During the workshop you will learn:

• What a Design Studio is and how to facilitate it effectively
• How to frame the problem correctly and inform the team about what you are trying to solve
• How to run and participate in a crazy 8s session and how to guide the team to converge on a few successful ideas
• How to provide and collect good feedback and prioritise important aspects of the product you are building

Leonardo is currently Senior UX Designer at Elsevier, where he is looking at how researchers stay up-to-date on the most relevant literature for their research. Researchers spend an average of 8 hours a week on this case, using hundreds of different sources and fighting every day their FOMO and the domain’s information overload. He’s now designing new solutions to solve their problem. He started his career in Italy almost 8 years ago as a brand designer, and then he specialised in user experience, working for an agency and as a freelance for international clients. He moved to London in 2015 where, before joining Elsevier, he worked at SuperAwesome to design KWS, a product to help companies building 100% kids’ safe and COPPA compliant apps. KWS is now being used by Disney, Hasbro, and many other top kids’ brands. Apart from working, he brews beer, climbs walls and plays jazz guitar.