Sessions at UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon 2011 with slides on Wednesday 11th May

UX teams of one have unique challenges. Fewer resources. Creative isolation. Organizational ignorance. Sometimes even hostility. This workshop will explore the real life organizational situations that teams of one work in, and show what you can do about them.

Teams of one arguably have the furthest reach and impact, precisely because they mostly work with people who don't yet know the value of user experience. But when UX teams of one are embattled, frustrated, territorial, and defensive, the discipline of UX seems that way too. And when UX teams of one are relevant and effective, confidence and interest in UX spreads.

The goal of this workshop is to give every attendee the tools to be relevant and effective by creating a personalized plan for their UX practice. Your plan will include the methods, soft skills, and strategies that will help you build support for UX and do your best work in a resource constrained environment.

We'll start the day by looking at what kind of team of one you are. A newcomer? A cross-over? A freelancer? While being a UX team of one can feel isolating at times, we actually have more in common than we think. Organizational models, team makeup, and product development approach all combine to create some fairly predictable challenges and opportunities. In this workshop we'll create a personalized assessment of which ones apply to you.

From there, this workshop will guide you in making an 18-month plan for your UX practice, and help you identify specific tactics and strategies to get you there. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner, this workshop will give you a game plan for doing more with less.

WHO IS THIS WORKSHOP FOR?

• User experience professionals working in-house embedded within marketing teams, development teams, etc.
• People with non-UX job titles who are crossing over—doing increasingly more UX work.
• UX freelancers and contractors who work with clients who don't have large UX teams.
• People who are interested in starting out in the field of user experience.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

By the end of this workshop, you will have learned:

• Challenges and Opportunities - A typology of situations that you might be facing as a UX team of one.
• Lean Methods - How to adapt the standard lineup of UX deliverables to be, self-documenting, lower fidelity, and more focused on answering concrete questions.
• Soft Skills - How to use negotiation, storytelling, networking, and listening to resolve conflict, communicate the value of your work, and build support for UX.
• Growth Paths - Common next steps that UX teams of one have taken in their career, and which one might eventually be right for you.

Spend half-a-day with author and designer Todd Zaki Warfel in this action-packed workshop. You'll walk away with a digital copy of Todd's latest book, Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide. Todd will present prototyping tips from the book and how to take advantage of the latest technique using HTML5 and CSS3.

You'll work your way through a series of case studies, as Todd reveals techniques that will help you craft flexible, bulletproof, effective and adaptable interfaces that make up a solid user experience. He'll show how to use tips from the book, combined with a number of guiding principles, like progressive reveal, predictable interactions and other ways to make your designs more elegant.

Stories are an effective way to collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research, spark design imagination and help make design ideas compelling. We all tell stories all the time, but to craft a story for a particular audience, for a particular reason and effect, requires some instruction and modeling, a reasonable amount of practice, and a lot of listening.

Storytelling might help you:

• Make user research data more compelling by adding the rich details of stories to your reports, personas and presentations.
• Put a design idea in context, showing how it makes an emotional connection or fills a need, exploring it from different perspectives.
• Help a product team really understand a point of pain, or show how a new approach could remove barriers.
• Sell an idea more effectively by engaging your listeners, allowing them to imagine the ideas for themselves.

Bring your own UX story material to develop safe atmosphere of constructive critique. You will learn the mechanics of oral and written presentation through instruction, modeling and practice. Exercises will let you try out different storytelling elements such as imagery, different story structures and telling stories in different contexts. You will experiment with structures and styles for different ways you might use stories in your work.

WHO IS THIS WORKSHOP FOR?

People who know they have a good UX story waiting to be told!

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

During this workshop you will:
- Understand why stories are a natural part of user experience work.
- Learn where stories fit into a UX process to add stories to your own user experience practice.
- Know the elements of a story – structure, plot, imagery, context - and how they can be used to craft better stories.
- Have practices telling a story in several different ways, exploring how to adapt it to different contexts.

Attendees will leave with a story crafting kit to use as inspiration for their next story (and the one after that).

As user experience designers, our ideas define us. But without the ability to share our thinking, to persuade, we can end up frustrated wondering why a client couldn't see what we saw. UX comes with particular challenges - when we're often working at a conceptual level - so our ability to communicate our ideas is particularly important.

WHO IS THIS FOR?
Anyone presenting work, whether that be to internal teams (visual design / developers) or clients (internal or external). It's intended to be particularly of use to junior/mid-weight user experience designers. It's not a 'presentation skills' talks, but instead looks specifically at how we communicate UX deliverables in a way that its intended audience can understand, communicate and contribute to.

WHAT WILL PEOPLE GET OUT OF THIS?
Practical advice that attendees can use straight away in presentations whether informal stand-ups or formal client presentations, and improve their UX deliverables.

WHAT WILL BE COVERED:

• Why we need to avoid the temptation of 'the big reveal'
• Building an strong, rational argument for our work
• Understanding who the 'real' audience is for our presentation
• Giving the client the tools they need to resell your work when you're not there
• What to show and how to show it
• How to make it real, personal and memorable

Why does my iPad calendar app look like a leather desk set from the 1940s?

We make new things look like old things because the old is familiar: it helps with usability, it makes us safer, and it's cute. Our mobile phones have replaced pads of paper and physical dials with touchscreens that have pictures of these things on them. Our digital cameras play a prerecorded shutter sound when we press the button because that's how our old cameras told us the picture was taken.

Their ability to both delight and confuse is profound - skeuomorphic touches will invariably get oohs and aahs at design reviews and from users. Yet in the quest for familiarity and nostalgia, these flourishes can perpetuate interfaces that only made sense given past technical limitations or, worse, suggest vintage mental models that are out of sync with the product's modern features.

Come listen to a light-hearted discussion about the what and the why of this increasingly common design pattern and how designers can leverage everything that's cute and rich about skeuomorphs without compromising mental models or a polished product.

Agile principles can be explained with just four words: We learn and adapt.

This is why agile development is a perfect match for good interaction design. It will make you able to respond to change and new insights during the development cycle - keeping your design up to date as user needs and market expectations change.

I've worked as an interaction designer on agile projects for five years. In that time I have tried and failed... and learned! Just as the agile principles state.

I will share how I, as an interaction designer, collaborate with the team, the product owner and other stakeholders. I'll show that it's possible to work on many aspects of the design details simultaneously, always keeping in mind the main concept and at the same time collaborate and communicate with the team members.

So you've formulated a User Experience strategy for your company from the ground up. Completion rates are way up. Complaint email numbers are way down. Your boss loves you, and you've got the corner office to prove it. What's next?

This session will take the next step and explore how User Experience fits into the business ecosystem alongside fields of Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management.

What tips can we learn from these fields, and how can we engage with our colleagues to pass on what we as UX professionals have learned from the web, to turn satisfied users into passionate customers.

In this talk Pedro will explain how the existing paradigms of search, category drill-down and social recommendation systems limit user's perceptions of existing data collections in a detrimental way. He will then propose a few strategies for introducing more serendipity and casual discovery into navigation systems, helping users find interesting content of which they were unaware.

In particular, he will present two case studies, one showing a serendipity engine whereby users remix keywords and filter content in a continuous contextual feedback loop, and another where the polysemy of images (they can have multiple meanings) creates the context for a way-finding application that enables high serendipity in the physical space. Pedro will finalise by suggesting a few other approaches.

As User Experience Architects we have to come up with solutions that reflect brand, psychology and other various aspect often in short time frames. We need to be able to communicate these ideas visually to communicate them effectively to our clients. The talk is based on some ideation sessions that we've been running here at LBi recently to get the team engaged in new topics to create visual solutions.

WHO IS THIS FOR?
Anyone sketching or wireframing solutions who is interested to see another approach for generating ideas. It's intended to be particularly of use to junior/mid-weight user experience designers who would like to explore other ways of approaching visual thinking. It's a quite a practical talk with a little exercise to show how it can be applied.

WHAT WILL PEOPLE GET OUT OF IT?
A practical approach how to use the cards, access to the cards set online and template to create their own.

WHAT WILL BE COVERED?

• Quick overview of the creative process and visual thinking
• Card topics exploration – which categories are there currently, which topics
• An approach how to use the cards to stimulate visual thinking
• A short exercise to show how it could work

This hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods to help you make better data-driven design decisions. We'll provide a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you've conducted your research.

Topics Covered:
- How to sell guerrilla research into a project from the start
- How to recruit better participants
- How to form better research questions
- What to do with your data once you have it
- A number of inexpensive, quick, but highly effective research methods when time and/or budget are limited
- Real-world case studies to show how guerrilla research methods provide measurable ROI
- Assessment methodology to determine which method is best for their project or situation
- Valuable "how-tos" to execute the research

Questions Answered:
- How do I get my boss or client to buy into doing research for my project?
- What is guerrilla research and how is it different than traditional market research?
- What are some guerrilla research methods and what kind of results can I expect?
- How do I pick the right method(s)?
- What's the downside/shortcoming of guerrilla research methods compared to other research methods?