This is the stage for agile team members passionate about creating products with a great user experience. Our goals are to:
In Agile development, the whole team must accept responsibility for the quality of the user experience.
Join a group of experienced Agile User Experience practitioners to iterate through possible web site designs to quickly find ones that best suit the customers needs. These designs will then be taken and iteratively refined and built during the rest of the conference. We're going to try to go from initial outline to new web site by the conference banquet! Mano a Mano have volunteered their web site to receive an extreme makeover during Agile 2010. Apply the skills you learn during the conference on a real world project - and help out a good cause!
| Presenter(s): | Bob Payne , Adrian Howard |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 09:00 - 12:30  |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere IV |
| Level: | Practicing |
Agile projects seem to start in a big rush. In trying to avoiding big design up front, teams miss the opportunity to imagine the great things their product could be. In this action-packed hands-on tutorial you'll learn a simple practice for collaboratively identifying great product UI ideas. You'll learn several different ways to envision your user's experience. Then armed with only a product backlog, pencil and paper, you'll go to work sketching product ideas. After synthesizing your team's ideas, you'll see the real power of ideation in helping great product ideas emerge quickly.
| Presenter(s): | Jeff Patton |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 13:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-1 |
| Level: | Introductory |
In this experience report I discuss the investigations I made into current attempts to address usability & user experience requirements within agile projects. I have conducted in-depth, one-to-one interviews involving 14 participants from 5 different countries. The data collected were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. These interviews covered a broad range of issues ranging from usability and UX goals, to incorporating user feedback in UI implementations within an agile team.
| Presenter(s): | Dina Mostafa , Richard Paige |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 11:00 - 11:30 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
This report will summarise experiences across a number of projects, customers and teams where there was a significant UCD aspect to the projects. It will explore where teams worked efficiently, not so efficiently or were down right dysfunctional. This will highlight each of the team’s key challenges, what made their approach successful or hi-light warnings for future projects. A common issue that each of these teams highlighted were extremities on the gap between UX and development collaboration and understanding.
| Presenter(s): | Matt Roadnight |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 11:30 - 12:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
We all tell stories—they are an easy way to communicate. Agile uses Stories as a core technique to explore needs and benefits for each unit of work. This workshop will look at complementary ways to use storytelling and stories to add depth to the team’s understanding of the rich context of user experience. These types of stories help you understand users, add perspective and context to personas, and explore early design ideas. This hands-on workshop will explore additional ways to use stories to keep the big picture in view.
| Presenter(s): | Whitney Quesenbery |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
There doesn't have to be tension between user experience methodologies and teams working to deliver fast, value-added iterations. Any agile team member can participate in delivering great user experiences without slowing work. Engaging the full agile team in keeping users central to their thinking is the best way to successfully incorporate emergent requirements and provide innovative and usable experiences. This active session illustrates how user-centric gains can be made with a few activities that activate user empathy and provide enhanced ability to provide deliverables for users’ needs.
| Presenter(s): | Samantha Starmer |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
One challenge of Agile development is to integrate UX work with the fast iterations of an Agile project. The User Feedback Two-Step is a best practice UX team members perform to juggle their work with developers and with end-users. Nimble players can be ready with designed and tested user interfaces when developers need them, and can implement user acceptance testing during iterations. We use a simulation game to give participants the experience of working in such a project—both as developers and as UX experts showing how to plan stories and schedule work into coherent iterations.
| Presenter(s): | Hugh Beyer |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
This presentation will cover the evolution of a centralized user experience research team as the engineering organization transitioned from waterfall to an agile development process. The experience report will discuss how a team of three user experience researchers was able to adapt to changes in the development process and how we were able to work with over 10 scrum teams to deliver usability results that impacted the teams’ product backlogs. Concrete examples will also be presented to illustrate how the UX research team was able to evolve with the rest of the engineering organization.
| Presenter(s): | Jennifer Padilla |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 11:00 - 11:30 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
We all know that testing designs with users is an important step in iterating toward a great product. But using traditional testing methods in a fast-moving agile environment falls short, as our UX team has discovered. To speed things up, we took advantage of resources our company already had - including support staff to recruit users, the customer relationship manager to track participants, and web conference tools to do remote testing. We'll share our failures, successes and challenges as we have modified our methods to be more in sync with our product owners and developers.
| Presenter(s): | Cindy McCracken , Skye Pazuchanics |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 11:30 - 12:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
You're a small agile dev team with a great idea and a tight budget. You've heard about user research, usability testing, etc., but haven't yet successfully integrated them into your workflow. Your attempts have challenged your budget, your assumptions, and the very agile practices that have served you so well. Don't stress. We’ll discuss some antipatterns that have emerged, exposing how we can get in our own way in our quest to develop great software. We’ll then share a range of core design practices and describe strategies for integrating them into a typical small team's agile workflow.
| Presenter(s): | Moses Hohman , Suzanne Thompson |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
Whether you're an "innie" or an "outie," we've all had _that_ project: The one where there's a lot of "must-dos" but no budget; The one where you have to scope and estimate without requirements; The one where you need to wear about 6 different hats while working on 3 different projects-and it's a project for a client you want to keep. In their talk, Michael and Joe will share their experiences managing business development, project management, design and execution, and post-mortems for sole UX practitioners. We'll laugh, we'll cry, we'll share our successes and, er, learning moments.
| Presenter(s): | Michael Carvin , Joe Sokohl |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
The gap between a good product and a great one can be bridged by understanding your users. In this session you will learn how better systems are built by taking small, iterative steps to understand the users desires, needs and abilities. You will learn how to get information about users quickly and cheaply. For those that have more time (and perhaps a small budget) Carol will introduce methods you can use to get more detailed information from your users. You will also learn ways to effectively share and communicate this information.
| Presenter(s): | Carol Smith |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
When integrating design teams within an Agile framework, the general practice is one of staggered sprints – keep the design team at least one sprint ahead of the dev team to ensure smooth transitions from sprint to sprint. Once put into practice however, the division of labor is never that clean. This presentation will cover how TheLadders.com product, technology and user experience teams successfully integrated an Agile framework into their process and evolved the “staggered sprints” concept into a more holistic approach to UX/Agile success.
| Presenter(s): | Jeff Gothelf |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Previously, I've written about [adapting usability investigation methods for agile](http://tiny.cc/agileUCD), and talked about keeping the [big picture in mind without Big Design](http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/2837). This talk is about how the UX team at Autodesk used agile methods to plan design. In other words, this talk will connect parallel track design as we practice it to our agile planning board.
| Presenter(s): | Desiree Sy |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
This session gives participants an additional tool to use in an early sprint for a product, a feature or set of features. Participants will use physical materials which are typically not thought of as part of the business setting - a.k.a. "junk." This session will be divided 4 segments: 1) Creating prototypes in small groups 2) Reflecting on the prototypes, their purpose(s) and the assumptions behind them 3) Revising prototypes based on the reflection 4) Finally, we'll summarize what we've learned, and how to incorporate this exercise or similar ones into the work of Agile teams.
| Presenter(s): | Nancy Frishberg |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | E-4 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Your Logo Here! |
Producer: Adrian Howard
Co-Producer: Darci Dutcher