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.

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.

In today’s Agile development environment, UI testing is still very much done the old way. We still see long scripts that are easily broken and impossible to maintain. By applying modern software development techniques like test first development, refactoring, and pair programming we can seek to make better tests that are less fragile and more likely to discover defects in code. In this session we will demonstrate the techniques listed above and discuss how they can be applied to UI testing. The demonstration will use a combination of fitnesse and SWAT (an open source web UI testing tool).