Agile2017

Abstract:
Do you ever look at your Information Architecture (IA) after the first few weeks of a project? Unlikely. Typically, IA is helpful in the initial design of a project, but unfortunately, it quickly becomes unwieldy and difficult to maintain. A lightweight method to keep the IA up to date would help your team keep the strategic thinking that takes place at the beginning of a project, and use it throughout the entire project.
Enter the DoGo Map. The Do-Go Map is a lightweight IA tool that provides a high-level understanding of the information architecture for a web site, or even a mobile app, and can be easily incorporated into the everyday workflow of a development team - an Agile development team in particular.
This hands-on workshop will present a step-by-step introduction to building a DoGo map. (Cards, Post-Its, and Sharpies will be provided.) The guidance will help participants create a DoGo Map, work with users/stakeholders to evaluate the DoGo Map, and use the DoGo Map to support design decisions.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understanding the importance of Information Architecture and the value of keeping it current as a system evolves
• A useful method for creating and maintaining an IA throughout an Agile Project
• Understand how probabilistic modeling in the IA supports a great user experience

Attachments:

• DoGoMap.pdf

Abstract:
Some people have the misconception that design is just creating ‘pretty pictures’. This is not the case; there is a science to creating the right ‘pretty picture’. Companies need to immerse design across their entire organisation to avoid becoming yesterday’s news. This session will delve deeper into the practical User Experience skills that will aid any member of a development team and will ensure the product you are building is ‘on brand’ and ‘user-centric’.

• Business Analysts and Quality Analysts will benefit from understanding the finer details of design.
• Developers will gain empathy for design and a better understanding of how to display content.
• Quality Analysts will leave knowing how to quickly notice problems with a design before release.

In this talk, you will learn how to ensure the product you are building is ‘on brand’ and ‘user-centric’, and why this is important to ensure the success of your product.

Learning Outcomes:

• • Design is not the sole responsibility of the designer, it's a team effort.
• • Different ways to prototype
• • How to gain empathy and get into the minds of your customers
• • Understanding some of the finer details of design
• • How to create delightful experiences for users

Attachments:

• Design isn't the designers responsibility 75 mins FINAL.pdf

Abstract:
There are two common problems that lead to bad software: the project team isn’t aligned on a problem and the customer isn’t involved in the design process.
You end up with a product that the business didn’t ask for, the tech team struggles to deliver and customers don’t want. How do you increase confidence in the direction of your product and work together to build innovative solutions that bring the business, technology, and customers together?
Design by Discovery is a process to understand business goals and customer needs. It isn’t about designing screens or coming up with a final solution. Rather, it’s an efficient way for a project team to gain a shared understanding, explore ideas, and develop a design direction.
You’ll walk away from this session informed, energized, and prepared to apply this knowledge on your projects.
With 37 years of combined experience, Matt & Garren have designed software and services for clients ranging from Fortune 50’s to startups to small businesses. They co-founded Artifact in 2011 and believe one of the secrets to success is to not take themselves too seriously.

Learning Outcomes:

• What is Design by Discovery?
• Why is Design by Discovery important?
• Who owns the discovery process?
• How do you understand which problem to solve?
• How can you better understand your users?
• What are effective and efficient techniques to use?
• How does Design by Discovery fit into Agile?

Abstract:
Introducing User Experience (UX) into your agile development lifecycle does not have to be a zero-sum game. User experience strategies, approaches and methods do complement the agile methodology. Being able to apply these strategies across throughout the project lifecycle will invariably lead to better, more effective products for end users.
This session will help connect the dots between User Experience and agile principles through real world practical examples. We will focus on key UX strategies like who can get involved in user research and when, how to apply human centered design to the process, and rapidly prototyping ideas in order to validate key decisions with users and stakeholders. The session will not be a one size fits all approach to injecting UX into your agile teams, but focus on ways to help inform your design which will inevitably evolve over multiple sprint cycles.
This session targets project teams that are interested in including UX design principles into their agile projects. From initial user research through the prototyping and measuring of the outcomes.

Learning Outcomes:

• • Introduce how UX fits within their current agile product development lifecycle
• • Gain a better understanding of how to apply the key aspects of human centered design as it applies within the agile process (i.e. if you are always iterating and discovering, how do you actually deliver a product)
• • Share examples of how iterative prototypes and subsequent feedback loops improve the overall product user experience
• • Better understanding that UX is the responsibility of everyone on the team
• • Understanding some of the challenges of working UX into an agile approach and ways around them
• • Highlight the differences and benefits of agile and UX vs lean UX

Abstract:
Are you struggling to integrate User Experience techniques with your agile teams? Are any of these patterns familiar?
The UX team works one sprint ahead of the development team.
UX designers spend lots of energy on high fidelity mock-ups which the developers then ignore.
You produce working software each sprint, but recruiting users is time consuming so you only test with users before you release.
There is no time to incorporate changes from user feedback into the sprints before release.
The UX designers and the developers seem to speak a different language.
Developers get annoyed because the UX design work great on iOS, but clashes with Android standards.
If so join us for a fun interactive session where we use Lego to explore how you can overcome challenges like this in your own environment. You’ll work as a team doing both UX design, and development (with Lego), and see how and why these patterns happen, as well as what you can do about them.
This workshop is ideal for people from both the UX world, struggling to understand how to work with developers, and for developers struggling to understand what UX designers are trying to achieve.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the difference between traditional UX, agile UX and lean UX.
• Recognize some of the common patterns that occur when teams integrate agile and UX
• Experience why UX designers and developers often end up in these patterns
• Learn how your entire team can be involved in UX
• Learn simple techniques that will immediately improve the way you handle user feedback
• Know the importance of UX and development skills being in the same cross functional team

Attachments:

• AgileUX-Agile2017.pdf

Abstract:
As User Experience continues to grow in importance as customers demand ever-more excellence from the products we create, the divide between UX teams and development teams often grows, too. How do we collaborate effectively on new products and features without carrying stories out and over sprint to sprint?
Believe it or not, we need to design more up front - BUT at the program level scale and above - if we want to be able to complete user stories (including UX) in ONE sprint. In this session, Natalie examines where the look-ahead UX Runway (that is, UX tracking ahead one sprint before development on stories) started, where it is now, and where it should pivot in the future. By re-examining Big Design Up Front (BDUF) concepts, mindful user research and customer acquisition costs, balanced with set-based design and advanced design guide tools, a surprising amount of uncertainty can be mitigated before getting to the release and sprint planning stages. This also addresses multi-team swarming on features, which isn’t served well by the one-sprint ahead approach that is currently being utilized.
As the cone of uncertainty narrows and delayed decisions are made collaboratively, designs can come into their own earlier than the sprint before development. This gives teams and programs a better look into what they will be building with less delay, and UX professionals a chance to look at the product or feature cohesively before breaking it into smaller stories and sequencing the delivery plan with far less uncertainty and a greater emphasis on scaling product and customer needs. It’s the next iteration of scaling the UX Runway.

Learning Outcomes:

• -Balance between big design up front and pre-development designs
• -Incorporate user research and set-based design at the program level to improve experience and collaborative release planning
• -Understand what has been tried with agile UX and how to extricate the concepts that work in unique product situations for feature and story level planning and design
• -Stop seeing development and UX as separate entities that work on separate sprints

Attachments:

• UXAGILE2017.pdf

Abstract:
Let’s face it. We are problem solvers. Our IT organizations excel at identifying and deploying solutions. But why are we still witnessing waste and inefficiency even with highly agile delivery teams? Part of the challenge lies at the front-end of the value stream, in clearly defining the problem, identifying desired outcomes and remaining flexible enough to incorporate feedback as the team adapts.
It is necessary that teams have the right skills to assess and balance trade-offs between technology solutions and the needs of the end user and to prioritize feedback. Product Development organizations typically possess these skills, often associated with product management and product ownership, however, IT organizations may lack them. An option to fill this gap is to include people with skills from the fields of User Experience, Service Design, Human-Centered Design and/or Design Thinking.
Why? Because the best UX thinkers are system thinkers who can research and articulate user needs within the context of complex tasks and ecosystems, down to the granularity of the usability of a single mobile interaction. Many UX practitioners are borrowing from Service Design to present journey maps highlighting business opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. UX is also borrowing from Design Thinking to guide ideation exploring multiple solutions.
IT teams that incorporate UX thinkers early in the value stream are more effective at assessing and prioritizing feedback which helps bring alignment across stakeholders, users, and the project team. This alignment brings efficiency and cohesion to IT projects, greatly increasing the chances of project success.

Learning Outcomes:

• Review principles of a mature UX process and be able to articulate how UX can contribute to developing a stronger project foundation
• Gain familiarity with Service Design and Design Thinking
• Have a new lens through which to plan future projects

Attachments:

• agile2017-UX-ServiceDesign.pdf

Abstract:
Often as technologists we are carried away by the various ways of problem solving, that we forget about the presentation of the solution to the required people, in an accessible way.
It is easy to overlook the fact that even the best application cannot deliver value if its inaccessible to the users.
This talk will:
1. Define accessibility and analyse its importance
2. Determine various people who need to use the applications we build
3. Evaluate what a truly accessible application means
4. Describe how to build a really accessible application

5. Highlight various tools to measure accessibility
6. Evaluate some best practices to increase accessibility
7. Emphasise the intention of accessibility as opposed to crossing a threshold set by a tool

Learning Outcomes:

• At the end of this session, each participant is able to:
• Understand accessibility and why it is necessary
• Evaluate ways to encourage accessibility while building applications
• Assess ways to encourage all the members of a team to think about accessibility while building all the parts of an application

Abstract:
Sometimes great people can do great work, and it just doesn’t have much effect on the organization.
This was the case at Redgate Software two years ago, when UX and product management were the Keepers of the Customer. Since then, we've switched to a model where product development teams themselves are responsible for the research that powers their decisions. Not only has this improved developer engagement, it's also delivered for the business through products that are much better aligned with users’ needs.
We haven’t stopped there, though, because the whole business needs to rally around that shared insight. Other organisations have used personas to great effect, but we have found it more effective to bring the actual experiences of our users (and non-users) to the discussions.
This talk will explore the challenges of bringing customers’ experience into everyday decision-making, including making the time and space to learn. We’ll talk about some overall strategies that have worked for us and some that didn’t!
In particular, we'll go through examples of:
4 proven approaches to help whole teams really engage
4 ways to ensure customer knowledge flows through to business stakeholders
You will leave this session with a bundle of ideas how to make your customer research really deliver.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand a model of change to embed the users at the heart of products and services
• Identify the time and skills challenges that prevent the ‘right’ people from doing research
• Get fresh ideas for supporting teams in taking on customer research
• Gain tools for working out how to maximise business benefit of customer contact

Attachments:

• Agile2017 - UXImpact - Elizabeth Ayer.pdf

Abstract:
Have you ever wondered what the best way to kick off a new project? Are you a product manager, designer, or team lead that has to wrangle multiple stakeholders and form a cohesive project plan? In this hands-on workshop you will learn how to collaboratively map and analyze a customer journey, and then turn it into an actionable backlog for your next (or current!) product. David Hendee, the Director of Design at Carbon Five, one of the world's leading software development & design firms, will facilitate this workshop based on more than 8 years coaching this exercise for more than 50 clients.

Learning Outcomes:

• Collaboratively creating an experience map
• Identifying pain points and ideating solutions
• Performing a funnel cross-check
• Transforming an experience map into a story map
• Creating an Agile milestone plan with design stories

Attachments:

• experience-mapping.pdf