The Lookback Player
The Lookback player is where you run or observe moderated sessions and where you review and analyze recorded sessions with your team.
Henrik Mattsson avatar
Written by Henrik Mattsson
Updated over a week ago

Who'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 three main parts - the Canvas, the Session Feed, and the Top Bar

The Canvas is where the participant screen and camera streams are presented. During a live session, moderators will also find basic controls for the call here - including camera and microphone controls, the buttons for activating moderator screen share (sharing a screen or tab or your choice with the participant, and ending the session.

After ending the live session, or when entering a replay directly from the dashbooard - a timeline appears on the bottom of the Canvas, showing you where you are in the session, as well as where highlights have been created.

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

The Session Feed

On your right you have the Session Feed which shows notes, chat messages and important events.

At the top of the feed, you have controls for hiding the feed, for going into Focus Mode, and for accessing filters.

You and your team mates can choose whether to take notes (for important observations) or chat, by selecting input format in the bottom of the session feed. As per usual, observers cannot be seen or heard so chat is the only way to communicate to the moderator and team during live.

All notes and chat messages are timestamped. Notes are timestamped at the moment you start writing, but chat messages are timestamped 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.

If you use the transcription feature, the transcript will also show up in the session feed.

The Top Bar

The left side of the Top Bar holds basic information about the project, round and session names. The right side has several important controls.

A live state indicator showing that the session is still ongoing, and the current duration.

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.

Finally, you'll also find the controls for transcribing the audio, information about the session, and the button for exporting. Transcription and exports are only available after the live session has ended.


Filtering

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.


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 you own stuff + any @-mentions from your team.


Transcriptions

Timestamped notes can be a powerful way to navigate a session recording once live is over, but nothing really beats scrolling through an audio transcript for quickly getting to those key moments and turning them into highlights for your team and stakeholders.

The player offers free transcripts of Moderator and Participant audio. It's quick and accurate. Just enter the transcription menu from the Top Bar, chose your language and click Transcribe. I you'd like, we'll email you when its done.


Highlight creation

There are several ways to create highlights in the player. You can to it the good old way by marking a segment of the timeline or using the T key shortcut during playback do drop the in-point and out-point on the timeline. You can then easily adjust the in-point and out-point by marking the highlight and grabbing and dragging the ends.

You can also turn a note into a highlight directly from the session feed by selecting the note and clicking the sun symbol. This will create a 1 minute highlight using the timestamp of the note as the in-point.

You can then easily adjust the in- and outpoint either by grabbing and dragging the ends of highlight on the timeline, or by editing the timestamps directly in the note editor.

You can create as many highlights as you want without worrying about filling up the Round with clips. Once you are done creating highlights, just select the ones you like and send them to the dashboard.

Did this answer your question?