Learnings from a Meerkat interview

Last week I did an AMA at the Slack-based UX community Designerhangout as the UX research at Lookback.io with Meerkat. Meerkat, similarly to Periscope allows you to live streaming app that allows you to take questions and re-posts your interview to Youtube later which, very neat and practical. Here is a short description of the experience and the findings.

The founder of Designerhangout Jacob Rogelberg and I scheduled the AMA (Ask me anything) a week in advance so I had time to do a test recording with Meerkat before going live on @designerhangout  with their entire community and not bugging them with tech details etc. I would do this again just out of curtesy, you don’t want people waiting while you get yourself together.

I also emptied my phone for excess materials. For example i synced all my photos externally and then deleted them so I had more than 200 MB to play with, that makes it a nice experience. Mainly I do this at any point in time when you are using video on your camera over 10 minutes of recorded material. My interview was 33 minutes. That takes some overhead, clean out some space on your device.

I signed in to Meerkat with our Lookback Twitter account as I have hade major difficulties with twitter password support after adding SMS verification, that has gone awry and won’t let me back in. Twitter customer service has a lot left to wish for but thats another story.

By tagging the video #katch Meerkat allows it to catch the video on Youtube later, so its documented. I named it appropriately so if people RT it it makes sense if its of for them on not “AMA with @lookbacks UX research @heidiharman”. This way when the tweets from your Twitter and Meerkat happens, it’s clear what the clip is about.

Once you are on Meerkat, people will show up in little round circles on your Meerkat screen, thats filming you if you flip to selfie mode (frontal camera). You will also get questions thru the Meerkat app. I got most of my questions thru our UX forum (designers hangout). My thoughts this, it being a new experience for both the founder and me, was that we could have prepped up with some questions in advance. And the forum could have directed the question to be done via Meerkat, this way I as the interviewee would not have to go between 2 screens.

Things I did in the beginning were:
1. Introduce myself, name, role, company and why I’m here – for the AMA.
2. I spoke briefly about what Lookback does.
3. I started answering questions.

It seemed as if more questions started popping towards the end of the 33 minute conversation in 2 different chat-rooms, Twitter and Meerkat. If advise to keep it one Channel.

I might even set up a tripod, so I don’t have to do handhold the recording at the same time I’m looking for questions on my desktop screen, ultimately i would only be working on the Meerkat screen.

All in all, it was a neat experience with people asking great questions and it was a lot of fun teasing out new stuff. Id definitely do it again and recommend it as a great tool for this type of interviews and makes it simpler to gather the material and publish it. Best of luck with your recording, AMA, Q&A or whatever creative use you find for it. Hope this helps your future Meerkat or Periscope interview in the future.

The actual stream:

Livestream from GeekGirlMeetup STHLM evening sessions Autumn 2010

During this spring(2010) I started GeekGirlMeetup evening sessions becuase we felt that we needed some hands-on practical session on web, code and startups, outside the two-day conference we host twice a year. We ended up having full house everytime, we hade frontende-code, start-up night, and backend-code during the spring sessions.

Concidering that we had 70 participants at every evening session, and 100 per day during the 2 day conferance, we were today very happy to have 89 viewers of our LiveStream today, the first eveningsession for the Autumn, held at Valtech with 70 participants. A pretty good ratio.

@mariasoderberg held a session on frontend-coding, @inselhai on SEO and @animalin held a session on what the future of building themes was. Pretty awesome.

A big thanks to @heidiupdate for moderating, and @emmakoszinowski for Streaming, so that the rest of us/you can see.

A few guiding points:

  • You dont need to be a programmer to join us, you need curiosity. There are also different nights with different directions, we encourage curiosity, its rewarding.
  • Anyone can help out. We encourage you to share your ideas and thought with us, so that we can continue to create the best GeekGirlmeetup for this Autumn. We need smart, curious, challenging thinkers and most all, doers to join us. Since our im is to create new networks and new rolemodels were having an openhouse for people intrested in organizing the future of GeekGirlMeetup. Next meeting is on the 29th, at Fröjd, Stockholm. I cant be there, but thats the beauty of this network, we make it work (even if everyonecant make the meeting or skype meeting), just look how far we have come.