Getting Started - UX

This is **the** UX thread for The Public Happiness Movement. Posted below is a getting started guide and the main resources we are currently using.

There’s a lot going on here so I recommend reading this post then diving right in by grabbing a task on the UX tasks list and making something happen, rather than getting overwhelmed trying to understand everything right away.

Note: Check and edit your user settings. Some new members weren’t receiving notifications, there may be a hidden setting. Its also good to choose how often, and how you are notified.

Introductions

Come and say hi and tell people a bit about yourself and why you want to join us on this mission for a happier, kinder world. Don’t forget to follow the thread and say hi and make new members feel welcome. Their skills and enthusiasm brings all of our dreams closer.

Download the App

Which makes it much easier to stay up to date with what’s going on in discussions and tasks you’re working on.

Join the Team

Joining the team means other members can reach out to you when they want feedback on their work and suggestions, or to ask if anyone can help with a UX related task. If you want to be actively engaged in UX’ing on our platform, you should join this team. You will receive more notifications.

Current Team Tasks

To find, discuss and post specific tasks click the ‘Tasks’ tab of the UX tag.

These should be broken into self-contained actionable slices of 30mins to 1hr so people from around the world can contribute in bite-sized time contributions, rather than excluding those who aren’t able to commit large amount of time. They can be strung together, just move them all over and assign to yourself if you plan to tackle them in one sitting.

Please try to keep to this rule when posting tasks. If the tasks are large and can’t be self contained, then use add [Discussion] at the beginning of the title, and add tags for all the groups needed to break it up into self-contained tasks.

note: some users are seeing this tab called ‘Board’. Its a bizarre bug we’re working to solve

Current UX Priorities

last updated: 20/8/2019

  1. User road-block hunt and quick fixes to create MVP
  2. New logged out user splash page
  3. Build Section Re-design
  4. Gather Section Re-design
  5. User (logged in) Profile Page

Priorities are a guide to advance the project most effective, they don’t have to be completed sequentially.

How Implement a Change to the Platform

How to make changes on the platform depends on your skill-set. If you are comfortable coding in Reactjs, Ruby-on-Rails, or the coding language needed, you can join the WebDev team and code directly to the platform in Github.

If not simply create a post and tag it ‘UX’, ‘WebDev’ and ‘Backlog’. It’ll now appear as a task for both the Dev and UX Teams to be discussed by others, and implemented by those with the required skills.

You don’t need to know which coding language the change is being made in. One of the WebDev Team will add any extra tags needed.

Generally you’ll be adding the ‘backlog’ tag for new ideas. If you deem it an urgent change you can use the ‘sprint’ tag. If work has already begun or you are beginning immediately you’d use the ‘doing’ tag.

Collaborating with other Teams

You may also want to involve other teams to help solve the task by adding their tag. For example: ‘UI’, ‘Graphic-Design’, ‘Copy-Writing’, ‘UX’.

If you need support from another team then your suggestion is probably not ready to be posted as a self contained ‘task’, so consider tagging it as a discussion and adding [Discussion] to the beginning of the title.

Its also often a good idea to tag their team in the post to get more eyes on it using the @ key

Seeking Paid Work

We run r/webdevjobs on Reddit to help team members who are looking for jobs. Each month we’ll pin a post of the profile of all the active members here who are looking for web dev related jobs so you get more offers.

Just fill in this Wizard and we’ll post your profile in the monthly pinned post.

Resources

**If you cannot access any of the below resources, please contact @AndyatFocallocal.
** This thread contains our main goals and development in the UX process.
Most up-to-date maintenance of links to project resources such as

Tools

  • Threads created in this forum to discuss ideas and plan with each other
  • Tasks in the UX Team’s Tag for project management. Add the tag ‘Backlog’ to create a card for a non-urgent tasks. Sprint is for priority tasks aimed to be completed this month (impact / time to implement). Please assign cards to yourself and move them into the ‘Doing’, then ‘Done’ lists. Click ‘tasks’ or visit this link to access
  • UX Documentation: Here
  • Sitewide Documentation can be accessed and searched here, or by navigating to the relevant team and searching for the documentation tag
  • Team Calendar Its common to put volunteer commitments off, and many community members found the most helpful thing they could do is to have a monthly or weekly reminder to schedule your intended time to work by adding it to your team calendar. More details here

Learning

This community is a great place for learning a new skill. [Search for](Tag Intersections (The Platform's Navigation Structure)] or add the learning tag combined with the # tag for your skill to find or post:

  • Great learning resources
  • Others to learn with
  • Experienced developers who want to support, mentor and offer guidance to those earlier on the same path
  • Free or discounted courses to get qualifications
  • Tasks posted suitable for beginners, and with experienced devs to check and give feedback

1st one there in this team? Post in forums and bring others over. There’ll be no shortage of people who want to learn while building positive projects which create a kinder, happier world.

Other Rewards

Its definitely best to join in because you want to see the changes it can bring to the world, and be part of a fun, positive and pro-active community.

We also invite anyone who plays a significant role into our team page, and are enthusiastic to support you if it helps your resume building: https://publichappinessmovement.com/docuss/m_team

Everyone who completes any tasks will be rewarded with Public Happiness Tokens at launch. We don’t guarantee they’ll ever be worth anything, tbh they are an experimental tool to add more fuel to drive the vision. I’m increasingly confident though.

Who’s the Boss?

@AndyatFocallocal!!

Well for now anyway. Andy is me and i can also be seen as the biggest limiting factor on our productive capacity. I do my best to represent the founding vision, and the work and decisions of all community members who are not currently active, preventing a situation where everyone joining in throws out the work of others and starts over.

The more decisions you take for yourself the better. I am there to guide until teams grow to be autonomous. Run ideas by me to begin with, until there are enough active and experienced members here to switch to the voting system. Your goal is to make this your space.

We have a Roadmap which will lead to a reputation-based decentralised governance system where you, and all community members are the boss, with votes weighted by how much they’ve contributed to the vision.

The Roadmap for transition is:

  1. Run ideas by Andy
  2. As team members understanding of the concept we are building, and vision grows we move to a leadership council made up of those who’ve contributed the most the vision
  3. Arriving at a reputation based decentralised governance system.

You can read more about governance in chapter 6.11 in the whitepaper

The real answer is: You are the boss, as soon as you are ready.

Notes

  • You may find some references or links to focallocal.org and Trello. We are not using these anymore so please report them to a moderator to be updated. The site name PublicHappinessMovement.com may be changed before launch as it’s not perfect either.

  • A more detailed plan of building our eco-system and vision for a world with more attention to peace, well-being and happiness, is here in the Whitepaper. Be warned it is a very long read

New to UX?

Here’s a fun guide to help

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@danyalamriben @AndyatFocallocal @AlecAaron

I’m going to suggest a plan here to move forward and get the ball rolling. These are just suggestions and of course, everything is subject to change as we progress and all that.

Organisation and Documentation

  • With a mind to people joining later on, and for own needs, it would be helpful to have a central location for documentation. Things like research findings, best practices (like UX Nielsen’s 10 heuristics) and the overall gameplan. I’d suggest google docs. I know some of this is has been mentioned in various threads, but it’s spread about.

  • Adding some links to Diana’s post like the community values statement so we have an idea of what’s effectively the mission statement.

  • Possibly conference calls so we can chat on where we’re at and get to know each other.

Phase One

  • Documentation of any previous research or insights
  • Any exploratory UXR we can do. User interviews, field research, examining anything pertinent in the academic literature
  • Did we have Google Analytics? Access please if so
  • A discussion about our messaging and narrative.
  • Synthesizing all this
  • Personas, maybe. I’ve mixed feelings about personas, don’t get me started

Phase Two

  • User Flow
  • Card sorting (we’d need around 15 to 20 users for this stat wise)
  • Information architecture

Phase Three

  • Paper prototyping, Personally I find it easier to put it on paper before wireframing
  • Wireframing
  • Low fi mockup

Phase Four

  • Hi fi mockup
  • User testing, around 5 to 10 users. It’s helpful to test internally first to correct obviious issues
  • UX writing, messaging, copy
  • Iterations

Phase Five

  • Roll out
  • Tracking analytics
  • A/B testing
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44 posts were split to a new topic: Archived Discussion on UX strategy

I’ll explain any jargon in the future!

Synthesising is basically taking a look at any research, what insights we can take it from it, and then making it actionable in the design. A note about research. Sometimes I can interview someone for 30 minutes and not come away with anything, or we do some card sorting it ends up looking like what we would have done anyway. Another issue is a user might say something, but act contrary to that. So it’s just a balance of qualitative and quantitative research and understanding the limits.

A persona is where we take any research insights and create a mock user to keep us a grounded to the user needs and possible pain points (hurdles the user faces when engaging with the environment, in this case a website). The issue with personas it that they can be misapplied. For instance, listing demographic information and how they love their cat might remind me that we’re dealing with real people here but it doesn’t tell me much about they will behave etc. To get that info enough research needs to be done, or we’re forced to make assumptions. Assumptions can be okay if they’re reasonably grounded, like expert vs. novice users.

Card sorting is to help with the info/menu structure. It’s basically asking users “here are five menu headings, and if you wanted to see where other users are in your area, which menu would you find that under?” It’s to get a sense of users expectations and take a look into their mental model (their cognitive map of how something should work). Honestly, the value of card sorting scales with the complexity of the website in my opinion, so it’s not always needed.

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