Are you a developer or product manager working without a user experience specialist on your team? Would you like to learn how to quickly explore interaction design concepts? And guide your team in making good UX decisions? This hands-on workshop will teach you to use napkin sketches and whiteboard drawings to make real UX improvements. You’ll walk away with experience designing on-the-fly using personas, scenarios and a few ideation and sketching techniques. No special skills required - if you’ve ever doodled you can learn to design on-the-fly. Be prepared to have fun and participate.

Setting a clear and engaging vision is challenging and critical for successful projects, so we have evolved an approach that allows teams to articulate the vision by telling the story of a customer’s experience with your product.

We will show you how to map the journey, identifying areas for technology innovation and key features along the way that will help to create a product that people love to use.

Many people can find empathy with a character and their story. This helps in creating a compelling product vision and communicate benefits in order to secure funding.

Admit it. You’ve always wanted to know how people are actually using that product you spent so much time developing. That can be done more quickly than you’ve seen before and it can improve your product a lot. If we can include some UX activities into the kind of under-pressure operation that the Obama For America campaign ran, there is hope for any Agile project.

Anyone who’s seen a user trying to get to grips with their application knows what a humbling experience it can be. No matter your design experience there’s no substitute for testing with actual users. But the whole user testing process can seem daunting & costly in terms of time, effort & materials. Seeing this Jakob Nielsen proposed a lightweight approach, ‘Guerilla User Testing’, in the mid-nineties. It emphasized what could be done on limited resources by a team committed to providing a decent user experience. Marc & Luke share over 20 years of experience applying this type of technique.

Integrating customer feedback into an agile process is a challenge. Iterations are short, and finding time for research, design & development means making sacrifices. In this session we’ll talk about finding organizational allies who can become collaborators in customer feedback tasks, getting effective & timely results, & potential pitfalls. Enlisting your organization in these efforts builds a customer-centric culture and provides the team with critical input. Examples will be drawn from our experience at Viget Labs re-designing the international web presence of a global hotel chain.

Participate in a hands-on workshop, where you’ll learn how to use sketching and the design studio method for rapid design iteration. Find out how we’ve used methods borrowed from architecture and industrial design for faster better design. See how using the design studio method can help you generate several weeks worth of work in just one afternoon. Find out what the 6-8-5 method is.

But wait… there’s more.

Think paper is for making airplanes? Think again. We’ll show you how to do things with paper prototyping you never imagined, including AJAX-style transitions and simulations.

You’ve done user research. Now what? Join us for this hands-on session to learn how to interpret research data, prioritize findings, and create actionable design research items. Learn about the task analysis grid, how to create data-driven personas, and what the persona DNA model is.

Find out how to use actionable design research to inform your prototype. We’ll discuss 8 guiding principles that will help you avoid common mistakes made during prototyping. And finally, we’ll discuss a number of prototyping methods and give a number of tips and techniques for common prototyping tools.