Category Archives: UX

Tony Ayres says…

In the ACMI collection there’s a video installation that spotlights a number of Australians film-industry professionals reflecting on their practice.

The Tony Ayres spotlight resonated most with me, particularly the matter of fact, self-awareness of his craft and his reflection on the critical skill of communicating concepts and idea to an audience, and its capacity to impact on them. I watched the video a number of times – it was fascinating and inspiring.

Pedestrian wayfinding in the inner city

Wayfinding at pedestrian crossings in Melbourne’s CBD where pedestrians are most likely to be face-down on their phone, much like as I observed as early as 2011 in Busan, South Korea. Like the promoters in Busan, the designers from the City of Melbourne understood the pedestrians and their behaviour – this led to the intentional design and installation of light panels on the ground at pedestrian crossings. Nice one, designers!

Previously, in Busan, South Korea

Advertising taped to the footpath at pedestrian crossings is a common sight in areas of Busan such as Seomyeon that are frequented by youth, young people and university students. As a location for advertising it is ideal. It is one of the rare times busy pedestrians will stop, if only for a short time. That’s long enough to catch their eye with some brightly coloured paper. Placement on the footpath is also more likely to increase the potential for a pedestrian to view the advertisement as they gaze down at their smartphone. Accidental line of sight!

In the following photo from 2011, duct tape residue is all that remains of footpath advertising campaign at this pedestrian crossing in Busan, South Korea.

Duct tape residue is all that remains of footpath advertising campaign at this pedestrian crossing in Busan, South Korea.

Pushuperer for 2 years

I’ve just registered for The Push-Up Challenge 2023. I’ve now been a Pushuperer for 2 years, which is fantastic.

Like the previous year, I’ll be completing 3,144 push-ups in 23 days to raise awareness and funds for mental health. Also like the previous year, I’ll continue to push and power-up to my Push-Up Challenge Playlist – give it a listen and tell me what ya reckon!

Jamming the educator journey #1

One of my goals this year is to streamline the process and improve the experience of educators and other colleagues who engage engage with the outputs (products and services) from projects that I lead and contribute to. It’s not an insignificant task and I’m not starting from scratch, but the big challenge for me is linking all of the disparate processes and closely-related activities together, as well as connect the three different teams within the portfolio who are crucial for success.

As noted by Kate Kaplan in When and How to Create Customer Journey Maps, journey maps create a vision of the entire customer journey, they become a tool for creating cross-department conversation and collaboration. Knowing who is doing what, and when is is crucial – identifying the key touchpoints across each stage and working to assign them to the relevant team(s) means there’s capacity and capability for the work to be done – it also contributes to a frictionless experience for the educator as they’re ‘seamlessly passed’ from team to team throughout their journey.

I worked with other leads and contributors from within the portfolio for a discovery session, which is resulted in a full and rich whiteboard that mapped the educator journey – great stuff!

The 5E (Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit and Extend) based customer journey map scribbled and scrawled on a whiteboard.

Whiteboarding is a great first step to get ideas down. For more flexibility and to better support iteration and input from others something more shareable and collaborative was needed – I went with a Figma-based Figjam to map out the journey!

Figjam was perfect for highly interactive collaborative sessions, but something else a little less messier and suitable for others is needed – I went with a Figma-based design file to map the journey!

Customer journey map #1 (daily whiteboard)

Making a start on the customer journey map for the 2023 Teach HQ, Be inspired and the MEA (teaching and learning festival) experience – it’s a first take and will probably require some ‘zooming-in’ with details and most likely a service blueprint, and some iteration. That’s cool because that’s what it’s all about – working it out.

Taking a deep dive (sort of) into user experience design, and mapping

Just started some self-directed learning on user experience design, via LinkedIn Learning. It’s a broad strokes introduction to a deep dive into user experience design that then leads into other learning about strategy and research.

So far, most of the content isn’t new to me and its great to get some deeper insights into how you can make the best usage of each map type, its application, and how it each fits together to set out the users journey.

I’m super-stoked to receive a certificate of completion for the UX Deep Dive: Mapping course, too – yay!