I'm Martijn, Senior UX Designer at Movio handling user experience and design across our product range. In a company as varied and fast-moving as this one, no two days are ever alike, but in this blog I'll give some insight into a recent day for me in the office.
9.00 AM - As soon as I arrive at the Movio office, I grab a coffee from our little kitchen and set up my laptop. I check my mail that contains mostly Jira tickets that the devs have completed. It gives me a good update and it’s the only time I check my mail during the day, as we use Slack the majority of the time to communicate within the team.
9.30 AM - Standup time. The Devs are divided into squads – self-directed small teams. Designers at Movio are a shared resource, which means I’m not part of one particular squad or product, but spend my time across multiple products at once. I attend standups for the Movio Media squad, because I currently spend most of my time working with them.
10.00 AM - For Movio Media, I’m working on a few new features (I've previously blogged about comparable titles feature). If we have new ideas or client requests come in, I'm one of the first people to start working on them. One of my tasks is to assess the scope of new features and figure out how they might work: How can it work for our users? What benefits will they have? To answer these questions I spend most of my time away from my laptop, sketching ideas on my sketchpad. I must design the features with great care so that they are compatible with the other features that we are going to implement in the future. When I have a clear understanding of the possibilities and caveats of a new feature I report back to the squad and we decide where to place it in the roadmap.
At the moment I'm working on adding a comparison group to Movio Media, essentially allowing the user to compare one set of movies and filters with another set. This implies almost a duplication of the application’s entire functionality. To make sure the feature is dynamic and holds up in the future, I am simultaneously designing other features like a time filter, ethnicity chart and movie attendance intersections. I love this part of my job, it’s like a giant puzzle with some missing pieces. Lots of fun!
11.00 AM - Every Wednesday we have our weekly meeting where the entire company comes together, including the remote offices who attend via GoToMeeting. Will Palmer (Movio CEO) gives us an update on what’s new with customers and the company, and we meet any new additions to the Movio Crew. It’s great to hear all the cool news on Sales, Marketing and Development.
11.30 AM - Back at my desk I start working on the ethnicity chart, a feature that allows us to see people's ethnicity distribution. It needs some visual design after the sketching phase I’d finished a few days ago. Adobe Photoshop is the tool I use to design all the user interface (UI) elements. It’s flexible, fast and gives me a lot of freedom with positioning and styling. Creating a digital design from the sketches allows me to add more detail with the use of colours, fonts and placement. An important part of every UI is visual hierarchy, making sure important elements grab your attention; e.g., using bold colours for the bars in the chart, and lighter colours for the surrounding elements.
12:30 PM - Lunchtime. I usually bring something from home but there are many eateries nearby. And of course, since we are very active people at Movio some foosball has to be played. Depending on the opponents, the games can get very intense.
1.30 PM - Apart from the ethnicity chart and the comparison group, I’m working on a time filter which allows the user to see what the audience looks like in a particular date range. The UI for selecting this date range looks very similar to a calendar you see on hotel sites, with the small difference that in Movio Media the start and end date can be the same. I am creating a prototype using HTML, CSS and Javascript to test smaller details like these. The prototype helps me figure out the smaller nuances as I run into them during the prototype development. When I am confident with the prototype, I set up a scenario and ask a few random colleagues (usually those outside the Media squad) to do a test for me. The results are sometimes surprising but always very useful, as they give me feedback on the interactions and design of the feature. I then go back, adjust and test with new people until I'm happy with the results. The final prototype functions as a working example for the devs to develop into production.
4.00 PM - In design, it’s common to spend 80% of your time on the last 20% of a task. At Movio, we design for 95% and figure out the last 5% during development, which allows us to keep moving forward. An example of the last 5% arose today when I checked in with the Numero team.
When a feature is being developed I will regularly meet with the developers, to make sure it is implemented as planned. Today I’m checking the progress on a new feature for Numero, Live Film Totals. We ran into an issue when the user switched between views, from View A to View B. In View A it’s possible to select multiple movies, in View B it’s only possible to select a maximum of one. I have to decide how the transition from view A to view B makes sense to our users. It means going back to my sketchpad and trying some ideas.
By assessing all the different situations that might occur, I get a better picture of the possibilities we have. In this instance we could do three things. Pick a random movie from View A to show in View B, suggest a movie in view B based on today’s popular movies (disregarding the movies mentioned in View A), or not showing a movie at all.
With the first two options, the chance of picking a movie that the user does not expect is so high that the application would show irrelevant movies most of the time. We ended up going with not showing a movie at all. It indicates that the previous selection is discarded, and the user is not confronted with irrelevant movies that would only add confusion.
5.30 PM - Time to go home! But not before playing some more Foosball.
The range of work I do at Movio is quite varied: generating ideas and shaping them into concepts, first on paper and then on screen; making our software easy to use and look pretty at the same time; checking in with devs to assure quality and solving last minute issues. I've worked with the Marketing team updating and localizing our website and Movio recently won a Workable Workies award for 'Best Career Page'. I touch many projects within Movio, and it’s awesome to see my ideas and designs being brought to life in our products.
