6 up 1 up exercise
In Part 1, I talked about the motivation behind the “Problem Solving with agile UX” session at the recent LAST (Lean, Agile, and Systems Thinking) conference. Here, I’ll describe what happened on the day.
Back in May, Pete Grierson, a User Experience consultant at realestate.com.au, agreed to present at a meeting of the Melbourne Agile and Scrum Meetup Group. He’s got solid experience at realestate, and in previous roles with agile UX, so I was pleased that he agreed to present that night. Here’s my writeup of that event.
Originally, one of the options for that meetup, was to have a workshop section. However, the number of people, the size of the venue, and time limitations, meant that it wasn’t practical to do this. Instead, I decided to team up with Pete at LAST conference, and it was great to have a full house for our session.
You can see Pete’s slides used to support the workshop, in the Slideshare deck, below. As I wanted to avoid “death by Powerpoint”, at all costs, most of the time was spent doing a series of exercises, rather than dwelling on the slides.
We also had a video camera setup in the room, and if the video turns out any good, I’ll link to it here.
The session and the exercises had the goals of:
- demonstrating how UX practices can increase shared understanding by supporting user stories and user story backlogs.
- showing that UX can be a valuable weapon in your armoury; helping a team build something that is really useful, and valuable to a customer.
- demonstrating that it’s most valuable to have the whole team involved in UX style activities, in order to collect latent knowledge about the issues, goals, and possible solutions. It’s not just the job of a UX person, all team members (product owners, business analysts, developers, testers), can and should be involved.
- Showing that it need not take huge amounts of time to include UX practices in agile projects.
August 9th, 2012
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