Designing With Agile: Fast, Effective UX Methods That Work
A workshop with Anders Ramsay
May 8, 2012 • 9am-5pm
Agile represents a huge shift from waterfall and other traditional approaches to software development, and UX practitioners have realized they need to adapt their traditional methods accordingly.
In this intensive full-day workshop, you'll learn both how to be a successful UX practitioner within an Agile team, and how to improve your own UX methodology (even if you're not in an Agile environment) through Agile practices. After completing it, you'll have a crisp mental model of how the Agile project game is played and where UX fits in.
Workshop Outline
To fully understand and take advantage of Agile's power, you have to experience it first-hand. This workshop will simulate key points of a UX practitioner's journey through an Agile project. We'll divide into teams and work in mini-versions of Agile project environments. In our "team rooms," we'll work through project activities that both reveal Agile thinking and offer practical value when you return to your real-world work. Activities we'll tackle or discuss may include:
- Product Visioning
- Agile Personas
- Paired Interviews
- Design Studio
- Story Mapping
- Minimum Viable Product
- UX Planning Board
- Cross-functional Pairing
- User Fridays
- Getting to Done (and beyond)
We'll intersperse activities with group discussion, and conclude the day by conducting a Retrospective (an important Agile practice) during which participants reflect on the project journey and share insights.
What You'll Learn
- An improved understanding of Agile thinking and how to apply it to UX practice
- Role-playing experience working as a UX practitioner on an Agile team
- Practical advice for optimising your physical environment for Agile UX work
- Fast and effective UX methods you can start applying immediately in your project work
Who Should Attend
This workshop targets User Experience practitioners. It will also be valuable to product managers, visual designers, or anyone with experience designing software products who wants to integrate Agile methods into their work.
Anders has been practicing User Experience Design for over a decade for clients in the finance and entertainment industries, with such clients as Sony, Viacom, Turner Broadcasting, FOX, CBS, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity, and JP Morgan. He is also highly active in the UX community as an instructor, panelist and speaker, and as founder and organizer of the New York City IA Meetup, which has over 700 members.
Anders's writing background includes contributing to Boxes & Arrows and blogging about all things UX at www.andersramsay.com. Anders currently is a User Experience Design consultant in New York City, guiding organizations and design teams in how to more effectively apply Agile practices in their work.