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.

Over the last several years, innovative UX practitioners working in agile environments have improvised and invented ways to include effective user experience practice inside agile projects. This short talk describes many common emergent agile-ux practices. Some of these practices are lighter weight versions of traditional techniques, while others are new inventions combining the best of UX rigor with a collaborative and pragmatic twist. As a participant, you’ll leave with a buffet of useful UX techniques to add to or adapt your agile process.

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.

When most people think of the phrase “Agile won’t work here” they think of resistance to adopting agile. There are teams and situations, however, that are truly challenging even to the most dedicated agile adherents. During this sharing experience, I plan to take you on a “cook’s tour” of a dozen or so teams that had difficulty adopting agile, even after the team was sold on the benefits. Filled with humorous stories, how these teams succeed (or failed) is an object lesson for us all.