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.

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.

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.