Advancing the state of the art @Agile2012

December 10th, 2011 Posted in agile, Design thinking, Education, events, Experience design, UX

Interested in defining the future of UX?

Adrian Howard (@adrianh) & I, Eewei Chen (@ultraman), invite you to submit sessions to the User Experience Stage of the Agile 2012 conference (Dallas, Texas, Aug 13-17 2012). The 2012 conference theme is “advancing the state of the art“.

User Experience practices have always helped agile teams discover, build and deliver the right product: putting the customer at the heart of every decision. The User Experience Stage at Agile 2012 is for anybody passionate about building products that truly delight their customers.

We are especially keen to demonstrate some of the ways Agile and User Experience practices are being combined in the Lean Startup and Lean UX communities: driving the iterative discovery and development of new products in new and exciting ways.

Questions this stage will attempt to answer:

What is the future role of UX?
How do you discover what users really want?
How can you better iterative to discover new product ideas?
How can generative user research be integrated with agile projects?
How can an agile team sustain a long-term product vision?
How do UX practices help agile teams build better products?
How do you put practical UX skills into the hands of the whole team?
How do you deal with the challenges of UX work on your agile team?
What are UX practitioners doing to enhance real world agile projects?

The stage aims to bring together practical and theoretical sessions from the best practitioners in the field. We want to see and hear about ways UX is evolving and improving to create awesome customer experiences. Please submit a session if you feel you have something important to share. And please, don’t hold back!

How do I submit a session proposal?

To submit sessions and find out more about speaker compensation, please visit:

http://agile2012.agilealliance.org/for-speakers/

NOTE: Please submit all UX related sessions to the User Experience Stage.

To encourage early submissions there are two submission rounds:
* January 15, 2012 – Early-bird submissions deadline
* Febuary 19, 2012 – Final submissions deadline

The earlier you submit, the more potential feedback you will get from our review team – helping you improve your proposal and making it much more likely to be accepted!

Anything you want to see or hear about specifically?

Don’t hesitate to let us know what you also want to see on the User Experience stage. Is there a tutorial you would like to see or a subject you would like to hear discussed? Is there someone from the agile or user experience world you would like us to invite? If you have a topic or presenter in mind, please let us know.

Thank you for your interest. We’re looking forward to meeting you in Dallas next August.

Sincerely,

Adrian Howard (@adrianh) & Eewei Chen (@ultraman), Agile 2012 – User Experience Stage producers

agile, design, eewei chen, lean, lean start up, start up, user experience, ux

Good design is…

November 12th, 2011 Posted in creativity, Design thinking, Education, Experience design, happiness, innovation, simplicity, usefulness, UX

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Dieter Rams’ 10 design commandments:

Good design is innovative

Good design is useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is consistent down to the last detail

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign

braun, design, dieter rams, eewei, eewei chen, happiness, innovation, user experience, vitsoe

Future of Web Apps is now

October 25th, 2011 Posted in creativity, Design Jam, Design thinking, events, Experience design, presentation, Start up

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Great people, great sessions. I was privileged enough to have been accepted to run a workshop at the most recent Future of Web Apps conference in London.

How to Build a Web App Fast

Eewei Chen, BSkyB & Jill Irving, ThoughtWorks

This workshop allows you to experiment with rapid design and coding techniques to help you deliver an idea for a first prototype in less than 8 hours. Teams will be issued a surprise challenge and have the duration of the workshop to create a web app that will delight users and answer the challenge!

What participants learned:

How to think creatively and generate ideas that really matter
Learn how and when to focus those ideas and tie it back to real business and end-user goals
Know when to create prototypes and concept usability test at key stages of a project
Understand the key development challenges and learn valuable tips to help you work faster
Create a minimum viable delightful solution and get it out to market fast!

The future of web apps highlighted to me the fact that there are some very good practitioners already creating some amazing apps using the very latest techniques and software. Some of my favourites included: