Sessions at UX Australia 2011 on Wednesday 24th August

User-centered design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, which must be systematically and rigorously analysed in order to extract meaning and insight.

This workshop will introduce various methods of Synthesis as ways to translate research into meaningful insights. During Synthesis, designers visually explore large quantities of data in an effort to find and understand hidden relationships. These visualizations can then be used to communicate to other members of a design team, or can be used as platforms for the creation of generative sketching or model making. The action of diagramming is a way to actively produce knowledge and meaning.

Workshop participants will learn about how to manage the complexity of gathered data, and through hands-on exercises, will apply various synthesis methods to elicit hidden meaning in gathered data.

Does your team struggle with developing or prioritizing requirements? Do you have difficulty getting stakeholders to think beyond their organizational silos to consider the end-to-end user experience? Do you sometimes wonder how to connect the dots between your user research and the design in a persuasive way?

If so, scenarios may be just the tool for you. Like use cases and agile user stories, scenarios describe sequential interaction. Unlike those other tools, though, scenarios rely on the generative and persuasive power of storytelling, which is perhaps the most natural creation and communication medium there is.

Based on a deep understanding of what makes your “characters” tick, this workshop will show you how to develop compelling stories, then use those stories to drive requirements and design.

A repeat of http://lanyrd.com/2011/ux-austra...

User experience is full of stories: personas, task analysis, design scenarios and even usability test scenarios.

Do you have a good UX story waiting to be told? Storytelling taps our oldest way of communicating to give you fresh ways to:

• Collect and use rich details to make user research information come to life
• Explore a design idea to put it in context or show how it makes an emotional connection
• Help a product team really understand a cultural perspective or point of pain
• Create more realistic scenarios and tasks for usability evaluation
• Engage your audience, allowing them to imagine the ideas for themselves

The techniques of storytelling can help you explore user research or develop design ideas that make emotional connections to users. In this day-long workshop, Whitney Quesenbery, author of Storytelling for User Experience will lead you in a deep dive into all the ways you can put storytelling to work for you, and lots of hands-on practice. Come learn how to collect, create, and use stories to make your UX work richer.

So you’ve done ethnographic user research. You’ve also analysed log files. You’ve interviewed help desk and customer service folks. You’ve had a honkin’ meeting with stakeholders. And you’ve nailed a sense of the user, so you’ve got some great personas. You even held some design sketching sessions.

NOW what?

While many authors have codified the early phases of experience documentation, there’s a disjunct that often happens when business analysts write requirements documents or developers and product managers write user stories.

Despite the best personas and user/task grids and wireframes, other documents override the best UX intentions.

User experience work doesn’t end at the wireframe – it ends when the product is implemented. This workshop teaches you how to make sure your good work continues right through until the product is released.