Ryesen'. I often get asked to talk in the morning of the second day because I have a loud voice apparently. So, wake up! I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my world which is a world of design and a world of experienced design. We are a misunderstood group, a bit like developers because the work that we do is often seem to be incredibly fluffy and have no great impact on the world because it's all about pictures. I am eistedd i chi oedd y byddwch chi'n ffordd y dyfodol a chrywbwn yn tynnu tymorol a wnaeth o ymgyrchu chi'n mynd i wneud ymgyrchu slygoe? Ond mae gennym o'i peth o'r ffraddysau sydd wedi sylfaenol ac wedi ymgyrch yn y ffraddysgau sydd yn y ffrydoedd ymgyrch gweld ar â y moyni maesol oed arno. Ond mae'n haf wneud ei wneud i gyd yn y dyfodol, gan dweud wych chi'n ffordd yn ymgyrchu. I think there's a lot of mystery, so, where I worked previously at a big bank we used to talk about a spectrum of fluffy to meaty. When we were doing things badly, we were sitting at the fluffy end of a spectrum and when we grew up we wanted to aspire to be meaty. We always saw the developers, the BI people, they were always meaty, and our mission was to try and move design up the spectrum from fluffy to meaty which is what I've spent the last three years doing. This feels really wingy to me, is it the wingy to you? Llanthai'n wybod o blaenfa hefyd, rydyn ni'n meddwl fod y byddol y cysylltion gwybodaeth i'r bwysig yma, felly nhw gan'n cael ei wneud i ddweud i'r c型 o ddofnodi, a ddim ni'n cael linef o ddweud i'r rhifnidol wedi'i wneud hynny. Llanthai'n cael ei fudio'r c型 i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud i lwyddaf Secwac. Gwybod wedi meddwl i'n meddwl i ddweud, ac mae'n meddwl i ddweud i ddweud i ddweud. Beth yw'r cyfnod yn ei wneud i wneud mewn cyfnod, ond rydyn ni gwyro'r cyfnod lle yn i, mewn cyfnod i wedi'w'r cyfle, a'r cyfnod i'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno. Ac mae'n grofwyr gwyro'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno. Felly gallwn yn wneud i gwirionedd rydyn nhw. Ym ydyddiadau ychydig המ�wyth, mewn cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno'r cyflwyno. Felly, mae'r llwyddaeth o gyda'r bydd yn ddweud i gael amser. Mae oes golygu y cysyllt fel y cyfnodau. Mae hynny'n cydweithio'r cyfeilio. Mae'r llwyddaeth hynny yn ddechrau. O bobl yn y cyfnodau llaw o'r bydd, mae'r llwyddaeth yn ddechrau, ond mae'r llwyddaeth yng nghymifredd, ond mae'r llwyddaeth yng nghymru, dwi'n cael eu bod yn y cyflwynio a'r 300 miliwn a'r gael, ond mae'r llwyddaeth yng nghymru i'r llwyddaeth, is that there are fundamental wastes of money in the process and it's one of the most inefficient systems we run. So the true is really important, the component parts of what we do. So if we want to move design towards meaty, we know we have to work with the true space. The real is the bit that you're sitting in now. You're sitting in a chair, it's a kind of fold-down chair, it's probably a little bit comfortable. It's designed for the context, it's designed for the place in which you're using it. If you apply this to the way that we do design, you start thinking about looking around you, is it mobile, is it tablet, is it website, what are the people going to do? What does that chair feel like? It's probably not rockin' your world, but it's not a bad chair. It has some components, it's kind of grey, soft-ish, it folds down, has arms, definitely has a back. And this is the components of the real part of this chair. And then design real is often the bit where we start to really screw things up. So true is okay. John Mader, who's one of my hero designers, John Mader has done a bunch of work with Apple, he's done some work with the design of terminals. He talks a lot about the early parts of his career being around complexity. And if you look at some of the poorer end of the stuff that we design, it's usually in that complexity space. And complexity is what we find in things like Mikey. So the real space is important to us because it's about your context, but it's often the space where we do things worse and we start to design things badly. Then there's the chair. Close your eyes for a minute and think about your favourite chair. This is the one that you go home to. You curl up in, usually take your shoes off in, and it will be different for all of you. This is the chair that absolutely aligns with where you want to be. This is it. It's comfy. It's big enough to curl up in and have a back that goes back. My kids are fighting me at the moment for a lazy boy.   And now when they go to places with lazy boys, they make great effort to tell me how much they want one. But the ideal is the space where we often want to be and the process of design is about taking what's true, looking around at what's real, and turning it into what's ideal. And that's the space where we often forget to have the courage to do things. And this is where I need you because we can't build what's ideal unless we start to build conversations around what's true, what's real, and where we could be. And the ideal space is where the really fun stuff happens. We have a few problems though because we're humans. And designing for ideal is that we tend to get lost into this space where we start to think that we know everything. So this is one of my favorite. There's a thing, Andrew Scudtsman's, came up with a thing called the Malkovich bias, which is the bit where we call it the uncle syndrome to quietly. But it's the, oh, yeah. Well, of course, everyone does this like this because that's the way people do things, don't they? I once had a banker tell me, and he said, he said, well, everyone knows what time their direct debit's go out in the morning. I said, really? He said, well, of course you do. Like, what else would you know? Like, why would you not know? And I said, well, I don't even know what day my direct debit's go out. And he goes, well, like, how do you survive? And I said, easy. He said, how do you make sure there's not enough money in your account? And I go, it's kind of this random process that happens where usually there's enough money and when there isn't, I get a rude letter from you guys and I make sure there is. And he looked at me with utter disbelief and he was like, I couldn't live like that. And this is a perfect example of the Malkovich bias. If you looked at the front of your phones, everybody's phones have said it wrong. I get teased for having like 31 calendar reminders that I haven't answered and 17 messages. And it looks like I don't really care about my messages, but I do because the ones I'm ignoring I've already scanned and read. But everybody's technology is different. Everybody's ideal is different. This, I would say, is my real, not my ideal. I have this aspirational need to make my phone be beautiful and simple and clear. And one day when I'm grown up, I'm going to have this wonderful life. But one of the things that we forget in design is that we spend a lot of time asking people. So you might take your site and you might say to people, you know, what do you think about this site? And they'll say, that's great. And you might show me a tool that will help me clean up my front page of my iPhone. And I might say, that's fantastic. But the gap between making me do that and the behaviour change it's going to take to make me go from what is real to what is ideal is the really interesting space and the space where we can really work as a community together to make changes. So for example, when I came to sign up for Drupal Sath, I did have a bit of a problem. I ended up with eight tickets in my basket because I couldn't work out what was happening and I couldn't see the feedback. Now, that's a problem that we all have with websites. Our website, MediBank Private, there's issues. We're working on it. We're trying to get better. What I'm saying is let's be conscious when we look at the technology that we have and when we're deeply buried in the beauty of it that it actually might not work. And it really isn't that hard to go and ask people to show you stuff. So we talk about, in my field, we talk a lot about generative feedback.  As human beings, unless we're largely dysfunctional, it's very hard to tell somebody who's asking you about their work and say, actually, it sucks. So people will say things like, yeah. Yeah, that'd be a really good idea. Yeah, yeah. I reckon that my friend would be really into that. And at the moment we hear things like that, we go, okay. So we never ask people, do we like it? We say, show us an example. So we were doing some testing last week with Facebook and people said to us, oh, I've never put my health information into Facebook. And we went, yeah, I know who'd do that. And they went, you know, I've never put private information into Facebook and we all went, yeah, I know who'd do that. And then we asked them to do some stuff which involved them actually putting a phone number into Facebook. And they all did it, 99% of them did it. We went back and we said, so you just put your phone number into Facebook and they went, yeah. But you know, that's not really private. And it was in a special page and they all had a good reason to do it. And that's why we used generative feedback because that gap between real and ideal is really fundamentally different. There was an experiment run in the UK and they did a series of tests. They bought 100 people in and they got them to sit in an exam. And they were told at the end of the exam that they could have a prize. And they said, they said, well, they had the prize and you've got to come back five days later to pick up the prize. And the prize was either a big basket of fruit or a massive basket of chocolate. And 86% of people said, oh, the fruit would be so good. I'll go with the fruit. And they came back a week later and they were given the option to change.  And of that 86%, 75% of them took the chocolate. And that's because our view of our ideal selves and our view of our real selves are very different. So when we design stuff for people, we have to be designing for what people are really like. So design thinking has become a bit of a buzzword. It's become the new innovation which we try to avoid a little bit. But all it is effectively, it's not secret source which some of the big consultancies are trying to sell it as. Everybody can download a design methodology off the website. Anyone can download this thing that says, all you do to design is you analyze and research your prototype. You design some more and then you validate. And we go, yeah. And I put this a little bit like an accountant coming to me and the accountant could say to me, you know, I'm going to give you a simple methodology to help you be accountant. I'll be like, yes. So what you have to do is you have to get a spreadsheet. Got one of them? Yeah, got a spreadsheet. And then you need to put some numbers into it. Okay? Yeah, here's the numbers. Then you need to add the numbers up. Got it. And then you need to tell me whether or not the numbers are right. How do I know they're right? Well, are they in the spreadsheet? Yeah, they're there. Are they telling the right story? I have absolutely no idea because I'm not an accountant. So a design methodology doesn't make you a designer. So I want to talk you through some of those things that if you look at Excel, Excel is in the true space. Works has boxes. It does the job it's meant to do. It's hardly going to rock your world. I bet you don't sit there on Friday night playing with Excel. Your calendar is in the real space.  The nicer the calendar, the better the calendar, the more likely you are to use it well. It's okay. Your calendar is a good thing. And then there are the tools that we kind of love. I don't know how many of you have tried carrot. Have you tried carrot? Carrot is a task app.  It says, greetings, lazy human. And then if you don't slack into it, it tells you that you've been slacking for 13 days.  And if you poke it, it tells you to stop poking it. And it's quite fun, except when it's really rude to you. And then it'll tell you and it'll tell you this has been on your task list forever.  And it asks you, it says if you publish this on Facebook, we'll actually, you know, if you publish your shaming on Facebook, then we'll actually give you some points back. So I gave this to my 10-year-old.  She actually was playing last night with carrot for an hour and a half, and she was playing with it. She said to me, mum, I've got you to level 16. And I said, I don't even know how to level 16. What do you mean? And she said, oh, if you keep telling it things, she said, look, I've just done this. I put in these tasks and then I cross them off really fast and then it gives me rewards. I said, oh, show me that. So then she said, on this, it's really cool. She said, because it's given me some points and I can trade those points off for the task that I haven't done. And I'm going, how did you work that out? And she said, oh, I don't know, but it was funny when it was rude to me, so I kept going. So this is the example of what I'm talking about as ideal. So and only by working with my 10-year-old did I discover that it actually did this because I'm probably more in the other space. This is another one of its messages to you. So everyone knows about user tasks. Everyone knows about user stories. Everybody knows about thinking of users first. We all know about business tasks. But that's a lot of mystery being about user tasks. I've seen lots and lots of spreadsheets full of things like as a user, I need to enter my password into a form. It's like, really? As a user, I need to not even think about my password. So when we do user tasks, we still a lot of thinking about what is it actually that somebody is trying to get done because we spend a lot of time framing a user task in the language of the context that we use. If I'm a business person, it will be about business language. I had someone tell me yesterday that users really needed to sign up for private health insurance. I'm like, really? I don't think that's what they're trying to do.  So a lot of time is about getting ourselves to peddle back and state those problems well. So design uses questions. We talk about how might we questions. And a question might be as simple as, how might I buy a ticket really, really easily? Or how might I sign up for a form? Or how might I not have to remember a password? It's not the answering of the question that's hard. It's the stating of the problem that's hard. And we often are so quick to get into the solution that we forget to stop and say, is that the right question? Turns out that sometimes a website's not about what a website's about. It's something totally different. And the reason why carrot is successful is because the purpose of carrot is not to do tasks because I hate doing tasks. The purpose of carrot is to make me laugh enough and keep me coming back often enough that I remember to do my tasks. And if I'd stopped and framed that question, then this is what you get, not an Excel spreadsheet.  So, but the only other thing is that design had this little bit of a thing where we tried to be grown up and we tried to really make it kind of cool and sexy to do design and we said that design was the most important thing in the whole dev process and that really sucked too because then we became just another shouting group like anybody else. Because we really do need the business tasks and we really do need business people and we really do need developers and we really do need designers. And just as it's hard for us to ask questions about the right thing to build, it's hard for the business to frame the right thing to build. So what we're doing at Medibank is we're building what we call a design practice, not a lab, not an incubator but an actual place where questions get formed across the business. And what we're doing is we're bringing together people from across product, service, call centres, tech, IT, money, finance and we bring them together in a room and we say okay the business needs to, I don't know, have 500 people sign up for this product by next week. What might we do together? And the actual process of going through that and deciding what are the priorities, what are the constraints and what are we actually trying to do for task? What is it that people want to get done? I've really changed the way that we work and they've changed the kind of conversations that we have and they've helped our devs to work better and they're helping our designers to work better and they're helping our products to work better. Some of you might have seen a product that we launched, Jim Better, which was an app that allows you to go to the gym without having to sign up. Now we did this before we had this process and as a result we missed things like the fact that we had iBeacons in our stores but not iBeacons in our gyms. We've lost the connection points. So what we somehow need to do in terms of value is to find the really cool spot between that and what we're starting to do, I know some of you have seen a process called core model or core page design. And what we do is we take our content and we take our business questions and we take our ideas and we nail them down. This is not our process, we didn't invent it. It's Ari Hallan's process, but it's really, really useful. And you decide what are the core pages, what are these things that people are trying to do and you do that before you design a menu and you do it before you design any kind of navigation. And what you end up with is a series of stuff and you say, okay, we need somewhere where people can sign up and we need somewhere where people can buy things and we need somewhere where people can get information. And we start off with a set of core stuff and we don't even fill these in. We just go, what are our core pages? Are we sure they're the right pages? Are they meeting business needs? Do we have the right content? What's the fluffy content we don't need and what's the content we do need? And once we've got that core page, then we start to go, right, okay, does that meet the two goals at the top? I can sign up for the product and I can get my health insurance easy. Then we start to go, right, okay, how do you get in and how do you get out? So rather than saying what is the menu and then what goes in the different menu pages, we start from the center of the web page and build out. And we say often what happens is we don't think about what's inward and what's forward because these days people don't land on the home page. I think the stats are that landing on home pages dropped by over 50% in the last two years. And home pages are where we normally start. Using this approach, we start with our core pages and then we start to be able to understand how do you get in and how do you get out? So it might be that you get in through Google, it might be you get in through a random page embedded in somebody else's website. And even more importantly, where do you want to go afterwards? Because that takes us from true. So true is the middle bit. Real is how do I get in? And ideal is I can get in and out quickly doing the stuff that I want to do. So it's not rocket science. It's just a simple design process that structures the questions in the room. And what we find is when we bring together lawyers and risk people and IT people and tech people, we can do this. It allows us to have conversations about what really is core and it allows us to have the conversations that enable us to build well.  One of the things that happens in businesses is everything needs to have a box, a form, a feasibility document. You know it. You've seen it, the task list, the sign-off, the UAT, the this form, the that form. And we get so stuck in the forms that we forget about inventing stuff that's really ideal. And it feels really uncomfortable to be in this space.  It's the bit where we talk about it in other ways. We say that there is the dream moment. The project's got funding. We're going to do it. It's going to be fantastic. Oh my God, this is so good. The money's in. Let's go have some champagne. And then there's the beginning bit for everyone's full of excitement. You start off and then you hit what we call the zone of despair where nothing is going to come together. Everything's going wrong. Everyone starts arguing with each other. You've got some tension. Things are happening. People want it blue, pink, green, yellow. And you're in that space. And often at that space someone goes, oh, this is never going to work. Let's just get on with it and let's get finished. And I would argue that we move too quickly through that because if you can have a capability in your teams or in the way that you work to allow you to sit in that space for a bit, 99.9% of the time you emerge from it with a massive sense of elation.  We're all going to get fired. And somebody will go, what if we did? Why didn't we think of that three weeks ago? But that doesn't happen by accident. That happens through the nurturing and the comfort that says when we hit this messy space, we're okay with that. This is what happens. And don't panic. Don't stress. I mean, if it's still going on seven weeks later then you've probably got a problem.  And that's okay. And a lot of my work now is about working with creative teams or cross-functional teams and making it okay for that to happen. And I would say it's just the same as home if you think about the moment you get up in the morning and you think, oh my God, how am I going to make all this happen? And some of it will work and some of it won't. And I got home last night and I looked around my house and there was stuff I think on every single surface. I think there was paper and stuff and then there was my kid's shoes and there was stuff. And I looked around and I was like, oh my God. Before I can even eat, I have to deal with this. And I thought maybe I don't. Maybe we could just get pizza.  And so we did. And that is what that missy space is. It's about not, it's okay when it doesn't all go right. My kids thought it was great.  So the words that we're starting to use is not design or not delivery, not development, not art, not creativity, not front and back end, but valuable exchanges. And that's the human side of what we're trying to do. And we're saying if we get it right, if we go, what's the user needs, what's the businesses, what's the essential content and what's the core? And we apply over the top of it this ability to be messy and creative in the way that we work. Then what we're building is a valuable exchange at every point. So instead of saying, does this meet user needs or does it meet, we draw a circle and we go, okay, of all the people who might be using this thing, who's getting value out of it. And if there is one point in that circle and for us, it's shareholders, stakeholders, customers, providers in hospital, physios. If we can't demonstrate value at every one of those points, then we got something wrong, we have to go back to that core. Because if I just deliver something to one point of that value exchange, then it's not much point in doing it. It's just going to be another bit of fluff in the journey and that's how you get, you know, multi-page websites that you can't find your way around. So in my field, there's a lot of stuff happening. I don't know how many of you've seen this. This is Givera, which is a, there's been a big revolution in insurance and banking in the UK in particular. So the UK government has been investing a massive amount of money into financial tech in the UK. So they've built incubator spaces. They launched the finance policy for the UK government in an incubator space in Canary Wharf. They've put in place legislation that says if a bank won't give you a loan, they have to refer you onto crowdsource funding opportunities. So there's been a big shift. And so what you've started to get is things like Givera, which you've said, what is it someone's trying to do? Someone is not trying to buy insurance. Someone's trying to make sure that they're safe when they purchase an insurance product. And what this does is you simply work with either your friends, your family, or a group of people.  And you agree to a level that they put in parameters and it's underwritten by an insurance company. But effectively, you all have modern cars. You all don't drive very much. They'll ensure you for this amount.  If you then don't draw against that pool, that money gets supplied against your premiums the next year so you pay less. So it's in your interest to pull together with people who drive carefully, because effectively what you're doing is lowering your premiums a year on year.   So we can't do that exactly, but what we're interested in is the fact that it starts off with a need and that need is not, I want to buy insurance. That need is, how might I pay less for my insurance and what might I do? So this has been hugely successful, they're happening. They're doing the same sort of thing across Germany. They're doing it with financial insurance and the like. So what I'd argue is that when we look at true business needs, real user needs and absolutely amazing stuff, it's in that intersection point. And it's about connections and there was some research done in MIT. They were trying to look at how really successful companies worked and how really successful organisations worked. And what they found was, we used to think it was about people that we call idea scouts. The sort of people who go out and they read funky magazines and they find great stuff and they come back in and they go, my God, we need a thing like this. Imagine if we did the health insurance of, I don't know, can't think of anything cool. The health insurance of something amazing. It turns out that those people actually are important but not very important. The more important people are these people called connectors. And you all know them. And as a dev community and I am not a developer but I have worked with lots of dev communities. Connection is something we do internally but not so well externally. And idea connectors are the people who do really, really great stuff with their ideas. They're usually people who have conversations with everybody. They might know where the cleaning lady is going on holiday. They might know what Bob on level 32 is what kind of new shoes he's buying. But in the process of all those conversations and all that talking, they're also discovering really important information about needs, about what's going on, about what people are doing, what things. And these idea connectors, they take the ideas from the idea scouts and they make them go to the right places. And the same is true of building really good pages. So we all got to this page where we built wireframes and that was great. Now we've built wireframes are all cool. But what I would say is those wireframes are idea scouts.  And the reason we use core page modelling is because what we're trying to do is to build those connections in so that that flows well. And we really keep asking why. So there's the five y's, the four y's, whichever ones you want to use. I don't think I can come up with seven. But what we do is we apply that all the time. If we can't answer why and we've got to round three, then we need to go back and do it again. And just having a wireframe is not going to help to ask those questions. As it says, it will tell us where we put something, but it won't say why. So we have a whole bunch of toolkits and pictures and things that we do. And we remind people to think about people. So I'm sure most of you work with personas and the like and there's a lot of secret source stuff about personas. You know, our personas are better and we have these special personas and it's taken us for a good six months to make our personas. Personas are just a thing to stop you thinking about you. But what we do is we'll take these personas through and we'll go and we'll ask the persona if we haven't got any money for testing. We'll use a persona and we'll go through and we had this example yesterday. It was, I think it was a seven point sign up for something. And we're going, what's going to happen to this guy if we make him go through these things? And they were going, well, he's going to start off and he's going to go into the page and they're going, yeah, and then he'll click next and we're going, yeah, really? You reckon? How do we know that? I will because he will. Sure. And that was the first point where it broke down because we had a persona on because we asked the question. We go back and we go, well, actually, there's probably only about a 2% chance at this point of him clicking next. So what can we do? Well, let's not make an expert in the tool. Okay, gone. And that's the way that we use these. And sometimes we create funky looking things and sometimes we create pictures for people and sometimes we create storyboards and journey maps. And it really depends. All of these tools are our tools. They're more for the people consuming them to make the right decisions than they are for us. A lot of it's about bringing people along on a story. So I've just employed a graphic designer in my team with the pure focus of telling stories. All she has to do is make my stuff look funky. And I learned this working in NAB a few years ago because we would say, we're service designers. We design the way products and services work together. And people will come and say, could you make our PowerPoint look good? We're not graphic designers. And then we did one for somebody and we made their PowerPoint and they said, oh, this team funcified my PowerPoint for me. And we became known as the funcifiers of PowerPoints. And half my team were going like, oh, these facts I so didn't want to sign up for this. But then what we noticed was as we funcified people's PowerPoints, our PowerPoints got shown to lots more people because everyone went, ah, you've got to use my slides. My slides look great. And they would appear at Exco and they'd appear on walls. And then we started to get people coming to us and they'd say, oh, I want one of those things like I saw on level seven with the colours and we'd go, why do you want one? They said, because every time the EGM walks past that, he goes, wow, that looks great, guys. And we realised that the design of visual artefacts was a key for us to have conversations with business people that didn't understand what it was that we did. So instead of trying to talk to them about wireframes and instead of trying to talk to them about page flows and user journeys and task flows and design patterns, we talked to them about stories. So I think we all know this. We all think about it. But we were talking the other day about the fact that the blue dot has actually fundamentally transformed our lives. I can't think of a time what now without the blue dot. I think I'd probably go into a state of absolute panic if I had to navigate my way through my world without a blue dot. And yet I did. My daughter found a box of maps the other day and she said, what are these for? I said, they're for finding your way around, aren't they cool? And she's going, what? People are really used to walking around with paper out like that. And I was going, yeah, she's going, oh, that's so funny. I was thinking about it and I thought, yeah, it is, isn't it? Like imagine, we did. We used to stand on streetcars and look at pieces of paper and she said, why didn't they just take a photograph of it?  I was like, no, she's like, what? That is so, and she said to my son, she's like, guess what? People used to walk around with maps and paper and stuff like that and they couldn't even take photos. And I listened to this conversation and I thought we think about purposeful systems but we forget and that's why we have to go back to true and real and ideal. So what is true? True is that now we do have a blue dot. So the systems that we can design allow us to integrate that blue dot and connect that blue dot into the way that we navigate. Because we now have a blue dot, real means that we can actually connect things together in different ways. And because we have a blue dot, I don't get lost anymore. That's my ideal. I do still have some issues with the whole like upside down thing and the right and left thing, but that's okay. I'm working on it. But we need to really think about purposeful systems. So what we do after we go through that core page task is we move back to the next bit because a lot of design and the complex design that happens in that space is when we actually fall in love with features and we forget to leave things out and it takes as much courage to leave something out as it does to put it in. So what we do is after we've done those page flows and those core pages, often we end up with these quite busy pages. And then we say to people, right, okay, you're actually designing for mobile so you can only have three pieces of content on the page. You can have more if you like. It's just gonna be a really long page. And then it gets really tricky because then you have to negotiate and you have to say, okay, what three pieces of content into what four paths. So we have the same inward paths, but our job is to keep people moving through those paths in content. And that bit gets really heated and that bit gets really complicated. And it's also where the best of the messy thinking happens because while we know something's core, this is taking it to the next, it's like the core core. So I want you to start to kind of eat right into the apple core rather than just make it a nice shape. And making design judgments is the purpose of the design practice in our organization. So what we're trying to do is to help people and give people the tools to decide when it is. So we have a series of what we call experienced design principles and they say things like, I want Lady Bank to treat my time as precious. So we'll go back to that core page and we'll go, okay, is that helping someone have make, are we helping them feel their time is precious? It's like, well, no, because they're going to have to take a photocopy into the year and get it signed and okay, that's out then. And that helps us make design decisions and judgment decisions and it helps us realize that we're not there yet and it helps stop us falling in love with the pieces. And that's when we're sometimes our legal people will turn around and go, but you can't do that there. It absolutely has to go somewhere else because we can't have that conversation until that's happened. And that's where that collaborative working helps us make really strong decisions and go, yep, no, maybe an out. And it's where arguments happen and people get upset because their favorite feature gets dumped. But effectively it helps us make better decisions. We've also stopped talking about minimal viable products because what I've discovered is that minimal viable product in most places means the thing you started off thinking about with all the stuff added on. And it just means that you do the minimal viable product plus all the other stuff faster. And what you end up with is a kind of half built thing that kind of works. Which isn't bad, but it's never really a minimal viable product. So what we started doing is talking about actions, a minimal viable actions. And we got this a lot from, we looked a lot into behaviour change. So there was an experiment run in the UK tax office. They had high tax payers. They had $32 billion of unpaid taxes from people who were very wealthy but who weren't paying them. And they'd sent them lots of letters and they'd sent them red letters and they'd sent them invoices and they'd sent them big rude things saying they were going to be taken to court and nothing happened. So they started to look at social bias and social behaviours and they said, okay, everyone likes to be like everybody else. So what happens if we send them a letter that says 86% of people in your area pay their taxes on time and that means that you have schools and roads? Awesome. Go be one of them. And they tried another one that said, did you know that in your street there's only two people who haven't paid their taxes this year? And they tried all these different experiments and in the first week they raised $15.3 million in them paid taxes because people didn't want to be the one that didn't pay for the roads and schools. So it worked better than all those letters and it saved them a stack in sending out letters too. They did another one too. They were finding that people weren't opening letters. I don't know if you do this. I do too. It's like if a letter comes from the bank, I put it over there and I deal with it some other time when I'm feeling stronger or later at night over a glass of wine or something like that. And it happens less because less comes by paper but I always used to not open my bank statements because I couldn't face it. So what they did was they said, okay, they employed some students and they got them to handwrite in red text or on the front. Bob opened this letter. It's really important. They increased their letter opening rate by 25% in the first two weeks because it had something personal on the front of it. So both of those things are simple actions that someone can take. Something was designed that was real. It was about someone's behavior and I could take one simple action to resolve it. There was another project in the UK where they looked at washing machines and they said, okay, it's not in the interest of, we have all these dead washing machines. Everybody has a washing machine. They get thrown out all the time. How do we help people? And the average age of an appliance has gone down. So we replace things now every six years, not every 10 or 15 years. How could we incent washing machine makers to make appliances that last longer because they've got the technology to do it?  So you're effectively entering into a contract with them not to have a washing machine, but to have clean clothes. And what that means is it's in their interest to make a washing machine that lasts as long as it possibly can because they don't have to replace it if it works well. And if they actually make it cheaper for you and it uses less water, then it's also going to make it easier for you to wash well. So what they did was they incented the behavior and made it easy for people to act differently and they made it easier for companies to act on the technology that they already had. There was another one that's done with power. So there's starting to be some interesting stuff around electricity saving. So there's some work done in the U.S. where they identified that if you're two people and I have a reward to give you and I say, be fit, walk 10Ks every day.  So then they looked at electricity and they said, well, what if electricity companies were incented to just provide heat instead of providing electricity or heating? Their job was to find the cheapest way to maintain your house at 27 degrees all year round. So if you live next to a big factory, they might get extra heat from the factory. If you live in an area with good wind, they might put in wind power. It doesn't matter the solution. It's their job as a technology company to solve the problem. It's your job to enter into a contract to just have a thing. And this is a perfect example of what I mean about actions. So instead of saying, I know what this is, this is going to lead to, I deal with a lot of these things. Tell me what this product is going to do. It's going to save 5% laps. Really? How? How is somebody going to do something differently? So we've been going into those. We're talking a lot about action metrics and saying it's all very well to say this is going to do this unless I can actually prove how it will happen in this site with this button, in this workflow, in this retail store, that I can't claim that metric. It's really tough because it's really hard to claim something like that and it makes you think in different ways. And it makes you different ways about the way people do things. So it might not be about saying, we need five pages. It might be about saying the sole purpose of this page is to get somebody to fill in all the fields at once. How will we know when it's done? Because they've pressed that. And then you can start to have conversations that are really true about the success of the design of something because at the end of the first week, if you wanted 36 people to finish that form in less than five seconds and they haven't, then you know there's something wrong. So it's been an interesting path. We were not there yet at all. But... And the other thing that we've learnt that's really important is that it's actually not about the thing. It's about the space in between the thing. So a lot of journey mapping has been going on in big organisations. PWC is doing journey mapping. Deloitte is doing journey mapping.  It's great. It defines the stages in a journey. But what we've been starting to understand is that the stages of the journey are not good enough because people don't do things in linear patterns and they don't do things in linear ways. What actually happens is, for example, web chat. We do some web chat service and our agents use web chat and they have to deal with three conversations at once. The trouble is that of those three conversations that they're having on web chat at the same time, they're all operating at a different cadence. So someone might be feeding the kids doing some shoe shopping and there's conversations kind of going with, can you help me with my health insurance? Ooh, nice shoes. Yep, I'll get you sandwiches in a minute. And so that's a sort of like a slow, lagging conversation. Somebody else is in there and they're like, okay, I want to talk about my health insurance now. Get on with the show. Only we kick people out after five minutes.  And we do put them back onto the same person and we don't lose their data or anything. But it's still a kind of weird thing that happens. And the reason that happens is because it's not about the conversation. It's about the connection points in the conversation. People talk about Omnichannel, which is a horrible word. But what they mean is actually that what we need to do is to get someone from web to mobile or mobile to store. And that bit is not about the interaction because I'm going to have an interaction on web and then I'm going to have an interaction on mobile. The really important bit is designing that bit that happens that moves me from one to the other. And we often forget about those. We assume those will happen rather than design them. Love this. This is a weightless project. So it's an initiative that was started in the U.S. And they said, what if we actually, we've got all these fit bits that people are wearing. We've got all of these trackers and bits and pieces tracking how many calories people use. What if we tied donors to the use of people's exercise? So if every calorie you burn, we donate X amount of money to food charities. And it's become a hub through which people use their data to affect a change. And it's been hugely successful. I think it's up to 300 and something billion now. And it's been hugely successful because it's a purpose driven change. I have data. You have money. I believe in some change. I'm going to make a change to me so that they get something better and you're going to help me do that. It's again, it's around that value exchange. I think we need to start thinking about valuable exchanges, not about sites. We've moved beyond things being important in their own right. They are. It's important to have a well-designed site. It's important to have a well-designed app. But what is the purpose of what it's doing and why is it doing it? So I do extra steps because my Fitbit's tied to this not because I feel good about it. I walk up the stairs with all these bags. I guess somebody in Africa is going to get more food. Now it's probably not quite as simple as that and I'm sure there's all sorts of cynical reasons about why that wouldn't happen exactly. But lots of other people think this is a good idea too. And that's I think what happens when we start to use our data, the true, the Fitbit data that we actually have with the real, I can track and contribute my stuff to your site into the ideal. I can actually change the world. So we've had a lot of conversations around the features of something or the things that have to happen. Often we start off in the design process. Somebody says, oh, we need a thing. We need a thing to help people go to the gym. And then we start to design what features that's going to have. It needs to have a sign-up page. It needs to do this. It needs to let people pay money. Then we have to start talking about the product job. What is this going to do? It's actually going to help people go to the gym in different ways. That's kind of cool. I can buy into that. But what if it actually changed my behaviour? And that's the step we often don't go to because we hit this one and we go, done. It's going to be amazing. People are going to love it. It's going to be awesome. But we forget to have that conversation that says, how does this change meaning? So what Guevara have done and what weightless project have done is they took what's effectively a web service and they looked at how it might change the world. And then they looked at how those things connect and where the overlap was and what the core was. That thinking is the stuff that I mean when I'm talking about design thinking. So I guess the purpose fits easy. I think about the things that matter to you. They're not things like paying your bills. Making sure that the spreadsheet's balanced. They're not making sure that you can get the right kind of vegetables at the supermarket on a Friday night. They're much bigger than that. How do I keep my kids healthy? How do I become a better person?  How do I not forget about that appointment that I said I'd do and then have to ring someone and go, I'm really, really sorry I'm not there? And that purpose bit is the human bit and we all have that. And whether you're a scientist, a dev, a legal person, a risk person, a designer, whatever, we all have purpose and that's the first part that you can come together and share meaning. Then you have your user needs. And again just to think about the how and the why and what someone's really trying to do. If you say someone is trying to fill in a form, take it back a level, go back up and go, hang on. Is the purpose, my purpose in the world to fill forms? Yeah, no. I'd like it not to have a form at all. But then the business needs and we can't forget those. It needs to make this much money and a lot of time, I have a lot of designers that I work with who see the perfect beauty in a design problem but have forgotten how to see the beauty in a business problem and business problems are interesting and exciting and just as exciting as any design problem. How do I make someone do and change their behaviour so that this will happen and these people will be happy and give us enough money to do more of this? Just a design problem. Except that because that's their world and that's our world. We forget that that's interesting. What I find is if I take designers on a journey with me around this business problem is really cool, then we start to get really, really cool things happening because designers get business. Everyone gets business. It's just a way of making something happen to change something to make something else happen. But we forget to frame it in the right way as an interesting problem or an interesting challenge. We start thinking of it as something we have to do for those annoying people. And then there's the core of this thing. I want to do this great, amazing, world-changing thing. What are the few things it absolutely has to have? And then can I get in and can I get out? And then the magic happens. If you just think about those things and you have the courage to sit in the mess and the chaos of that space, then magic does happen. But it takes real courage and it takes you to own the questioning of that problem. And often we see that problem but we perhaps think it's not appropriate to ask it. Or we're concerned that someone's going to think we're fluffy if we ask that question. And I think for each of us in every team that you work in, how do you create that environment for your team that allows people to have that messy space and ask those questions? And obviously it has to have a stop and a go, but if you do it, great things happen. So I would say there's a lot of conversation and winging goes on. And my community is the worst of it. Oh, everyone understood design. The world would be an amazing place.  Then we wouldn't have to do that. We all have it. We whinge about our clients. We whinge about the other people we have to work with. We whinge about that really grumpy person in compliance who's stopping me doing what I want to do. And we actually have a small punching spot in the corner of the design area which is like for those kind of moments. Because we all have them. But the fact is it's our responsibility and our courage to move beyond them. And if we can't solve that problem and the questions we're asking are the wrong questions, the stories we're telling are the wrong stories and the engagement we're having is the wrong engagement. So often what we'll do is we'll have a meltdown with someone or a stakeholder and we'll come back and we'll go, we'll go, ah, that person's never going to let us do something. Hang on. This is a design problem. How do we get that person to think that this idea of ours is their idea and really great? And that changes the way we work because it then gets people to stop being quite so grumpy and it actually gets them focused around problem solutions. So it might be the story we've told isn't good enough. We haven't told the right story to the right people. We actually gave the wrong message to those people and they think we're building a thing but we're actually building a triangle thing. And what we have to do is get them back online. And it's allowed us to look at the way we manage our stakeholders instead of whinging about everybody else which doesn't mean there is one person that I actually am on a mission to kill. And he is now in the... He's so far in my dark corner that he may never get out again. But that's okay. I'm dealing with that. He'll die quietly and painfully at some point in the future. But I will... And my team said to me yesterday, you know you're going to have to get over this. And I was like, yeah, I know. So I would say it's up to us to do this and to apply this and to come to it and to ask the right questions and be part of a community that's doing these things because then we can really do amazing stuff and the skill that you bring to build and create great stuff and the skill that a great designer will bring to suggest the way that someone might use that stuff and the skill that a great organisation might bring to apply that and make a problem that makes money is a really kind of fun thing to be part of. So that's kind of all I've got to say, really. I had to have London in here because I've just come back from a year in London. And I guess I'm open to any questions, any answers. I'm always open to a coffee although it's been a bit busy the last six months. But yeah, have a chat, find me, talk to me. Talk about interesting things. I think we've got time for a couple of questions. So yeah, yeah, of course. You mentioned in the beginning bringing people together with designers and generating insights. One of the problems I run up against is the box principle. You get some people stuck outside the box. You might be designing for a hardware shop and you pick up a hammer in front of the group and they're all got blank faces because they've never been in the shop, they've never used a product, they don't know anything about it. Or you get the other people who are stuck inside the box soon as you say hardware or in synchronisation they all pull out an iPhone and ask Siri, what is hardware? And you know they're all going to think the same. So how do you actually shake them up and get the change? So there's a whole range of things. So we have this program running at the moment with our leadership team and we're sending out the general managers and executive general managers and lots of organisations do this. We're sending them out to our stores and our core centres. But we're sending them out with a postcard and the postcard because we know if we just send them out there they'll come back and say oh you know my area of business performance is doing really well because everyone worked really hard and they go of course you did because you were there. So we're sending them up with a little postcard and it's asking them to first of all they have to draw a sketch of the processes that they've seen and we're giving them a prize for the worst and best sketch. We can't draw. Well these people say that they can't do what you're saying either so go be uncomfortable. We're asking them to take photographs of the staff room, the worst bit of the store and the best bit of the store. We're asking them to look at the staff desks because when you look at the desk of somebody who works in the store you start to see where the problems lie. So our desks in our retail stores have lots and lots of paper around them because it's hard to remember all the things that we have to talk about. And we're asking them to turn up with cake and we're asking them to at the end of it they have to do an interview with the store staff to interview them on video about their experience in the store. So what we're asking them to do is to go out and experience it but we're asking them to do it in a way that puts them outside of their comfort zone and you can do this in all sorts of ways. I mean you can just send somebody out to go buy a hammer or if it's a hammer shop go buy a hammer and try and hammer. So this is really bad. It's not working for me. So just getting somebody to do something rather than think something sometimes is really important.  But why is the escalator going that way because everyone's going to walk that way to get? That's weird. And so just remembering to put yourself back in context we sent some guys out the other day to look at what happened at tram stops and off the tram. We're going in and what happens at a tram stop than that. So we got them to go out and sit at a tram stop and watch for a bit and we got them to focus on what people were carrying what they were doing what they did when they got to the tram stop how they worked and they came out and they were like oh my god I never realised so much happened at a tram stop. So it's really just about getting people to stop and reframe. I saw one company that's employing poets as their experience designers because they said poets and creatives see things in different ways and when we send a business person out to some way to go and do observation they come back with business framed observation when we send a poet out they come back and go oh my god the blue thing over there was really weird and loads of people didn't sit on the blue thing because they didn't like it and they'll tell us stuff about emotion so it's really I think about creating the opportunity for people to step outside their box and be comfortable and that's what we try and design in. I mean it's not always easy to think about it but it is possible. Thank you Harry. That was a very long answer. I hope that was... I thought it was a good answer did you like that answer? Any other questions? Absolutely thanks. That was brilliant. There's a lot of parallels and overlap in the way you're approaching your design with behaviour driven development in like development design software design and I just want to know if you'd like to talk about that or ask like see does that fit in with the bigger picture that you have there? Absolutely so I think behaviour change and behavioural economics are really key drivers particularly in health and finance so much of what we do we use the I don't know if any of you know the BJ Fogg model around behaviour change so he's a Stanford design professor and he's developed a really simple behaviour change matrix which talks about motivation, opportunity and trigger and that if you don't have all of those things in the design of an interaction then you're unlikely to get a behaviour change so when we design our minimal viable actions we talk about if we want someone to do this how are they motivated to do it what is the opportunity for them to take that can they find the thing on the page and what's the trigger for them to do it so the trigger might start way back in the type of SEO information we have available the trigger might start in a Facebook page but unless we consider that motivation opportunity trigger then we can't really design effective interactions for customers we also the BJ Fogg model is quite interesting because it shows it defines behaviours into things like span behaviours, spot behaviours or continual behaviours so do we want someone to do this just once do we want them to do it regularly every week or do we want them to do it over a period of time so we find that model quite useful just in framing up what we're trying to do so for something like health insurance which is kind of effectively a grudge purchase how do you encourage someone to continue to engage with that that's a span behaviour we need to start to build in those so yeah we're doing a lot of work and we do a lot of my team's fascinated I've got one behavioural designer in my team and we continually scan the environment just to find out what people are doing and I think that's what interests us about things like carrot and weightless org that they are behaviourally driven projects that happen to be expressed in digital formats so yeah How do we get you and your team involved helping us make decisions around UX in Drupal Corp and Drupal Corp I'd be really, we're always happy to do a workshop and certainly we're happy to do stuff one of my biggest coaching lessons this year has been don't say yes to everything because my kids started to get to the point where they were like who is this mass woman but my team, one of the things that we do try and do is support communities because for us the more people work like this the better it is for us because the better stuff we do so we're always happy to run a session or a workshop or support a hackathon or whatever you've got on by all means keep in touch and we'll do what we can to help and you'll be sorry you said that There's lots of us around in Melbourne it's quite a strong design community so we can always kind of like put people in Thanks Harriet Any, I think we've still got some time for some questions so I see one there, one there any others just put your hands up so I can kind of maybe Is that it? Alright a couple over there Any women want to ask a question? I'd like to hear She's just continuing from that previous question I suppose as a aspiring sort of user and customer experience designer myself coming out of programming into this space what advice do you have for sort of training formal learning and study options and potentially your background and how you got into the area? My background's a bit random but there is some good stuff so in terms of training General Assembly are doing some really good UX training in Melbourne at the moment they have a whole range of programs and they have a really good industry mentoring People like Heath Wallace run a series of sessions around UX training and development but I would say the biggest thing is to be continually curious to sort of go spend time sitting on tram stops and trying to understand why people do things and there's a lot of stuff on the web UX Australia is one of the big conferences that sells out quite rapidly but it's usually a really good really well curated program of experience design type events My background is kind of weird I was a teacher and then I was a multimedia developer and then I became interested in why we had interfaces and it was really early days for UX so in those days there were no jobs for UX and so a lot of us who had backgrounds across everything from behaviour design learning and development HCI got together and started to build a community 2009 was the first UX conference here in Australia and then for me it was a pathway through service design through that into service design and it's always been my father's an industrial designer and I grew up in a household where I would come down in the morning and there would be 10 kettles and I'd go to make a cup of tea and he'd go why don't you choose that one? Come on, I don't know because it was near my hand No, there must have been a reason so I kind of grew up in that environment and that's what I mean about being naturally curious what why people do things when you use something think about why the button is there what annoys you about it and it's that training that we call industrialising curiosity so when I recruit for my team I can teach UX skills but I can't teach curiosity so I just employed a really young girl as a graphic designer and I employed her because she came into the interview and she told me about some stuff you've done recently and she said oh I redesigned this toy site and I said oh yeah okay and I said how'd it go and she said well I tried this but people were really against it because it didn't look like they wanted it to look and I said what did you do then so she goes well I took them all to Myers and I showed them all the toys and where I was would sit and why the colours wouldn't work and I got them to do things and they came back and said yes and I was like okay I want you because I can't she comes with a set of graphic design skills it's that natural curiosity about why people do things and how they might do things she talked about another thing she did where she worked with a not-for-profit community and she'd realised that she didn't understand what it was that they were trying to do and that was why she was struggling with the design and so she went out and sat in some meetings and listened to what they did and then came back and went get it so I would say nurture that curiosity I say go and chat to people there's things in Melbourne there's UX movie night General Assembly Heath Wallace Huddle here a service design company here in Melbourne they have open evenings and they've just run a design week session so there's some good stuff going on I just get part of it and talk to people but yeah definitely look at some term training as well and that spectrum of design so are you interested in the behavioural and research side of it are you interested in the ethnographic side of it is it about designing better interfaces for people so to sort of work out where your design spectrum sits that's sort of what I would say a girl question this is probably a bit of a to the left type of question but I look up from a family which has got people in it with dyslexia and autism spectrum so I'm always thinking about those people and their different ways of thinking and their different ways of integrating information and reading information and stuff and I just wonder are you conscious of that any of the work that you do and how do you keep yourself conscious and reactive we have to comply with the usual W3C accessibility guidelines which have become I think stronger over the years I think they've become much more about facilitating information exchange rather than just making sure the code is right a lot of it is about getting people to consider so I'm lucky enough to be in a company that's got quite a strong diversity policy and approach so it's quite easy to have a conversation around diversity also because I work in a health area we have to make our stuff accessible also it's about having the right people and the way I find learning and development people are really good to have in a design space because they'll often talk about how to effectively exchange information I spend a lot of time working with people who aren't designers about different things change people teach me about how to get people's behaviour learning people teach me about good ways to structure content so yeah we definitely consider it we don't always win the argument but often we do and some of it might come down to we just can't use a visual learning treatment for this or we can or we have to have a different idea I think we're helped by some of the legislation that's come in recently to support us but yeah it's a part I'm deeply interested in


Hi everybody it's Sam at Mixed Up Craft thank you for watching my tutorial today I'm going to show you how to make this beautiful easel step swing floating card. It's a few cards in one really, you've got the step element, you've got the easel card and then you've got this floating element here. Now this one does fold flat and I recommend that you fold it flat this way so that then when the person opens it it kind of already goes into that shape and everything, your folds all kind of stay nice and crisp whereas I've seen a lot of them are just like this and obviously once that's been in an envelope for a while those score lines are not going to be as sharp as you would like them to be so I'm going to be sending mine off like this. Now these ones are for Mother's Day but of course you can have it for any occasion that you like you can see there they stand really nicely and you've got all the space on the back of this swing piece here to write your message so let me show you how to make it. So this is a simplified version so I actually was requested to do this tutorial by about seven different people over on the request section on my blog had a little look into it and I saw a tutorial by Debbie Henderson and when I'd looked at a lot of this card style on Pinterest and things like that just to see if there was a more simplified way to do it and this is what I've come up with here so you want a piece of you know I'm doing a six by six version so this is 12 by six and along the 12 inch side you want to score it six inches then what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut a square into this left-hand side here so this one here is about four by four but it's four and one eighth by four and one eighth but four by four will be fine and that will give you a one inch side on all four sides there so I'm going to just lay this one here, tack it in place, if you don't have a die cutting machine you could draw around something that's square and then just cut it out or you might have you know your trimmers you can cut a square four by four square in the middle and but by just die cutting straight in here I just already thought that that was a bit easy and most people you know watch my tutorials will have a square die and a die cutting machine so I'm just going to run this one through now okay so you can see that's come away perfectly and you could use this piece now for the piece that's going to be floating but because I wanted to get as much prepped before the tutorial I've already got mine ready but keep that piece and you can use it for the middle part so now that's all cut we're going to do some scoring so pop it back into your scoreboard with this side on the left-hand side and you're going to score it one and a half just keep your stylus in the track until you get down to the other end okay and then at two again all the way down and then it's three and a half all the way down now I have changed those scorelines slightly from the live I wanted it to have more height at the front so I've added an extra half inch to the front here so anybody that's watching and on the live that's what I've changed there now we can fold and burnish the scoreline so you're going to fold your main six inch scoreline there in half so that's you know your card blank there then that next scoreline you want to become a mountain like so okay and then a valley and then the front one will become a mountain I'm just going to flip that over there just so I can get some nice burnish lines there and there is the card shape okay you'll see now once we add our mats and layers bring up on the side there that's the shape that you should have next if you want to do some die-cutting with this front piece here then I've pulled out my box number 15 by the papercraft society or kit 15 and that's what I've used to decorate all of this now I believe the day this tutorial goes up they have an offer on the papercraft society kits will link the kits below because if you are someone that's watching my tutorials and you enjoy the kits and you've been unsure whether to get one or not then today might be a good day to check them out again I don't know how long the offers running so if you're watching this some months later but then I imagine it will be gone and it will be whilst stocks last but you might be able to get yourself a bargain in this kit there is this lovely edge die here now it's not wide enough to cover the whole width and during the live and I was like oh I really want to use it so I ended up just adding a little curve to the end and that's what a lot of other people did as well so I'm going to use that one there and I've got myself here this yellow cardstock and I want this to become the mat layer here so you'll see I've got this lovely gingham if you don't want to do an edge you might have a straight edge rather than a curved edge but we're just like a nice scallop detail or you know a different design altogether or you just keep it completely normal you know as it is it will look lovely with some nice mats and layers built up but I do just want to add a little bit more this is going to be for Mother's Day so I'm going to go quite over the top so it's a six inch width card so I'm going to bring this down to five and three quarters I'm just going to cut that it's just piece from my scrap and this is going to sit over here so you'll see already I've got a nice border either side but what I want to do first of all is just I'm only going to die cut so I'm only going to run this half through I mean if you don't want to burnish your score lines yet then wait till you add this piece in and I'm going to line up that middle scallop roughly so it's in the middle of the card right up as close to the end as I can get it and I can just see I've got about the same either side there so I'm going to pop this there I'm just going to run just this piece through the die machine then run it back and then reverse it back out again you see now I've got this shape and then all I did was just the die to lay it down and I just drew around it I'm going to sit it there just to get the same kind of curve and this was just you know a good way to just show you how you can extend you know some of the edge dies to fit you know bigger cards again just like so and then I'm just going to you could just cut it straight as well you don't have to extend the the shape of the the curve there but I did think it was quite nice okay so that's done then with this one I'm going to lay the die again right at the end just making sure I've got an equal amount it'd be slightly less each side now because this is slightly not you know slightly thinner it's not as wide and again just going to die cut that end just use that die just to draw around the sides here okay next I'm just going to open up the card and I'm going to lay this down I'm just going to bring it down until I get a nice white border that I'm going to bring up a little bit higher and then I'm just going to mark with my pencil about a quarter of an inch up from that score line I'm just going to cut that okay so that's that piece and because it's plain I'm going to use this embossing folder just to add a little bit of texture and I'm going to use some of my bar cool paste over the top of this as well so now I'm just going to run this through my machine this is the X cut wicker design okay so that's that one all done let's get this out of the way and now I'm going to stick this one down onto the base there so that will start to strengthen that that's that all done next I've got this piece of acetate and the acetate comes in the kit as well and this is one and a half by just under the width of the card here so this is six inches so I've done this to five and seven eight just so you don't have anything poking out the sides and you'll see I've added double-sided tape here now this doesn't have to be acetate either this could be cardstock but if you want to have that floating look then use the acetate because then you can't see it I've just added some tape to the front ends here so I'm going to stick that down first just on the front just on the end pieces and you're going to turn this over you're going to butt it right up to the score line here but it's going to stick onto the these this front piece here that's what you're sticking it on to but I'm leaning it against the back piece first just to get it in place so I just want to make sure I've got it in the middle there and then I'm just going to pinch over get it right up the top there and that will help balance the card okay so you'll see what we've got there and then I've cut this piece here which I've also already embossed and this one here measures three and three-quarters squared so I'm going to take the tape off of the front and then if you open up the card lay it all down completely flat this piece you want to sit perfectly in that square so you've got an even border I think that's about right and now just reinforce those score lines again now when you bring this up once we add our stopper this piece will kind of just float there just it just stays where it needs to be so I'm now going to flip this over and I've cut the same piece again the same size three and three-quarters and then I put a matte layer on there which is three and a half by three and a half in the yellow and then I've got three and a quarter by three and a quarter again in white so you can write your message and I'm just going to sit this perfectly over the top like so and it'll stick to that you could put more glue on there if you want but I think that's enough but now again once the stoppers in place you can see how that all looks so now that's all left for me to do is add the stopper and decorate so I've already got my stopper ready here and I've put some foam on the back and this one just says happy Mother's Day so now you just want to kind of bring this up as far as you want I'm going to come up a little bit higher here because I think I'm going to do some more floral detail on the bottom so I'm going to bring it down as far as that will still kind of hang there so I'm going to go about there I think okay so again if I just bring that up there you can see that shape once we start adding more onto this it will weight it down so for all the mats and layers now you can do this again slightly differently if you want I did it so that I had the short strips in the middle here and then longer ones coming down either side you might want to have one long strip along the bottom and then shorter pieces here on the side so I'm going to show you that way in the sizes but again you know you might want to change it so you'll want these two pieces for the front and the back every piece here is three quarters of an inch wide but the length of these are four so two of that size and then two again that three quarters wide by two and a quarter and then I have four pieces here which are one and a quarter again by three quarters wide and these will cover all of the sides here so these smaller ones are going to go in here and here okay like so those longer ones will go in the middle here and in the middle of the back and then those two will go on the sides on the back so I'm going to get them all stuck down okay next I want to add some shine before I stick the flowers down now I should have probably not added that next but this is clear and it will just make everything sparkle so I'm not worried so this is amazing stuff and this is the Cosmic Shimmer Glitter Kiss and this color here is Frosty Sparkle and it will just add a beautiful sparkle you can see hopefully it's picking it up all the sparkle on the sponge there so I'm just going to soften my sponge because it can dry up they do say you should rinse it I don't I just find that as soon as you apply it back into the medium the whole sponge starts to soften again so I'm just kind of pop in the sponge in there so you've got kind of a slope and you'll always rub the excess off you a little bit goes a very long way so that's nice and soft again now and I'm just going to it's nice on embossed surfaces because it picks up you know all the raised surface again you're not probably going to really see too much of this but I will bring it up closer in a moment but I'm just brushing it over like so it doesn't matter there's all different colors but if you've got the clear it's like a sparkle pen but in a paste and it dries very quickly as well I would also cover this backside here with maybe some either more white or some a patterned paper it doesn't matter that it's hitting that sentiment I'm going to brush over a little bit if I bring that up now you should be able to see there we go all the shine it's still drying a little bit but you've got all that sparkle on the bottom and I'm also just going to like I said do these things probably before you put it all together but I'm just showing you that you can still do it once it is you can go over it so if you do want it thicker then by all means do so again if I just bring up the front here you got that beautiful iridescent okay you can just about see it there and just adds so much sparkle to the card it looks absolutely beautiful so I'm going to give that a few more minutes to dry and then I'm going to start sticking down all of my flowers here and I'm going to follow the same arrangement of this one I've got a different butterfly I've got all the leaves there now I've inked these up and I've shaped them I've added you know all the staining detail and some little gems in the middle of them and if you want to see all of that in real time then I will link the Facebook live in the description box below so you can follow that one but I'm now going to get the heat gun on and get that all stuck down okay so that's now all stuck down I did end up having to do another pink flower because I realised I wanted a pink one here and a pink one down here so it looked nice against the yellow so rather than have three yellows together I used that extra one and popped it there instead so slightly different arrangement to this one here but I think it still looks really really pretty next I'm just going to finish it off with some sparkle pen on the butterfly and all the leaves now you could also add the cosmic shimmer sparkle but I'm going to use this now and again if I just bring this one up you should see the sparkle on the butterfly board here so I didn't do on the leaves actually so I might not on this one we'll see I'm just going to now cover this okay so just left the sparkle on the butterfly if it darkens the cardstock don't worry it's just because you've gone a bit heavier with it and it will dry clear eventually but that's now very shiny and then I'm going to add some Nuvo drops so you can see where I've added them all here so I've done the butterfly trail there and then I've just added them in in any little gaps I've got there now this is now an embossed surface so it's not as smooth as that one so I'm just going to place them on the kind of raised areas okay so I'll just bring that up now I will add some more to this piece here but I don't want to keep it upright for too long because otherwise those dots will drop but you can see there what I've done and I just need to die cut another stamen and an embellishment for that pink flower there but you just so you can see everything there so I'm going to lay that one back down so I'll just bring that one up again nice and close there so you can see I think it looks absolutely gorgeous so I hope you like this simplified version and I think by doing it this way as well it's nice to then be able to add the acetate so it gives you that floating effect of thoroughly enjoy putting these together I can't wait to see your versions if you haven't and you are on Facebook if you head over to mixed up crafters we've got a Facebook group there and you can share anything that you make following my tutorials and there's a lovely group of men and women there sharing all of their wonderful designs also coming up now will be a couple of other kind of step cards easel cards that you might enjoy and I'll share some playlists throughout the video as well that you might want to watch after this video and if you haven't subscribed and you've enjoyed today please hit the subscribe button and hit the notification bell and then you'll be notified every time I upload a video thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon bye


And outside Africa, the Queen's lifelong sense of duty has been remembered at her state funeral service at Westminster Abbey, before her body arrived winter, where she will by now be interred. The Dean of Westminster, who led the service, expressed gratitude to a congregation of about 2,000 people, including world leaders and royalties. The Queen will be buried with her husband of more than 70 years at a private family service.


When people think of tattoos, they might picture a famous rock musician or leather-clad biker, but none of them would have tattoos if not for sailors. Tattoos have long been associated with sailors. They're chosen designs reflecting life on the sea. Skin Deep, the nautical roots of tattoo culture, recently opened at Naval History and Heritage Commands Museum in Bremerton. This exciting new exhibit features the naval history of tattooing. Sailors in the area are encouraged to check out this exhibit of our past, but also to remember the guidelines set forth for today's sailors. Check out the Navy Tattoo Policies in Chapter 2 of the U.S. Navy Uniform Regulations. Office of Naval Research Officials announced a new prototype diving helmet. The helmet allows Navy divers more dive time than the short supplies of helium currently permit. The new prototype helmet could revolutionize diving missions. Additionally, smaller vessels for missions will become a new possibility since less gas will be needed for divers. For more news from the Office of Naval Research, visit their website.


At Audiology Associates at Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. On Saturday, July 30th, the Appalachian Citizens Law Center will be hosting a Black Lung Screening Event at Pike Central High School. Mountain Top spoke to the program director and organizer of the event to understand the impact of Black Lung and why they are taking initiative to help those affected by the disease in our area. What we're doing is we're trying to gather in co-miners, retired, disabled, inactive co-miners that may think that they have Black Lung or they think maybe they've already been awarded Black Lung benefits and just trying to gather them in one place to see how we can assist them with anything that's going on with their disability. We're going to have legal questions to be answered. We're going to have, of course, if they want to sign it for benefits or re-sign it for benefits, we'll have people there to do that. We're going to have medical people there if they have questions about medical. It's just going to be kind of a one-stop shop if they want to come in there and just talk to anybody. We'll have somebody there for any questions they have.  They went to work and came home with a disease that now prevents them from getting to do and enjoy their retirement years. Or it made them retire early. And so I think it's really important to remember the fact that, you know, we want to get them the care that they need, but also to just be able to ensure that they're taken care of and getting the health care that they need is the ultimate thing, because we know how important and how needed health care is, especially for those with black lung. For Mountaintop News, I'm Nick Colum.