Programme

Arrival and registration

Introduction to UX People by Nick Cochrane

Agile UX (How to do big design up front when you’re not allowed to do big design up front)

Agile’s bottom-up, get-it-started approach can help us make better products faster, but it does so in a way that’s hard to reconcile with the UX and design desire to approach products holistically. How can we get around the rule of “No Big Design Up Front” when design up front is at the core of what we do? Can we escape the tyranny of the sprint when design effort and development effort are so orthogonal?

We need to begin crafting our own tools, techniques and strategies for working in an Agile environment, just like developers, BAs and project managers before us. Plus we need to understand where we can find spaces in Agile that we can carve out for our own purposes. In this talk we’ll find a little space where we can push Agile to let us do some design, and a few ways to avoid being dragged off our feet when Agile pulls at us.
Presented by James O’Brien, Freelance UX Consultant

From Print to Pixel, a Journey to Mobile Design

Coming from a print background, John-Henry will touch on some of the lessons to be learned in mobile design from other areas of information design – handling of type, structure of content as well as a focus on understanding user and producer needs. Design always involves constraints, perceived requirements, opinions and cul-de-sacs. John-Henry will explore some of the decisions and debates which emerged while designing apps in the last few years.
Presented by John-Henry Barac, Shazam

The psychology of engagement and how to use it to deliver on your design goals

What is it about the structure of content and the design of an experience that keeps users engaged? This talk will consider a range of theories and practical approaches that help designers make their digital experiences more compelling through a better understanding of their user’s cognitive and decision-making processes. We will consider what motivates users to engage with an experience, how you can remove barriers so that you keep users engaged, and the underling patterns of how people perceive the information they are presented with.

Applications for these techniques include conversion rate optimisation for e-commerce, helping define design and content strategy and making your designs persuasive.
Presented by Mo Syed, Head of User Experience, 10CMS

Strategic User Experience

Really powerful User Experience comes only when the strategy and values of an organisation align with the design values of the user experience designer – unfortunately all too often these strategy and values are either undefined, unclear or misaligned.

While there’s no way UXers can come in with a silver bullet (or six) and resolve the situation, a greater appreciation of the strategic work done in other parts of the organisation and how they relate to user experience is invaluable.

In this session we’ll explore a framework for approaching User Experience in a more strategic way by working more broadly and cooperatively across the organisation, and we’ll also explore some tools and techniques that you’re probably not using right now but probably should be!
Presented by Leisa Reichelt Freelance UX Consultant

Workshops: session one

1. Teasing out Business and User Requirements in Workshops In an ideal world all projects would have time and budget for up front, one-to-one audience research. In reality sometimes all you get is an hour or so with a big group of people, all of whom have different needs and wants. In this workshop Julie will take participants through a number of different exercises to help them understand how they can tease requirements out of both internal and external audiences in group sessions. The session will be very hands-on and participants should come away with quite a few easy tricks to add to their repertoire.
   Run by Julie Dodd
2. Rapid Paper Prototyping or You Make Them Do It. Can You? We often find ourselves charging into workshopping – of all kinds – without giving proper pause for thought as to whom we’re asking to do what and why. In this workshop we will work through a rapid paper prototyping task as defined by you (the client). We’ll endeavour to mimic the pressures and time constraints we often put on our own clients when getting to grips with new techniques, generating ideas quickly and iteratively; and being expressive in front of one’s peers.Don’t worry, there will be cake.
   Run by Jonty Sharples, UX Consultant for Tobias & Tobias
3. Running a gamut of gambits: exploring behaviour change strategies and design When designers are trying to influence users’ behaviour, we inevitably do so with some model embodying assumptions about how users will behave and react to the way the product or service behaves. In practice, a product or service influencing a user’s behaviour can work best when the objectives of each side and the designer’s and user’s model of the system are compatible, so, it’s important to try to understand the models that users have of your system and design using strategies that match them. Inspired by Wizard of Oz testing and a stack of 1960s pop-psychology books, in this workshop we’ll explore, choose and try out a range of behaviour change strategies on each other. Playing either ‘devices’ or ‘users’, we’ll seek to influence each other’s behaviour—as ‘designers’, using the Design with Intent cards to select strategies to match what we know about the ‘users’, and then running the simulation to see how right we were, and what kind of extra information we need to find out. Are we going to try to match users’ thought processes, or change how they think?
   Run by Dan Lockton, Consultant, Requisite Variety; Research Assistant, Brunel University
4. Testing on a tiny budget: DIY research techniques to improve product design As UX people, we always want to build products that come from amazing inspiration, but shaped by the real world grounding of rigorous research and testing. And as UX people, we are always working up against tight deadlines, with a research budget that won’t stretch. Especially in an agile environment, there is an onus to test and rapidly iterate products without a great deal of lead time. In this practical workshop, you’ll learn techniques to get lo-fi rapid user testing done quickly on a lo-fi budget. By the end of the workshop, you will be leaving confident that you can run a guerrilla usability test in your office or on location.
   Run by Martin Belam, Guardian News & Media
   

Workshops: session two

Workshops from the 14:00 sessions are repeated.

Close and networking