UXcamp Europe 2015 - Day 2/Part 2: Conditio Humana (Why UX in real world sucks & agility stinks & some war stories) & Panel Discussion

Here are my notes from the final two sessions I participated at the UXcamp Europe 2015...
(Previous posts of the UXcamp Europe: Day 1/1, Day 1/2, Day 2/1)

#4 Conditio Humana: Why UX in real world sucks & agility stinks & some war stories - Jevgeni & Uli 

Conditio Humana is a philosophy term.

The Human Condition: We are born. We have to die. End of story. Everybody has to master the transition and they try their best.

BUT the limited perspective is leading to some limited results.

Have you heard of the peter principle? 
.... read about the peter principle.

Advertising & UX contradict each other.
"Let's make a website where people can..."
NOBODY - no user in the real world - ever will to that. Ever. Seriously

UX dies a slow death in advertising
- UX = Ease the pain
- Advertising = Increase the pain. ("Make the logo bigger.")
What is good for the user is bad for the brand.

"We've been working on our brand guidelines for 1 year, but we don't have something yet. Please use the version from 1996." (real quote from telecommunication company)

Why scrum does not work for big companies
General Show Stoppers in bsuiness: Procurement (they want to now upfront the costs in detail) & Legal

Show stoppers in doing:
- Daily business in departments, internal trainings, holiday situations
- Project vs. Operations
- Gap of reponsibility
- Agility in Strategy? Art? Creative Direction?
- Processes take time. Rework takes time. Time is money.

Who has participated in a daily standup taking longer than 1 hour?

"We don't have a product owner." (real quote from insurance company)

What can you do?
- Don't be afraid to fail. That's part of the process.
- Know when you screw up. It's a gut feeling. Act on it.
- Play. Have fun. You can see people smile in the results.
- Build a bridge you can be proud of. At least make some stories.

My conclusion: The scrum implemented in the large organizations was only bullshit-word-dropping, because Scrum with 400 people can't work - and it's not scrum.

... The conclusion: Isolate - Plan - Focus

#5 Panel Discussion

Panel discussion by a failed industrial designer, a failed frontend web developer, a failed project manager, a failed philosopher and a not-failed stage director :-)

Panel Discussion

Discussion on Apple Watch
"I have one so that I get to know the experience."
"I'm still searching for a use case."
"Probably sports is the main use case."
"The main use case of a watch is displaying the time."

Best Sessions/Topics
- Scrum Self Help
- "UX is still not appreciated how we want to have it."
- "The value of UX is there and we should try small steps to move the organisation." (referring to the talk by iversity)
- "We should not sell it, the results will sell itself."
- "A lot of eye opener discussion took place: like context ux, panel with women, education panel, ..."
- "Data collection is changing: is not only about collecting data, but it's about high quality data. But the analysis is done now very quick and dirty - I'm not sure if this is good or bad."
- "Visual User Research - Tools are very useful and easy to use."

The panel discussion closed with thoughts about how the UXcamp can improve... but many agreed that the conference is already at a high level and they should continue focusing on the Barcamp-Way of Conference.

Last but not least I also want to thank the organizational team for there perfect work and there huge engagement that was visible all over the conference.

See you soon :-)

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.

Agile UX - Still some challenges, but I love it

Wintery Sprint Burndown :-)

I'm working in a company where agile was implemented several years ago - for me personally I work in agile projects since 2007. I'm a big fan of agile methodologies and I think it is the best process for the kind of software we are working on. I like the close collaboration between the various roles in one team and the early feedback from the customer.

Still I think there is a challenge for implementing UX in an agile process. For me personally the biggest challenge is the continues change of the UI and the interactions. Because additional functionalities are developed over a long period of time it's sometimes hard to integrate new functionalities in an optimal way. Often a UI "refactoring" would be necessary but the costs are at the moment very high and it's hard to convince oneself and the team that THIS bigger change is neccessary NOW.

In the last weeks and months I found the following interesting sources for Agile & UX:

• UserZoom published a free e-book "The Essential Guide to Integrating User Experience and Usability Testing in Agile" (registration neccessary): Nice overview of agile methods and some concrete suggestions like "A good rule of thumb is a 1:4 ratio of designers to developers. Also be sure to allocate project budget to user research and usability evaluation, ideally 10% of budget is a good target if possible."
• Lean UX - a great book by Jeff Gothelf
• One year ago Hoa Loranger of the Nielsen Norman Group published an article about "Doing UX in an agile world" with some interesting findings of case studies and a nice summary of the topic and the main challenges.

Links - "Best of": User Experience cannot be designed, Lean UX & More, better, faster UX design

Hi,

today I want to share with you some interesting links of the last days.

Why User Experience cannot be designed
Smashing Magazine, Helge Fredheim - March 15th, 2011

UX doesn't depend only on how something is designed, but also on other aspects, because we cannot design the user and we cannot design the situation in which the product is used. Fredheim gives a great new perspective how we should see the UX work... because it's not limited to usability or information architecture.

Lean UX: Getting out of the deliverables business

Smashing Magazine, Jeff Gothelf - March 7th, 2011

Traditionally user experience design is very deliverable-oriented. So most of the times a huge amount of effort is used to deliver documents instead of working on end-user experiences. Lean UX, inspired by lean and agile development techniques, tries to bring results faster to life with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.


More, better, faster: UX design for startups
The Cooper Journal, Stefan Klocek - March 16th, 2011

This article, also related to the Lean UX idea, is focusing on how the UX process can be speed up to be able to show results very fast.

3 to 5 days for each "learn-build-measure" cycle are suggested. But fast shouldn't be dirty so pair design - as we know the concept already from software development - is recommended.

Br, Claudia