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The Lookback Player
The Lookback Player

The Lookback player is where you run or observe sessions and where you review and analyze previously recorded sessions with your team.

Russ Troester avatar
Written by Russ Troester
Updated over a week ago

What's in the player and how do I get there?

You and your team enter the player either by joining a LiveShare session or by clicking a recording in your Lookback dashboard. For a LiveShare, you partake in the session either as a moderator or as an observer. Moderators will be able to video chat with the participant. Observers are seeing everything that the moderator is seeing, but cannot be heard or seen themselves. Anyone with collaborator status in your Lookback org who is observing the LiveShare can take over as Moderator, but there can only be one moderator at any given time.

Player layout and main components

The player has four main parts - the Top Bar, the Canvas, Moderator Controls (only during a live session; replaced by the Timeline during playback), and the Session Feed

Contents

The Top Bar

The left side of the Top Bar holds basic information about the project, round and session names.

The right side also has several important controls:

  1. A live state indicator showing that the session is still ongoing, and the current duration (Note: this is only displayed while the session is live).

  2. Icons show you who are currently in the session - with a star indicating who is currently moderating. Observers can press the moderator icon to enter the menu for taking over as moderator. There can only be one moderator at a time.
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  3. Finally, you'll also see another set of tools right above the session feed on the right:
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    1. Help: Click here to access the chat tool for support
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    2. Notifications: See where colleagues have mentioned you in session notes/chats
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    3. Keyboard Shortcuts: See a list of all the keyboard shortcuts available in Lookback
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    4. Eureka: Our AI assistant to help you more easily find insights in your research
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    5. Transcriptions: Access the transcription menu to transcribe or retranscribe a session
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    6. Info: find more details about the session included date when it was captured, device used, and participant details
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    7. Share: download recordings, export session feeds, and create Public Links

The Canvas

The Canvas is where the participant screen and camera streams are presented. The size of the participant's screen will depend on the device they are using and your own monitor. It will automatically scale and adjust as you resize the player window.

Moderator Controls & Timeline

During a live session, moderators will find basic controls for the call at the bottom:
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  1. Camera - click this to toggle your camera on or off
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  2. Microphone - click this to toggle your microphone on or off
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  3. Screen sharing - click this to share your screen with the participant or to stop sharing your screen
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  4. Moderator Push Link - click this to push a new link to your participant
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  5. Discussion Guide - click this to pull up your Discussion Guide
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  6. End session - click this to end the session with your participant

After ending the live session, or when entering a replay directly from the dashboard - a timeline appears on the bottom of the Canvas in place of the Moderator Controls, showing you where you are in the session, as well as where highlights have been created and other events like the beginning of individual Tasks in a Tasks round.

The timeline also offers controls for adjusting playback speed (0.5-4x), volume, creating and adjusting highlights, and for going into full screen mode.

The Session Feed

On your right side of the player, you have the Session Feed which shows notes, chat messages and important events. It's divided into 2 sections:

  1. Feed: Contains notes, chats, highlights, and Eureka Insights
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  2. Transcription: Transcription of the entire session (both the participant and moderator - for moderated sessions - are captured and transcribed), and Eureka Headlines

You and your teammates can choose whether to take notes (for important observations) or chat, by selecting input format in the bottom of the session feed. The participant will not be seen or heard by the participant or moderator, so using chat or notes is the only way to communicate to the moderator and team during live.

All notes and chat messages are timestamped. Notes are time stamped at the moment you start writing, but chat messages are time stamped as you press enter and send them into the feed. Chat messages appear in blue in the feed, and notes in white. You can @-mention team mates to get their attention.

Editing Feed Content

Notes, Chats, Eureka Insights, and Transcripts are all editable if you are a collaborator.

To edit something in the session feed:

  1. Click on the 3-dot menu next to the item you want to edit
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  2. Select Edit

  3. Edit the content as needed and then click the Save button

Create Notes from Eureka Headlines and Transcription

We've made it easier to create notes directly from the transcription or a Eureka headline during session replay

  1. Go to the Transcription tab
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  2. Click the 3-dot menu next to a headline or moment in the transcript
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  3. Select Create note
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  4. A new, editable note will be added to the Feed tab at that moment in time

Session Feed Controls

At the top of the feed, you have controls for the session feed. Click on the links below to learn more about each control
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  1. Hide Session Feed
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  2. Side-by-side view
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  3. Focus Mode
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  4. Filters

1) Hide Session Feed

As the name suggests, this button will left you hide or collapse the session view. This can be useful during live sessions and replay so you can focus solely on the participant's camera and/or screen.

2) Side-by-side view

Sometimes it's helpful to see both the Feed and Transcription tabs at the same time. To do so, you can use the side-by-side view

During replay, toggle this on to seamlessly take notes while viewing the transcript and your Eureka moments.

3) Focus Mode

Our research clearly show that cognitive load can be quite significant during moderation of live research. So we built Focus Mode to help moderators quickly filter out everything that isn't vital during the live session, while not having to worry about missing any important questions from the team.

Use the toggle at the top of the Session Feed to only see your own notes, highlights, etc. as well as any @-mentions from your team.

4) Filters

The player is built for taking team collaboration to a new level. It's fun and valuable to watch live sessions and research together! But we also know that it can become hard to find relevant stuff in the collaborative stream when everyone are chatting and taking notes - so we built filtering for both content types and people. Whether you are live or revisiting the session afterwards, just enter the filter menu at the top of the session feed and let us know what you would like to be shown.

You can also apply filters to feed exports

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