Women of Silicon Roundabout 2018 - My highlights

Women of Silicon Roundabout is an annual conference that highlights and tries to help fix gender inequality within the tech industry by bringing together inspirational speakers, informative workshops and companies looking to recruit top talent. It is an event I have been lucky enough to attend three times and it has been brilliant to watch it grow from a one day conference to a two day extravaganza at the Excel Centre. Here are my highlights from 2018.

At previous events the focus has been more on development and engineering so I was very happy to attend a couple of workshops and talks this year that highlighted the importance of user-centred design.

The first was a talk from Spotify given by Sarah Raymond (Product Lead) called “Building great products for everyday lives”. Her talk was about how Spotify had learnt that they needed to break several assumptions they had about their users and how that affected the progression of the user interface design. One of their assumptions was that music fans know music. The reality is that they like it but they don’t know it and they don’t always know what they want. Through this Spotify changed the browsing UI to focus on supporting a mood or activity, for example, ‘Focus’, ‘Dinner’ and ‘Sleep’.

Sarah also spoke about some issues they came across when redesigning the free version of Spotify. The majority of users are on this free version whereas the majority of employees use Spotify premium. As they rely on company wide dogfooding, where employees use and test the product, to inform updates this was a problem. So in order to get a wide range of insight they ‘turned off’ premium for employees for a week. During this week the Jira tickets poured in. It forced employees to get on the same level and empathise with their users.

The second was a great workshop from the Government Services Design team. They talked about a project they had worked on to reduce anxiety in the prison induction process, due to the huge percentages of prisoner suicides during their first days in prison. In teams we looked at personas and created a user journey map to find pain points, opportunities and consider the transitions between online and offline processes. This was a great session that I took away a few key tips and tricks from.

Firstly, alongside creating core recommendations, work on developing overarching principles as another deliverable. These should be top level and still applicable if priorities and teams change.

Secondly, instead of working towards a fixed solution try to reframe the brief as a question. This helps to put the user’s needs at the heart of the process.

Focusing on the user is key to my approach to design so it was fascinating to get tips and to hear case studies from two very different companies.