Tips from an IA Newbie: Things I learned

The first talk will focus on some of the challengers Rob faced during his first year as a UX Architect at the BBC while also reflecting on how he would approach similar challenges in the future. Firstly, Rob will talk about his struggle to explain the relative benefits of a controlled list versus an open tagging system to be implemented as part of the submission system of the GEL (Global Experience Language) Component Library. Secondly, he will talk about the quirks of being an Information Architect in the naturally creative and optimistic culture of UX. During the sprints at BBC Education in particular, Rob had to learn to balance his natural urge to focus on real-world constraints with the need to push boundaries and create delightful solutions, so that he could contribute meaningfully to these sprints without killing everyone’s enthusiasm.

Rob Scott/@robscottsays is a User Experience Architect at the BBC, currently working within BBC Education on products such as Bitesize, BBC Food and BBC Teach. Prior to that, he worked on both the BBC’s IPTV Platform (which powers iPlayer for TV, Red Button+ and live experiences such as Glastonbury and Wimbledon) and was also part of the GEL team. Before that, he spent 7 years with a niche provider of meaningful travel experiences, constructing the IA for CRMs, flight booking and event management systems. Rob also co-organises the VR Manchester Meetup and will happily talk about 'presence’ (that is, the level to which a virtual experience feels ‘real’) for hours if you let him.

Leveraging Customer Service expertise to improve UX

The second talk will explain how we can utilise, when we have no available insight or hypothesis, the knowledge and experience in customer service teams to understand what our customers' issues are. Llara recently joined Beauty Bay where she has been working with the customer service team to gather knowledge about customer pain points and actively make changes to end those. She will share her experience about the initial challenges of this work and its impacts on usability going forward, explain the methods used to engage with the customer service team to help them to understand their value in the organisation, and she will also talk about how customer service can potentially be leveraged to fill organisational UX skills gaps.

Llara Geddes/@the_llara is Head of UX at Manchester-based, Bury-founded online make up and skincare retailer Beauty Bay. With a background in Marketing and Customer Service and many years of experience in UX agency-side, Llara moved to Manchester last January from Edinburgh and spent just over a year as a UX consultant at Amaze before joining Beauty Bay. Llara is also a volunteer organiser at Ladies that UX and a speaker at TechNorth’s Northern Voices programme.