The final — and main conference day — for UXLX saw 450 people from 32 different countries flock to the the Lisbon FIL centre to hear Don Norman, Christian Crumlish, Kristina Halvorson and more.

Beyond User Research: Building an organisational brain — Louis Rosenfeld

The first talk of the day really put a mark on the presentations that would follow. It was a talk about the elephant in the room in practically every design case I currently work on; big companies are usually chopped up in little departments and those departments do NOT communicate with each other. Lou held a strong plea that those departments should start working together in order to create a better user experience and outweigh your competition.

• Silos —Lou is a consultant in information architecture and visits lots of companies who need his help with getting their act together. Whenever he asks about search analytics, the voice of the user via the callcenter or usability research reports, most busineses have to ask three different departments about these things. There is nobody who connects theses “silos”, as Lou likes to call them. So if there is a Usability Research Silo and a Customer Support Silo, do you think they should be talking to each other? Or at least connect their findings in some way? Hell yes. And this is not only the case with research and analytics departments. Most of the time, the “brand strategy” is created in Silo A and the persona’s for the screen designs are written in Silo B. And these Silos also do not communicate with each other.
  These silos are missing out on the combinatorial effect: together they are better than the sum of both when viewed apart.
  So do we do with these silos? Well, let’s blow them up.
• Getting there — So how do we blow up these silos? First off, Lou tells us, you have to get out of yours. Visit some other Silos and find out what they know. Work together.

Lou concludes his talk with a few pointers you need to keep in mind when establishing a decision making organ. First off: blue sky it. Ask yourself, if you’re going to build a dicision making apparatus, what would it look like?

Next: Ban loaded terms and crutches from the discussion, like “omniture”, “user testing”, “market research” and so forth, because these words tend to take the discussion on roads your company has been walking on for too long.

And the bottom line: blow up the silos and put people together.
“Companies that integrate their silos of insight will outpace their competitors.

Playful Design/Design for Play  — Christian Crumlish

Play, like design, is both wonderful and available for multiple interpretations – something Christian Crumlish took full advantage of in his wide-ranging talk.

Starting off with the analogy of how print designers bemoaned the web’s lack of control, Crumlish suggests that we should be using the concept of play — its original meaning is ‘to dance’, which is apt as we should be thinking about allowing space. Play gives us masks, the chance to have an assumed identity, and the change to carry out re-imaginings (one entomologist is a dedicated participant in Civil War re-enactments to the point that he brings in era appropriate bugs to attack the troops!).

He gave a quick overview of what makes games work.

1. Starts with an invitation to begin
2. Boundaries [magic circle], what will happen
3. Rules are key — what is fair and what is not?
4. Goals — what is the end point you’re reaching out for? (Gamification is based largely on this)
5. Competition — we naturally compete, so that type of environment can help with play. But  it’s not only option — collaboration is also a important alternative (the board game Pandemic is a great example of this). The leaderboard can draw people to that and neglect experience — people also like to work together!

Moving on to playing in the musical design —he believes we  can turn our users into maestros, as an expert Illustrator user is much like a musician! — Crumlish provided a range of analogies (frameworks set up the rules, you need a bit of chaos for creativity, as in jazz). However, for me, his utterly inspired point was that of creating tunable experiences:

You don’t need to create a perfect experience, but instead one that’s tuneable.

A great example of it is Twitter—you keep tuning it to get what you want (more/less). Extending the metaphor that musical ensembles are about “getting in tune” (choosing what key), he suggested that we choose to “ensemble play” in the key of a certain hashtag.

And for those who know anything about Crumlish — he’s known as an avid amateur ukulele player — yes, he finished up the talk with a tune.

Critical Thinking for UX Designers – Stephen Anderson

After sun- and T-shaped thinkers Stephen Anderson decided that it was time to introduce a new type: Z-shaped thinkers. According to him these are people who think beyond the obvious, people that dare to turn the challenge around and take it a step further. “When everyone zigs, zag.” The point that Stephen wants to bring across is that it’s not about the tools, it’s about the thinking process itself.

When looking at existing examples Stephen mentions people like Negroponte who dared to embrace the limitations of creating a laptop for children that would at max cost $100. Instead of being blocked by the constraints he managed to turn it around and create a really interesting laptop. Another hero of Stephen is George Lucas. When he started with the Star Wars movies nobody knew how they had to make it, but George Lucas simply said that they had to aim for the result they wanted to have and would find a way to reach it. This way of thinking makes it possible for us as UX designers to really take challenges on and make a difference. But what’s the way to do this?

As an example Stephen gave the audience a simple task. First he asked everybody to “Design a vase.” When people did this he turned the challenge around and showed everybody how you should look at the challenge: “Design a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” This simple task really showed everyone what the right approach is. The question that follows this is whether or not a lot of designers ever get the room to rephrase a challenge like this… often the business has a clear description of what they want and it’s difficult to change things around. But that doesn’t mean we must avoid it. It means we need to understand the importance of it and should try and talk to the right people in the right language. And this is where Leisa Reichelt’s workshop on Strategic UX fits in perfectly.

Z-shaped thinkers…

• reframe the problem;
• explore many perspectives
• synthesize information
• embrace constraints
• challenge assumptions
• appreciate details

… in order to envision unseen opportunities.

Content Strategy — Kristina Halvorson

You know that world of junk that WAL-E lives in, picking up the odd interesting trinket? That’s the way content is these days on the web. Halvorson says that those odd trinkets are the occasional piece of good content she finds in her travels as a content strategist.

With that sobering metaphor in mind, she talked us through the realities of content and content strategy these days:

• The elephant in the room of any conversation is where the content for a site will come from and how it will be maintained. To make matters worse, web writers are normally brought in far too late into the picture.
• Content is not copywriting, The content goes into a messy ecosystem, and has a lifecycle.

So what is content strategy? He colleague Melissa Rach has the following definition:

Content strategy helps figure out how content will help you meet your business objectives

Halvorson sums Content strategy  up as plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. (Note, it’s a verb, not a noun). Or the below diagram:

She points out that while the field has been around for fifteen years, it’s only been recently that UX has started to pay attention to it, perhaps because it never seemed relevant. Even now she points out that UXers may think they don’t have do deal with workflow and governance. However, they do have to ask the right questions.

• Demonstrate — hold a mirror up to their pain. She showed an example of  history.com showing Valentines Day content on the 16th of February, and a paralysing data-dump of all categories.
• Recognize the life cycle of content — there are a whole lot of models as to the hoops content has to jump through, but it’s most important to understand which must be changed regularly, and by who.
• You need strategy and tactics. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”
• Quoting  some well known professionals goes a long way to supporting your arguments.
• Draw — pictures are good.
• Envision. Decide the picture you want to aim towards.

Discussing the conundrum of CMS’s (and their somewhat failed promise), she recommends the blog CMS Myth.

The Cross Channel Experience – Nick Finck

Ninety percent of businesses say the cross-channel experience is critical to their business success. Nick Fink talked to us about definitions, methods, tools and examples to help us create a seamless customer/user experience (he believes the names don’t matter as the goal is the same). We need to answer the question: “What is it that we need to do to (sell a bike/let people enjoy a conference)?” and create a seamless experience for our products and services.

Businesses and also UXers tend to think in channels, but customers don’t. They don’t think in the silos that businesses create and perceive one business through different channels or touchpoints. So it’s important to craft a coherent cross-channel experience.

But how can we do this? Of course we need to gather insights on how people use our products and services. We have to pay attention to detail and look for hacks: e.g. what do people add to a product to enhance the experience. And we need to follow the experience through to the last point and learn the business process behind it. Once you’ve gathered the insights you can create a customer journey map, an experience map or a service blueprint, all of which help you to visualize the cross channel experience.

Finck takes Netflix as a good example, because they have matched the different touch points in such a way that the system is pro-active: It knows when you’ve had a problem with its service and proactively compensates you for it. It informs you when it sends a movie or received one back from you and will allow you to engage with its services on any device (iPhone, iPad, TV, laptop, …) This is a sign that Netflix has aligned its stage and backend to serve their audience a seamless experience.

The question of businesses is: ” How do we do this?” We need a strategy.

• Break down silos;
• Different disciplines need to work together and co-create the experience;
• We need to have a unified vision of what we’re trying to do.

It’s great that Nick Finck talks about the experience beyond the screen, and the theme of breaking down silos is definitely a recurring theme at UXLX (see also Louis Rosenfeld’s talk). As UX’ers we have the skills and tools to help break down the walls, so let’s go out and do it.

Cage Match: Mobile web vs Native Apps — Josh Clark

Let’s get rrrrready to rrrrrrrumbleeeeee!

I was getting really excited when I heard the title of this talk (rescheduled from Jeff Veen because of illness).Josh’s presentation was really set up as a match— from the premise, right through to the imagery of each slide (each with some old skool wrestler, boxer or luchadore in a position that reflects the context). I always like guys who put something “extra”, some delighters, in their presentation.

The presentation is not backed up by statistics or real life examples, but consists of observations and temporary technical restraints that both contenders inhabit.

Josh shows the audience two different commercials. One for the iPhone 4 app “Facetime” in which we see smiling people sharing emotions with each other:

Then he shows us the commercial for the DroidX phone, in which astronauts find a strange device in space. Within this device they find a phone that kinda integrates with the astronauts arm and forms itself into an Android phone. Did I hear a nerdgasm?

The different cultures couldn’t be clearer —  iPhone is about emotion, Android features and technology. So making an app for iPhone or Android can be based on your marketing strategy or the way people would want to use the app.
Then there is the mobile web. “It’s webtastic. Everybody loves her”. That is because you only need to make one app and your done. You have an instant reach of everyone who owns an iPhone or Android phone (Josh briefly addresses Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, but they are irrelevant to the point).
So, if everything is a match, there has to be a winner, right? No.
There is no winner. Both contenders have their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s comparing apples to oranges.
But Josh has a very strong point of view that in order to be something in the world of mobile devices, you should at least have a mobile website. And on top of a mobile website you could, for example, create an app for your most precious customers; an app that provides them with something handy and unique.
Josh declares a winner that, in my opinion, is no contender in this match, but plays a whole different sport: the API. True, when you have a good API, building a mobile site and native apps is a breeze, but for me, this outcome was a bit disappointing, given the premise of the talk.

• Apps need an appstore, websites do not.
• Apps can make money pretty quickly, websites not so.
• Apps have great UX, websites not so.
• Apps have to be downloaded, websites work right away.
• Apps need to be updated manually, websites can be updates as much as you want without having to bug the user.
• Apps are about doing things, websites are about reference.
• Apps have great word-of-mouth, websites not so.
• Apps can speak with each other, websites not.
• Developing an app is a pain, building a website is not; in fact, prototyping a mobile website is a breeze.

So both have their advantages and weaknesses, no shocker there. But why not make an app that hold a frame which hold a mobile website? These Hybrid apps can work and you would have best of both world… right? Not exactly. The problem with an app is that is has to feel like an app. And an iPhone app feels differently from an Android app. So your mobile website must behave accordingly. Ofcourse this can be resolved by creating two mobile websites.

Ding ding ding! But we want a winner!

The Manual of Detection — Dario Buzzini

For his talk, Dario Buzzini used the detective novel “The Manual of Detection” as a guide to UX practice, backed up with examples from his work at IDEO.

Starting with the poetic (and somewhat provocative) statement: “We designers, we write stories not manuals, we design experiences not procedures, strive for beauty not truth”, he picked 11 quotes from the book that had relevance to UX.

1. On Shadowing — it’s not about being unremarkable but appearing as if you’re meant to be there (like a shadow)
   In relation to skills needed in a job — you need to have more than one in order to seem as if you should be there!
2. On Language — As an investigator, you need to know how to talk the right languages, objects have memory, too.
   Surgery situation — the nurse is touching the patient’s hand not only to comfort them, but also to measure anaesthetic. realised in surgery situation that the gadget for the nurse with stylus would eventually be used just with thumb!
3. On Leads — follow them, to let them go.
   Often your first idea may be the best, but it can’t be your only one. IDEO has a parking lot for ideas on their whiteboards, so that designers get their ideas out and move on.
4. On Documentation — most is for the wishing well, not a file .
   Buzzini stressed that should be actionable (echoing Dan Brown’s talk on documentation the day before).
5. On Nemeses — important to find your opposites.
   IDEO create partner teams for projects (apps etc) where both sit and work together. Can be difficult but helpful.
6. On Bluffing — If you’re caught in a lie, lie again.
   “Designers Lie. [laughter] Designers *sometimes* lie”. Sometimes your clients don’t need to know the truth so much as get a feel for an approximation. IDEO made a physical obstacle course for phone provider to show the hurdles customers had to go through to get a contract. The client got it. [Don Norman later commented that marketers lie and thus are successful. Designers are too honest for their own good!]
7. On interrogation—the process begins long before you are alone in a room together. By then, you should already know your answers.
   User research starts before talking — what people say is very different from what they do. Buzzini once interviewed a woman with limited dexterity who said that she had no problem opening pill jars. How she opened them? “I cut it open, how else would you do it?”
8. Cryptology — be careful what you dig up, it’s yours.
   Designers haven’t helped people with banking, making it hard for them to understand what happens with their money. Banksimple is using diagrams to help with that.
9. On Solutions — a good detective tries to know everything, a great one knows just enough to see him through to the end.
   In UX, this is about prototyping — you just have to choose and work smart. A good example for prototyping is Liveview App that lets you send a screencast to an iOS device
10. On Dream Detection — be careful to check whether what you’ve seen is real or a fallacy.
    Check exactly who it is you’re designing for.

Living With Complexity — Don Norman

In his keynote speech “Living With Complexity” (based on the book of the same name), Don Norman urged the audience to understand the difference between the complicated and complex, think about where the complexity is in any system, and to think signifiers, not affordances. Some of his findings were:

Another interesting tip he provided was to think about where the complexity occurs in a product system (aka Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity). For example, with coffee machines, in a manual it occurs with the user (making the coffee), a semi-automatic in the machine, a pod model in the packaging.

He finally echoed other speakers such as Halvorson with his reminder that it doesn’t matter if a design is bad unless it starts to affect sales.

——–

By the end of the day, most people had managed to collect most (if not all) of their UX Trump Cards (apparently Bill Buxton and Robert Hockman Jnr were particularly hard to find) and Mental Notes mini-sets. While the fabulous location was a given, UXLX excelled in running a tight ship — speakers were kept to time so the four rooms never got out of sync, a common problem with conferences — and a line up of quality speakers. It’d be great to see some more local/European speakers (a prime example was how Netflix — a service that isn’t available in Europe— was used as a case study several times), but given the diverse crowd, hopefully some will cross the line from participant to speaker next year.

With sun, sea, and a tropical 30 degrees C outside, no wonder people kept  saying that UXLX felt like a vacation. You might think it a pity to be indoors. Luckily day one of the conference kicked off with some cracker material that justified staying inside.

Storytelling for User Experience – Whitney Quesenbery

One of the first workshops of the day was kicked of by Whitney Quesenbery. In her workshop she tried to teach the audience the importance of telling stories during the design process, both to clients and team members. One of her main messages is that stories aren’t a broadcast transmission, but always create a connection between the audience and the storyteller:

• the storyteller shapes the story;
• the audience form an image;
• the storyteller and the audience affect each other;
• the most important relationship is between the audience and the story.

When a UX designer did research and shares his knowledge with the team stories can be a great way of doing this. When done right the storyteller retells the important parts of the stories the users told him, thus creating a connection between the design team and the user.

In order to become good storytellers we first must learn to become active listeners. We need to really be willing to hear the story people (users) are telling us and understand what’s it all about. Being an active listener means we have to encourage the story to be told further, by asking open questions and giving non-verbal feedback.

During the workshop Whitney actively involved the audience by giving several tasks. She focused on the following subjects:

• Story structure: structures give the story a shape and help the listeners/readers to understand it better. Is it a me-they-me structure, do you want to turn it into an adventure structure or should it be a contextual interlude? The way you set the story up can help engage people in the right way and lay focus on the right part of the story (like the product, the user or the process);
• Story context: context grounds the story in a specific place and time. You may want to emphasize (or change) the location, time, history or something else to help the listeners to understand it better.
• Purpose in UX: stories help drive UX work in several different ways. Do you want to share a success story and share what made this product so great or is the focus of your story to facilitate a brainstorm and do you want people to think in a different context?;
• Format of the story: there are many ways to tell a story, you can decide how. Is it written or drawn like a comic? Should it be a formal presentation or a light conversation starter?
• Imagery: imagery gives the story emotional resonance. By adding details about the sounds, smell or motion of the environment or a specific person you can pull the listeners into the world you are creating.

These tasks were closely linked to the book she wrote with Kevin Brooks called Storytelling the User Experience., so if you want to know more I would definitely check it out (also check out our excerpt). All in all it was a very interesting workshop with loads of stories. And as Whitney said: “what is design but a story?”

Become a UX Team of One – Leah Buley

UXers may know about being asked if you’re an innie or an outie, but if Leah Buley’s research catches on, you might also be a giraffe, bee, beaver, or penguin. Confused? They sum up the types of people that might be described as a UX Team of One. In her interactive and workshop with a lot of new material (such as I can’t find pictures of the gorgeous icons she used for each animal), she took the group through planning their futures, and thinking about ways to combat issues as the lone UXer.

However, her outstanding and memorable takeaway (including beautiful icons sadly not caught on camera but bound to end up on badges) was that of the four types of UX Teams of One. She sees them as a spectrum (most of us start at number one and move down), and classifies them as the following:

1. The Crossover (giraffe) has recently come over from another field. (Their long neck is from foresight).
   As their challenge relate to focus, access and skills, the strategies are to do with collaborating and DIY research. A key point to remember is that clients won’t allow for research do it should just be built in or ‘done on the sly’ (our podcast with Sam Lader on design research also talks about this).
   Some methods include using MAYAs Heuristic Markup, The Five Second Test, and competitor images (even getting the clients to collect them as homework!)
2. The Doer (a bee) is a knowledgeable person in a company without a UX department — they usually have to do things beside UX or move departments a lot. As they are held back by being brought on too late, or not valued, they need strategies to focus on professional relationships, visibility, and ROI.
   Some relevant methods included Liva Labate’s UX Health Checkup, product definition workshops (stakeholders repeatedly draw and disucss their product vision, as after a couple of rounds they’ll be far more aligned) and “Lunchtime UX” listening dates with other key team members.
3. The Builder (beaver) has been in UX for while on point of starting UX team.
   As their issues relate to relationship management and politics, the strategies are to align with business and build out a team. Methods included ongoing internal surveys, case studies and pre-meetings (1-to-1 reviews of docs with each key stakeholder before a key design review)
4. The Independent (lonely penguin): those that are freelance etc. Literal team of one
   They need to promote themselves, be legally savvy, and set their own terms (e.g. using a project brief). What’s more, they need to be known for something (as Leisa Reicht has blogged about).

Buley has been evangelising the UX Team of one for a few years now, but those who saw her talk a while ago (or looked at the slides) should definitely see it again as there is a whole lot of new information in preparation for her book-in-progress of the same name.

Skeuomorphs: The Good, The Bad, and the Silly – Andrew Watterson

Skeuomorphism is the act of using cues from the old to make new things feel more familiar. It has been applied for a very long time and can in our practice be a great way to introduce people to new technology and interactions. Some of the better known examples of skeuomorphs are the sound of digital cameras when you take a photo and the fake engine sound electrical cars make so that you can hear them approach.

When launching a product with a totally new way of interacting, like the iPad, you see that skeuomorphism can be an easy way to let people get used to the device. Watterson gives examples like the bookshelf in iBook and the old fashioned look of the contacts page. But at the same time he points out that there is still a lot of debate whether this approach is really the best way to go. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions for or againts, like our writer Rahul Sen is the recent article ‘The IxD Bauhaus: What Happens Next?’  I believe that there is a balance and that skeuomorphism can definitely be a good thing, but that we should always try to keep challenging ourself to also look at different ways of approaching the interactions. It’s just one way to reach what we want, but surely not always the only and best one.

Watterson’s conclusions regarding to this topic:

• Use skeuomorphs to add a satisfying and nostalgic emotional effect;
• Bridge gaps between what people are used to and a new method with skeuomorphs;
• Question whether you’re skipping the opportunity for innovation by using a skeuomorph;
• Don’t mismatch your functionality with a skeuomorph.

Picking your Neurosurgeon’s Brain— Susan Dybbs

For most of us, the closest we get to seeing what happens in an OR is through TV shows. However Susan Dybbs showed us not only what a surgeon sees when they’re carrying out telesurgery, but how we can use participatory design methods to understand highly expert and tacit processes.

Starting with Terry Winograd’s observation that designers have limited time to process things like how something feels like is in the tacit domain, Dybbs pointed out the issues that designers have when trying to create interfaces for highly expert systems such as telesurgery interfaces — the designer can’t get anywhere near the understanding that the users have of what happens and what is working. She resolved this by reating a toolkit of a mockup process with clipping (words, chunks of information, pictures of xrays etc) and then got surgeons to talk/make through their experience of surgery.

One of the most interesting insights from this method was being able to show the difference between what users say they need and what they actually use. In the case of surgeons, this might be documentation that is for legal reasons but never used in actual surgery, information they didn’t actually need (surgeons thought they needed to see the room view but actually didn’t) and vice versa (e.g. sideness — which side of the body you’re operating on, is a minor but key piece of information in helping a surgeon orient themselves with telesurgery).

Her tips for best practices:

• Create a toolkit (nothing is more scary than a blank piece of paper)!
• Do your research (sort original themes)
• Precondition your participants (e.g. photojournal, or just storytelling/pre-interviews)
• Keep it rough + impermanent
• Think aloud (helps show mental models)
• Be flexible (e.g. meet people at their comfort zone — help them make collage if they don’t want to do it).

Creating the Ultimate Experience: UX + CX + CRM — Stuart Cruickshank

Can you have a relationship with your oven? Stuart Cruickshank argued that you could. How? Through a combination of acronyms: UX, CX (customer experience) and CRM (customer resource management).

CRM has traditionally looked at strategy, business, and technology, but thanks to social media, a new branch of this known as Social CRM has emerged that also looks at engagement and conversation through empathy, emotion, authenticity, transparency. A great example of a company using social CRM is Zappos — their model means that their customers have a great experience and feel empowered, while the company gains advocates and profit (they have no marketing budget!)

On that oven? The Art Home Electrolux project attempts to do this (an exciting restaurant in Paris uses all Electrolux products, and the cook provides tips about cooking, meaning the customer could go home and cook what they got at the restaurant, as well as continuing the conversation through social media.

After a lot of conferences talking about service design, it was refreshing to have an alternate take on service systems UX could get involved with. As Cruickshank pointed out that the end of the talk, while CX and CRM have more visibility at the corporate level, at the end “experience is the goal”.

For those interested in the topic, he highly recommends Paul  Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light (4th Edition).

Effective Design Documentation Without a Fuss — Dan Brown

Despite the growing interest in living prototypes for UX, it looks as if design deliverables won’t be going away any time soon. Dan Brown (who we interviewed earlier this year) tried to trick the attendees into saying it might be or otherwise, but most UXers know to always say “it depends”!

What is design documentation? Brown defines them as “an artefact, defined by a team, to create a project, whose purpose is to move a project forward.”

He suggests that many designers forget to think about purpose and progress (at worst making some projects stand still), as above all, documentation should inspire action.

Brown breaks down design documents into different types: clarifying approach, justifying decisions, comparing multiple approaches. Each of these should be handled differently, just as your structure should change if you’re writing for a different audience (e.g. developers vs C-level).

He finished up with a look through the Eight Shapes Unify system he took part in creating. His rationale for the system is that most existing templates in Word etc are a waste of time as they force you to fill in blanks.

The best takeaway in regards to writing was to “be a journalist not a comedian” — in other words summarise first rather than having it at then end (common in comedy but in journalism known as burying the lead).

Designing by Doing: Bringing Agile Thinking to UX Practice – Anders Ramsay

Agile development is one of the hot topics in todays UX scene, so several talks at the conference today focused on this topic. In Anders Ramsay’s workshop he didn’t jump into the agile process itself, but used the approach of agile thinking and showed how we as designers can use it in our day to day practice. He did this by giving several tasks:

• Paired interviews: this method comes from paired programming, where two programmers sit behind one screen and together write the code. In paired interviews you let two users interview each other instead of you interviewing them one by one. According to Ramsay this is a great way of getting insights you would normally be unable to collect, since the users themselves know what to talk about and what is interesting to know. By letting them conduct the interviews and write down the interesting material you can collect great amounts of raw data in a short time;
• Agile personas: in agile development you don’t design all the details at once and you try to minimize the amount of documentation. The idea behind agile personas is to create very light-weight artifacts out of research data (like you collected through paired programming). By letting the entire team check the raw data and detect trends you are able to share with them important insights. When you after that write the agile personas (real name, main characteristics and quotes) you have a great starting point for your future discussions;
• Story flows: use some of the user stories you collected in your user research and prioritize them. After this you can start adding tasks to each story and prioritize these as well. Even when you are not doing scrum you can still use story flows to get a good overview of what you want to create and especially what’s the most important thing to do first.

Ramsay’s workshop was very engaging, although a bit chaotic. He was well able to show everybody the power of agile thinking, although there are still so many other things to agile thinking that would have been worth sharing… one of the aspects I find most interesting is the daily standup with the entire team, to get a good feeling of what the current progress is. You don’t need to scrum to have the benefits of this way of working together as a team.