UXcamp Europe 2015 - Day 2/Part 1: Scrum Self Help, VizWars and Shift Happens

Sunday Session Plan

After a great 1st day of UXcamp Europe - the second day again offered a lot of interesting session. Overall at the UXcamp Europe 74 sessions were proposed.

#1 Scrum Self Help - Tobias Ehni

Tobias started a session where he wanted to have some exchange about our problems and solutions regarding Scrum & UX.

Here some notes from the discussion:
- Being PO  & ScrumMaster at the same time is not a good idea
- UX experts working upfront are using Kanban Boards
- UX and PO can work hand in hand - both have to prepare upfront the Sprint.
- UX: not a finished concept is prepaired at the beginning of the project - it should be defined "far enough" for the next sprint.
- Ratio Dev/UX: 2:600 from 3:5… every project needs experts participating. If there are too less UX people, somebody else will do the job, like a developer.
- UX needs to part of the team and the whole team agrees on setting stories to done.
- "Green dot": The UX team had to agree at the end that the story is done (during the sprint).
- QA Engineer also can take care that the UX goals and requiements are fullfilled.
- UX also should fall in love building not perfect but working products and do continuous improvements - like the Developers are doing.

#2 VizWars - May the force of visualization be with you! - Tanja Cappell 

Tanja (@FrauHoelle) talked about why using paper and pencil are important and how to sketchnotes. Of course because this was a workshop about Sketchnotes... here's mine:

#3 Shift Happens - From product-centric to customer-centric in 12 months - Lara & Christina

In this talk Lara and Christina (from iversity) talked about how the changed their company culture towards user friendlyness. Iversity is live since October 2013 and is a plattform for online courses of higher education.

The following methods & steps they took in the last months in order to improve:

• Company Breakout: Building our army - "Therapy" for the company to build up a "real" team
  They facilitated two workshops:
  - Every departement was able to give feedback on other departments
  - Customer Journey workshop: Cross department teams and it was important to exchange the idea of the product.
• Guerilla Testing: Let experience, don't tell.
  Guerilla Testing was done with people from the company.
  It was important for the team, because they found out that it doesn't hurt to get feedback.
  Take Away: Don't talk about your great methods, the team should experience them.

Customer Journeys

• Customer Journeys: Using a customer journey it is easier to experience how the customer will feel using the system.
• Company Strategy: Adding top down to bottom up. While supporting improving the Pitch Deck they got closer to the CEO.
• Course Design: Creating new business opportunities
  They used paper prototyping and even role playing for designing the course.
  Now there are also supporting the universities in designing their courses
• Business Design: Building alliances
  Because of there visible work they were asked for other consulting jobs in their company.
• Organisation Design: Embracing crisis
  They were asked to make a organizational chart and helping restructuring the company: removed hierarchy, no departments anymore, only teams

Looking foward to an interesting afternoon.