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 three main parts - the Canvas, the Session Feed, and the Top Bar
1) The Canvas
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 as well as the buttons for activating moderator screen share 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.
2) The Session Feed
On your right you have the Session Feed which shows notes, chat messages and important events. It's divided into 2 sections:
Feed: Contains notes, chats, and highlights
Transcription: Transcription of the entire session - both the participant and moderator (for moderated sessions) are captured and transcribed
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 teammates 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 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.
If you use the transcription feature, the transcript will also show up in the session feed.
3) 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 see another set of tools right above the session feed on the right
Help: Click here to access the chat tool for support
Notifications: See where colleagues have mentioned you in session notes/chats
Keyboard Shortcuts: See a list of all the keyboard shortcuts available in Lookback
Eureka: Our AI beta to help you more easily find insights in your research
Transcriptions: Access the transcription menu to transcribe or retranscribe a session
Info: find more details about the session included date when it was captured, device used, and participant details
Share: download recordings, export session feeds, and create public links
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
Time Stamped 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 starting point and/or end point of the highlight 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. You can then combine these clips into a Highlight Reel.