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.

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.

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.

Agile methods are frequently associated with iterations, incremental development, and adding one thin slice of functionality at a time. We have mantras such as YAGNI and “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.” We promote refactoring. These concepts are, however, harder to apply to UI-intensive application code than faceless back end systems. In this tutorial, we will incorporate ideas from user-centered design, discussing how we approach user-facing agile application development at Reaktor through a mixture of presentations and hands-on exercise.

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.

Developers on an Agile project depend on fast, accurate user feedback to guarantee that you are solving the user’s problem. But often Agile projects have to operate without real, current customers on the team and need to build up the design and research skills to get good user feedback.

This session is for anyone who has the job of getting user feedback. We’ll teach best-practice techniques for working with users in the situations that matter to an Agile team: understanding customer needs, getting feedback on design concepts and testing baselevels, and we’ll practice key skills.

Success in adopting an Agile culture depends on the team’s ability to adapt, while establishing common objectives/principles across the team. This case-study observes this theme via the lens of a project team at Liquidnet. The project’s concept was actually originated by the UX team. Eventually, with an interdisciplinary team of 30, the vision became a reality. It wasn’t until a major change in scope occurred when Liquidnet decided to bring an agile coach to facilitate process change. This experience report documents the team’s experience integrating the Agile culture into their very own.

As the internet proliferates beyond the PC to myriad devices - from iPhone to smart-phone - anyone delivering digital products deals with complexity: varying form factors, cultural differences and contexts of use. In this workshop we explore the implications of this complexity, discover through collaborative experience where the pain points lie, and identify strategies for dealing with them. We conclude that the unique challenges faced in the design and development of mobile applications benefit from agile software development and its ability to cope with such complexity.