Communication + Execution
💡 Communicate with the team 📝 UX research is much more than a report.
A full week with many things going on and a good one too. The more I get to work hands on with open source projects in the lightning and bitcoin ecosystem the more I realize that we are slowly but surely creating new ways of doing things and that includes the UX research process. It is an ecosystem of some really genius minds and I am very grateful that I get to work alongside these people every day and learn from them and continue to be the voice of the user and wave the UX research flag.
Did you see me waving the flag or shall I hook up some AI art for that one? :-)
💡Insights from this week
Starting with some insights from this week as a result of both building the UX research toolkit but also being hands on in projects. UX research in the space of bitcoin and lighting projects is very dynamic and open to evolving at this stage, some practical realizations this week were:
Invite the voice of users into conversations
It is not enough to interview users and create a report and present it to the team, we actually need to be there side by side with the team engaging with them and continuing to look for opportunities to invite the voices of the users into the development process. In the open source world this might not be so clear cut as with a traditional company, it’s a lot more fluid and can be very playful too. A practical example might be when a particular page is being worked on of an application, to recall the insight that the user shared with you and invite it into the conversation so that the insight can be drawn into the product development process.
Trust the skills and insights of the team and invite them into the UX research process
A good example is when creating a survey for bitcoin core, instead of starting with a blank slate instead I asked the team “what would you like to know from users?” Through them ideating they covered a wide range of questions ranging from developmental to design related. When we involve the whole group in the process it feels a lot more fluid and everyone is involved in the research direction.
Learn from other FOSS projects
Observe how other FOSS projects are collecting user feedback, see the various channels that they use to collect feedback and how they do it. Took some learning this week from observing BTCPays Github where they collect user feedback and used that as inspiration to ideate on what that could look like for bitcoin core app.
This week was split into a few main activities:
BTC Prague: Working on representing the bitcoin design community at BTCPrague. If you are heading over there would be lovely to meet!
UX Research toolkit and call: Lots of content on this one. I had a few mornings where I just had my head down and pretty much just focused on writing content. This week I kicked of some content for 2 new sections, those being visual communication as well as the section on UX research repositories. We also had a good call on Thursday where Art spoke about rapid prototyping as a way to get feedback on designs as well as Paulo who spoke about the repository template he has kindly shared with us.
Bitcoin core app UX research set up: Bitcoin core app is also well on its way and setting up the homepage content for the bitcoin core app homepage as well as creating a survey. Also co-ordinating with the team to do an initial guerilla test within the community. Such a fun exercise for the whole team to observe how people use the application. The best part is this will be recorded and we can capture user insights in a very fun way which really involves the whole group. So am pretty excited about that.
Summer of bitcoin students: The students are well underway with preparing their project proposals and are sending them over for an initial review. Some of these are already very well planned and they have a good idea of which research approach they would like to take.
Onwards to next week where I’ll have a few things to focus on:
Writing more content/iterating on content for the UX research kit
Preparing for some usability testing on bitcoin core app
Helping out further with organization for BTCPrague
Further wrapping up the research insights from the research done on Wallet Scrutiny
Have a good one!
Mo.