Following the previous reflective journal, here is the reflective journal for 23rd-27th April 2018.

There is no coding going on this week as the focus of this week is mainly on collecting analytics data from the latest prototype of my work (Elebase 4 Build 4375 at the time of writing) and also planning and writing a first draft for my 2,000 word report on the project, so this is just a reflective journal with little in the way of ‘production diary’ content.

Monday 23rd April

Analytics collection

After some very minor modifications to the code made over the weekend, for example the addition of some text over the hero image that says ‘Click or tap the animals!’ as a call-to-action to get users to click or tap on the animals to activate the animations and the addition of a page explaining that the site is still under construction before the home page is accessible (fascinating!) The call-to-action message was added because I didn’t know if users would instinctively think to try and tap on the animals. I wanted to see what users thought of the animations as they were a headlining feature of Elebase 4 which (until-now) hasn’t been tested by users, so I was interested to see what users had to say about them. The message fades in about a second after the page has loaded and fades away after around 20-25 seconds as to not clutter the hero image, but inform users that they can tap on the characters and something will happen. I didn’t want to say what would happen because that spoils the surprise element.

I sent the links out to a group of friends to test and get data from last night (Sunday 22nd April). I haven’t logged into Google Analytics yet to get hold of the analytics data but I have logged into Microsoft Forms and have been reading the feedback as it has been coming through. The links were sent 24 hours ago at the time of writing this and so far 8 people have tested the site. I’ll give the others several more days before I nudge them to look! I’ll be looking at this data over this weekend or early next week I would have thought.

Initial impressions are fairly positive! The age-old debacle about the heading font has returned with some testers liking it and others not so much – I’ll have to see what staff at Nellie’s Nursery actually think of this when I show it to them on Wednesday. Generally testers like the appearance of the site with the average rating being 4.5/5 for appearance and testers felt that the site was usable, with the average usability rating also being 4.25/5 at the time of writing. Animations were generally liked (without looking at my analytics data, the fact that testers are talking about animations means that the new call-to-action to click or tap on the characters has worked!) but sounds have been criticised for being unexpected (I thought that might be the case) and although the ‘jumping’ animation when the user rolls over the menu buttons on the desktop sites are generally liked, it has been suggested that if you roll over the buttons all at once or too quickly, the animations look ugly and distracting. iPhone SE testers noted that the site did not display all assets correctly on the SE’s small display (especially when put it next to a larger iPhone such as the 6s for comparison). SE users noted that the hamburger menu didn’t display correctly and the giraffe often went behind the tree instead of in front of it. I just want to use this as another example of how sometimes device emulators in web browsers don’t accurately display how a site will look on a given device. Look at the comparison screenshots below showing how Google Chrome rendered the site on an iPhone 5/SE-sized device compared to how the site actually renders on a real iPhone SE.

As I found out when testing Nellie’s Nursery Mobile Prototype 2 on a Samsung Galaxy S7 (see the end of this post), testing your products on as many physical devices as possible is invaluable! If I didn’t have access to an iPhone SE to test this with I would likely have shipped a website that does not display properly on a current generation Apple smartphone or the still-common iPhone 5 and 5s! I wrote more about testing in emulators versus on physical devices in the February 26th-March 2nd Reflective Journal.

On the whole though, I am pleased that I have received positive feedback so far and more importantly have received yet more food for thought and points to build on to make the next version of this product even better! I love seeing how this has evolved and thinking back to February when the first versions were being developed, a lot of has changed in two months and that’s because a wide range of testers have consistently provided me with fantastic suggestions and feedback to work with! Had it not been for user research my work might still looking a lot like it did two or three months ago which user testing has proved is not as intuitive or pleasant to use as what I have today.

First stages of planning my 2,000 word report

The 2,000 word report needs to be written in the style of a business report and it needs to be about the steps I have taken to develop Elebase (the Nellie’s Nursery website) right the way from the work that I was doing back in January when I was creating moodboards to right now with the (near) completion of Elebase 4. This is a lot of ground to cover in just 2,000 words (my weekly reflective journals have generally been anywhere between 4,000 and 15,000 words long!) and must also include references to UX theorems and practices that have been used to make this project.

To get started, today we were put into small groups and tasked with coming up with a structure for a report about a specific topic. BSc Games Development student Robin Wragg and I were tasked with structuring an essay about GDPR – the new EU directive on data protection which is enforceable from May 25th this year. We decided that the ‘abstract’ section is basically just a summary of the report that is placed at the beginning of the report and that for this report about GDPR it should probably include a brief overview of what GDPR is, what some of the consequences are for not following it and why businesses need to be aware of it. And that’s it. There needn’t be any solid evidence to back this up in the abstract. From here on, here is what we planned:

Introduction

• More depth about what GDPR is.
• Information on the data protection act(s) that GDPR replaces.
• Slightly more detail about the consequences of not following GDPR.

Findings

• Exactly what action businesses need to take to be compliant with GDPR.
• What data businesses need to protect and how exactly they need to protect it.
• Information about the Primary Impact Assessment and Data Protection Impact studies that businesses need to carry out.
• Some relevant case studies of large-scale cases where data protection issues have impacted a business, for example a case study on the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytics scandal.

Discussion

• A discussion of the topics raised in the case study and how businesses should avoid being caught out by GDPR.
• A discussion of the reparations for not complying with GDPR.

Conclusions

• Draw conclusions from the above sections about how important it will be to comply with GDPR after Msy 25th.

Recommendations

• From the conclusions, suggest the steps that businesses should take in order to ensure that they can comply with GDPR.

Bibliography

• Cite the sources used in the report.

Following this we were introduced (rather appropriately given that references and sources were the focus of the session!) to some of NUA’s help sheets on how to reference various sources such as books, websites, journals and even video games and YouTube videos (which I guess are an ever-increasing source of knowledge!) This was a helpful session as it taught me how to use Harvard Referencing within my text meaning that I can now cite sources for specific sentences rather than having a bibliography at the end which is essentially just a list of sources where something in the text has been referenced from, but you may never find out what bits of the text came from which sources.

Also demonstrated was NUA’s new library search system called ‘Discovery’ which is a very powerful tool for finding books, journals, downloadable PDF documents and e-Books and potentially other web content. This will be a powerful tool for finding sources for this report that I need to write and I am certainly up for using it! I’ll probably use it as a way to research UX theories for this piece. O’Reilly Safari e-Books were also demonstrated which is a category of tens of thousands of e-Books that the university has subscribed to that are freely available at the tap of a button from your Android or iOS device or from your web browser. Now being the proud owner of an Android device, I hastily downloaded the O’Reilly Safari app onto my Galaxy S8 but was saddened to learn that at the moment my student email address is not recognised by the service. I have been in touch with the university library about this and we are working together to resolve this. I am really excited for when it becomes available it seems like a fantastic tool for reading e-Books about a range of topics related to the courses taught at NUA. There are a lot of UX books out there – most of them pretty expensive it must be said, so to be able to obtain them for free is a blessing!

This afternoon I wrote a structure plan for my report (or at least what I think the report will look like at this point in time!) a little like the basic one Robin and I wrote a hypothetical article about GDPR earlier on.

Title

• Just the title of the report, which is ‘Nellie’s Nursery Production’ (or something similar).

Contents

• A table of contents, each section below will be in the contents page.

Abstract/’Executive Summary’

• A summary of the report: its purpose, its findings, its conclusions and recommendations for going forwards.

Introduction

• Some information about Nellie’s Nursery.
• Some information about the requirements statement that was written in January and an explanation of how these requirements basically list everything that they wanted to see in a website.

Methodology

• Information on the research I did about nursery websites in January.
• Information about formative user research and what my findings were.
• Some research on children’s interaction and research on UX practices – even including the research I did in February about mobile menu systems and how this research influenced my design choices.
• Information about how I made the site.
• Information about how I tested the site using real users, real user testing strategies and generating real test data to work on.

Findings

• Information from the various testing sessions and feedback from the survey that is being circulated at the moment. Include information about what the users liked, what they disliked, what pain points were and how each new iteration resolved problems found with the previous version.

Conclusions

• Discuss the results from the user testing sessions to determine whether the UX theories were true and are present on my site, or whether my site and testing does not/has not conformed to the norm.

Recommendations

• Suggest changes to the site based on the user testing that has been carried out and most importantly the data that the current analytics testing and survey produces.

Bibliography

• List the sources that were used during the research and writing of this piece.

This structure should be enough for me to work on over the next few days to get a first draft completed by the end of the week.

Tuesday 24th April

Participating in user testing

Tom Haczewski from The User Story introduced me to a student in Year 3 at NUA who studies Design For Publishing called Holly Stringer whom initially approached him in March for advice on how to conduct UX testing for her third year final piece. He referred her to me and over the past month or so I have been giving her advice on how to build the website she wanted to test and also how to conduct user testing in the UX lab at NUA using Morae. I felt that I was able to guide her to conducting a user testing session and was able to give her my knowledge and experience of user testing. The website that she has produced is a website that a lady asked her to make which has basic details such as parking fees and spaces, restaurant information, accessibility information and shop information of all of the NHS and private hospitals in the UK and Ireland. At first Holly was a little overwhelmed by the task but I explained that she wouldn’t need to complete the whole website for the purpose of user testing but just complete a few pages to give the tester ‘a flavour’ for that the final site would look like – obviously completing the whole site would be a mammoth task! She also didn’t have any experience in coding or building websites so I suggested that she tried Adobe Muse which although is being deprecated by Adobe in the coming years, is still supported and still a good tool to produce a website with without the need for code. Over the past few weeks Holly has been creating this website prototype in Muse and has been ‘picking my brains’ for UX testing methods and today she was ready to test!

Holly executed an A/B test, trialling two different navigation styles (hidden and visible) and asking the user to perform a number of tasks. The two different prototypes were tested on the desktop PCs and the user testing was recorded with Morae. After this, Holly asked a number of questions about the usability and appearance of the website. I felt that I was able to provide good feedback for Holly and it was great to be involved in some user testing in the UX lab – this is probably the first or second time that I have been a participant in the UX lab. I felt that Holly’s work was really good and she made a very usable website that could evolve into something bigger. Let’s hope that if the lady wants Holly to continue development that Adobe come up with a plan to migrate their users from Muse to something else – apparently Adobe XD will have fully replaced Muse by 2020 which makes sense.

2,000 word report progress

Today I spent quite a bit of time writing a first draft of my report. The ideal word limit should be around 2,000 however as it stands my piece is approximately 1,400 words. I feel absolutely fine about this because I have the core structure of the piece written by looking back through my old reflective journals and basically rewriting them in a much more concise and basic fine and have basically explained the whole journey in 1,400 words. This leaves me approximately 600 words to add in research and a bibliography. I plan to get my work checked soon and get some guidance on the direction that the report needs to go in. I need to spend the next few days researching some UX practices to put into this report and get them into approximately 600 words – that should be doable!

On Thursday afternoon I need to present a presentation about the contents of my report, so this afternoon I created a presentation just going over what each section of the report includes. In my usual presentation style, the slides consist of full-page images that relate to the content of the slides. I’ve explained in the past why this is my presentation style but basically it’s because I am not a fan of having text on slides because I don’t want to be the presenter that reads off a screen and I want the audience focusing on me, not the slide. I feel that as a presenter you shouldn’t need the aid of text on a slides to assist you, you should know what you are talking about. If the audience are looking at me then I know that instead of trying to read what might be on a slide, they are more likely to be listening to me and what I have to say.

Wednesday 25th April

I spent this morning researching UX theories such as Hick’s Law and the Honeycomb theory as well as some UX principles about children’s design and nursery websites to put into my 2,000 word report. Adding information from these sources will enable me to talk about my prototype conforms to UX theories and how the theories have been helpful in designing the website and also how I’ve naturally just made a website that seems to fit these theories. I’ve not actually written any of these theories into the report at this point – this will come over the next few days but I can submit what I wrote yesterday as a first draft for evaluation on Friday.

Nellie’s Nursery LOVE Elebase 4!

What can I say? I visited the nursery this afternoon to show them what I’ve made so far and also to take some photos of the children and the nursery for the website to replace the stock images. Despite only half of the website being functional as yet and the excessive use of Lorem Ipsum, staff at Nellie’s Nursery fell in love with the prototype even calling it ‘beautiful’. They particularly liked the animations on the home page and simplicity of the design. The only thing they were not so keen on was the heading font which has been heavily criticised since day one by NUA’s graphic design students. They felt that the font was perhaps too ‘chilldish’ so it is back to the drawing board to find another font. Otherwise, it is all systems go!

The university project is due on May 11th and doesn’t need to be a completed site. I will likely submit Elebase 4 as my submission for this project and then after that begin developing Elebase 5 which will eventually lead to the final site that is hopefully released to market soon. I know that after May 11th the university won’t support the project, but I feel confident enough to continue developing it and then launch it. In a way, it would be a real shame to leave Elebase in the state that it is in given how much research, user testing and feedback has gone into making this. In total, 20 people have provided direct feedback and many of these have conducted formal user testing in February and March, so with the basics of site proven to be successful and many of the early problems ironed out we can expect Elebase 5 to be a massive update to Elebase 4 featuring further refinements and the addition of the missing pages.

I’m buzzing about this and very happy to hear that Nellie’s Nursery are pleased with the direction in which the site is headed.

O’Reilly Safari e-Books

On a slightly unrelated note, I managed to get the Safari e-Books working on my phone today. This is a fantastic resource and will be amazing for future research. I can just see myself sitting on the bus reading these e-Books on my phone. There are a lot of UX e-books on there which are free to download and free which is great and a lot of them also include audio and video too which could be quite nice. The actual UX of the Android app at least I feel is very nice with the option to scroll down the pages (as if were reading a PDF document on a computer) or swipe to the left to move the page, as if you were reading on an e-Reader like a Kindle which kind of mimics the act of turning over a page in a book (that’s the idea at least).

Thursday 26th April

This morning I went back to Nellie’s Nursery to finalise some more details with what they’d like to be done to the site going forwards. The meeting went well and I can’t wait to continue working on it, probably after May 11th which is hand-in.

The next week or so is going to be absolutely manic-busy as the 2,000 word report needs to be drafted by tomorrow and needs to be fully completed by May 11th which is just over two weeks away at the time of writing. Next week I have to work on a group presentation for my course which will be watched and assessed by several people from the UX/UI and games development industries, namely Tim Caynes from Foolproof (who visited in January and saw me present the ‘Bet You’re Drunk’ game that myself and several others created the concept for as a result of a challenge he set us), Ricky Morton who also visited NUA at some point to deliver a presentation on his experience of working in the games industry and most importantly for me, Katie Fisher whom is a UX researcher at The User Story. Recently I’ve worked a lot with Katie at various educational events such as the Step Into Club where we delivered a presentation to students about UX and tasked them with developing a paper prototype and also at the 2-day Techathon that I attended a couple of weeks ago – you can read about of these in this post. Knowing Katie on a more professional-level than the other two asides, the main reason why I am keen to impress her is because I’ve made it very plain recently to her and her other colleagues (Tom Haczewski and Olivia Campey, both of whom I have also worked with lately) that The User Story is on my ‘wish list’ for internships with them being a local company and me knowing all three of its employees now so naturally I want to do a good job at this presentation as it looks good on me, shows I can work in a team and hopefully she will go back to work and say positive things about me and my presentation skills to Tom and Olivia – no point beating around the bush about it – that’s what I want her to do. The other reason is that our research and statistics will need to be absolutely on-point as with her being a researcher she will likely have a lot to ask about that side of the presentation, so that will need to be perfect.

I also need to devote a bit of time to looking at my analytics data and survey results for the April 2018 Elebase 4 testing in more depth and write a short(ish) post about that. Then, if I have the time to do so between next week and May 11th actually implement some of those changes. I reckon by changing the paragraph font and adding a mute button to the animations I will have fixed most of the issues picked up in that testing. I’ll also take another look at scaling in portrait mode on the iPhone SE and see if that can be improved – it’s annoying that the Google Chrome iPhone SE emulator doesn’t emulate the site properly but I’ll have to try my best! If I can analyse the data and act on feedback in this short time frame that will help put me ahead.

The research I did this morning about UX theorems and children’s interaction needs to be written into my report draft and submitted by the end of tomorrow. That might be a challenge because tomorrow is my manual driving test (the joys of having passed before in an auto!) and tonight I need to get some last minute driving practice in so I am tip-top for tomorrow as next week it seems that writing this report and getting this group presentation bang-on will eat a lot of time, so I don’t really want to have to do my test again.

It seems that some serious time management will be in order! Luckily, I rarely get stressed about things these days and just prefer to stay calm and be methodical about things so the next week should be manageable.

Friday 27th April

Due to having my driving test today and having some family affairs to attend to, I haven’t been able to make any progress today at all so will need to work over the weekend and early next week to get the analytics data analysed and also the research written into my report draft. I am fairly happy with the report draft at the moment and with some research and external sources to back up my opinions and design decisions it will be even better.

Today I also hired a friend of mine from university as a copywriter for the nursery website. For the purpose of the university project the copy doesn’t matter but when it goes online having good copy that persuades parents that Nellie’s Nursery is the place to send their child for a great head-start in education could mean the difference between a parent sending their child there and a parent choosing not to, i.e. the difference between a sale. I advertised on the university’s Facebook page for a copywriter and had several people contact me within an hour of me posting the advertisement and in the end went with a student that I know of fairly well but haven’t worked closely with before. She did English Literature at A level and really wanted to have an opportunity to get back into writing as she felt that this was the only thing missing from her graphic design degree. She almost did an English degree and keeps a personal blog that is well-written so I am looking forward to working with her to produce the copy for the final site. Copywriting will take place after May 11th and I will be paying her because I don’t expect her to work for nothing and there is potentially a lot of work to do!

I could have done this myself because I enjoy writing and know what the nursery want, but I wanted the chance to work with somebody new and for somebody perhaps a little more passionate about persuasive/advertising writing than myself to have the opportunity. Getting somebody else to write the copy also means that whilst they are doing that, I can spend time on refining the site and ensuring that it displays and performs correctly without also having to worry about writing the copy. This decreases production time and means that the final website is published sooner.