“The mind can’t neatly follow office hours. One paragraph might be the work of a morning; an entire book of three slow years. We tend to miss this when we encounter the thoughts of others. Because they frequently sound so composed and can be digested in an effortless stretch, we too readily imagine that these thoughts emerged in a coherent burst. We forget that a lakeful of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights.” (School of Life (Business enterprise) 2020: 22)
The inspiration for this post came from a combination of some academic reading I did for fun and topical reading for Week 11. Clark stated that to remind your boss of your greatness, you need to tell them, while Gray et al. pointed out that they conducted an excellent case study as part of their research (Gray et al. 2015; Clark 2018). So, I decided to take a leaf out of their journals and lift the curtain on all the work that went into my final submission.
Creating this Capstone Video was such a mix of ups and downs. I started by browsing through all my journal posts on this site and got a little sad that the first part of this course is already over! The biggest challenge was squeezing everything into 5 minutes (30 seconds) BY FAR. I felt comfortable with my script until I timed it. Even with speed reading, I exceeded the proscribed time limit. My stress and insecurity at chopping my script down surprised me as I was no longer sure I could cover everything I wanted. Typically, the challenge is to fill UP the time limit or word count, but here the challenge was altogether different. However, this is the perfect precursor to my further studies in UX. How can I cut design/copy down to be as efficient as possible, making them easier to read and use? The videos from the two rapid ideation sessions were the perfect practice, and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to practice with various programs and styles before the final assessment.
Early in the module, we learned about the ICEDIP model of creativity, which quickly struck a chord with me (Teaching Expertise 2012). In particular, the section dedicated to incubation. The active nature of reflection we undertook in this module made me really stop and think about how I do things revealing that I am a natural idea incubator. I allowed myself to work slowly on my script over a few days in between working on other things. I didn’t agonise over it or grind it out slowly and painfully. It just happened.
Once I had my script, I was excited to get into video editing as it was a nice change from writing. As this is a User Experience course, I wanted to make my video experience as smooth as possible. To do this, I took several steps:
- Splitting the video into sections
- Separating the main sections into sub-sections
- Labelling each section and sub-section within the video
- Aligning references with where they occur in the video
- Highlighting which journal posts inspired sections of the video
- Including screenshots of the journal posts when I mention them in the video
- Using large, dyslexia-friendly font with high-contrast
- Speaking clearly and slowly and enunciating as best as I could
However, all the extra layers and editing to my video ended up bloating the file, causing significant problems when I exported the video. In the end, I chose to cobble together a workaround and preserve all the additional editing layers to keep the video clear. However, now that I have a completed mp4 for submission and a little more time, I will research compression methods in more detail and experiment with trying to create a smaller file.
Now I see the final outcome, I am happy with the result. I still feel insecure that there isn’t enough content to convey everything I have learned fully, but I’ll get over it. When I reread the ten-minute script, I realised it doesn’t actually say anything the five-minute version doesn’t; it just says it with more words. In particular, I am happy that I took the extra time to improve the user experience of my work, as even though that wasn’t the goal for this submission, it is why I’m here after all.
References
CLARK, Dorie. 2018. ‘How Women Can Develop — and Promote — Their Personal Brand’. Harvard Business Review [online]. Available at: https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-women-can-develop-and-promote-their-personal-brand?ab=at_art_art_1x4_s03 [accessed 18 Apr 2023].
GRAY, Colin M., Austin L. TOOMBS and Shad GROSS. 2015. ‘Flow of Competence in UX Design Practice’. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 3285–94. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2702123.2702579 [accessed 11 Apr 2023].
SCHOOL OF LIFE (BUSINESS ENTERPRISE) (ed.). 2020. How to Think More Effectively: A Guide to Greater Productivity, Insight and Creativity. London: The School of Life Press.
TEACHING EXPERTISE. 2012. ‘Assessing Creative Development: The ICEDIP Model – Teaching Expertise’. Teaching Expertise [online]. Available at: https://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/assessing-creative-development-the-icedip-model/ [accessed 21 Apr 2023].
Easter Eggs
Over my left shoulder, you see that flat thing sticking up? That’s a big bar of chocolate that I demolished during the editing phase.
On the left side of the video, see that black thing? That’s my mic which I sadly overlooked until I had finished editing, exporting and uploading. *sigh*
The blue and yellow things on the shelf? Origami paper dragons, obviously, made by me. I was going through a phase.
That book facing the camera is not a book; it’s just a dust cover I abandoned there because it was annoying. I wasn’t trying to make a point. If you’re interested, the book is The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake.
That blue ‘Love’ thing? It’s a bookmark I don’t like. I don’t know why I still have it.
German vocabulary of the week
Behind the scenes – hinter den Kulissen
(I’m pretty sure most German speakers would say ‘behind the scenes’ but nevermind.)