This hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods, like the “burrito lunch” to help you make better data-driven design decisions. We’ll provide a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you’ve conducted your research.

We’ll provide hands-on demonstrations for how to conduct field research and interview participants. We’ll even provide participants, yes, real people, for you to interview during the session.

Persona put the user back into your user stories.

While we understand that our users are important we may lack language for talking about them. If you already know about persona you may find your approach for performing research and representing user data as a user persona to be time consuming and, what’s more, the persona you create simply aren’t being used. In this short tutorial you’ll learn to create simple relevant persona for your agile project, how to communicate them to the team, and how to use them generate valuable feature ideas, and design imperatives for your product.

This session will describe our experience in using the Scrum process of Software Development to create complex tools for use in animated movie production. Our process evolved out of the need to keep the task of UI design at least one sprint ahead of software development. Our products are designed for the creative in-house artists who use the tools for long hours over the course of movie production. We will also share ways to capture the complexity in the artists workflow and methods to break it down into reusable components both for graphical user interfaces and for software development.

Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the norm for helping IT departments deliver great software… but what about the business? What about the product manager? What about the software itself? What can we do to ensure that we build the RIGHT software with the RIGHT features… the features that will make us the MONEY!
This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure they are building the MONEY (honey.)

One of the toughest problems facing agile UX designers is keeping the big picture in mind while designing incrementally. This talk builds on prior work at Alias (now Autodesk) that described successful agile adaptations of usability testing, contextual inquiry and iterative prototyping.

I’ll present a framework we used to create and implement multi-sprint designs for a complex product without violating the agile taboo against big design.

In 2007 a large consumer electronics retailer faced significant business challenges. In pursuit of new modes of strategic flexibility and fast execution, the e-commerce division transformed its culture around Agile principles and the user experience team adapted its practices to the new paradigm. How would increased velocity affect the quality of the functionality produced? How would time-intensive activities like usability research be affected? This paper presents a case study describing successes and failures while integrating continuous research into Agile projects.

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.

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.