Big Design 2013 – Prototype Collaborate Innovate, Sketching UX
July 11, 2014 Category: Events 4 Comments »
Ok, I’m late.. like really late on posting this – so late, in fact, that the Big Design Conference 2014 is right around the corner! I realize that’s it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blog (sorry about that). A LOT has happened in the last year and I hope to post about some of those things in the near future. Until then, here at least is part of my attempt to play catch up.
Last year I spoke at the Big Design Conference. It was my 5th time speaking there. I continue to be impressed by the organizers and growth of this conference. The Big Design Conference is quickly becoming a “go to” international UX conference.
One of the highlights from me, is that I got to take my entire team to the pre-conference workshops. I attended the “Workshop Workshop” – basically the awesome Russ Unger was teaching facilitation techniques while also teaching some of the team exercises from his “Designing the Conversation” book. I’m always leery of trying to teach two different things at the same time, but Russ pulled this of beautifully.
I spoke on prototyping and collaborating, sharing some of the techniques that we were using at GetThere (I spent last year leading the UX product design team for GetThere). Here are the slides from my talk:
If you haven’t picked up Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book and the Innovation Games book you’ll get the meat that I had to leave out of my short talk.
Enjoy!
Workshop Agile + UX
November 12, 2011 Category: Events No Comments »
Big Design Week starts Monday, and we’re thrilled to announce that our own Caleb Jenkins has been asked to help present on Wednesday’s workshop! He’ll be digging in to the dicey topic of UX and Agile with Brian Sullivan and Jim Carlsen-Landy. We’re looking forward to hearing how these three present together. They all come at Agile and UX teams from slightly different angles. Jim has managed UX teams for a couple of years at a company that was an early adopter of agile practices, and Brian will be walking through hands on techniques to get scrappy with your UX research, design and deliverables.
Caleb will be focusing in on some of the misconceptions that exists between the agile and UX worlds and specifically how teams can scale Scrum with UX teams. It’s going to be awesome! Check out the full week’s schedule, and if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time to register.
See you there!
UX + Agile
May 13, 2011 Category: Blog No Comments »
Jared Spool published a great article yesterday titled “Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams”.
Jared talks briefly about proliferation of agile approaches in software design and user experience (UX) design and contrasts that to the Big Design Up Front approaches of the past, he then goes further in describing, not only User Stories, but several other layers of UX design and how each layer differs in scope and purpose from the other layers.
we frequently saw the successful teams talking about these other layers all through development. When a team member would produce a deliverable or design sketch that wasn’t quite matching the direction that the other team members imagined, the team would step back and talk about the other layers, trying to figure out where the disconnect came from. Because the team established the layers together, based on research they jointly conducted, they found it easy to collaborate on creating coherent experiences that regularly delighted their users.
It’s a great read, and I highly recommend heading over to the UIE site and reading the full article. You might also consider subscribing to the UIE podcast BrainSparks.
ch
If you’ve never heard Jared Spool speak live, he’s a great presenter and is always thought provoking and memorable, our chief mentor will be presenting at the same conference as Jared in July, The Big (D)esign Conference is July 14th – 16th – Hope to see you there!