Something a little bit different. There’s a great exercise for conference speakers (or anyone else) to practice their craft - Presentation Karaoke.

Wikipedia describes presentation karaoke as “an improvisational activity in which a participant must deliver a presentation based on a set of slides that they have never seen before.” What it doesn’t say is that it is absolutely hilarious and fun to play. I describe it as; 1 minute, random topic, random slides — GO!

You can step up and give it a try, or sit back and watch. Either way, you will not forget this!

Researching users and testing with them is both simple in principle and hard in practice. With the best intentions and little training, anyone can get started, however bringing in robust and valid insights requires a little bit more skills.

After having worked with entrepreneurs and agile teams where testing and researching fell onto the Product Owner or Business Analyst, I've identified key user research skills that help non-designers strengthen their research, make it easier, and result in greater trust in the findings.

In this workshop, focused on both exploratory research, where you learn about users and the problem, and explanatory research which is focused on observing reactions and interactions from being shown something, I'll share basic techniques and recommend tried-and-tested tools to help improve both the quality of the research and its findings, and the ease and confidence in conducting the research.

I'm a ux designer and researcher with over 10 years experience researching users all over the world. I've developed agile research practices that allow for good research within agile cadences, ensuring the team is always supported by genuine, robust insights.

This workshop has been given previously at deliver:agile 2018 and at Product Development Days 2017.

Shipping your digital product is good, shipping desired features and functionalities is better, and shipping those artefacts in a form that is both highly usable and perfectly fit for purpose is even better.

User research has a long standing reputation of requiring highly technical skills and large amounts of time. Although some topics do require a dedicated research effort to bring meaningful insights, a lot of product insights can be gathered through smaller, repeated research endeavours, and benefit the team by bringing needed clarity in a timely manner.

Designers are not often taught well how to strategise their effort to deliver value incrementally. Borne of my experience or validated by practice, the techniques and recommendations I will share can be brought in and shared with all, and benefit the entire team including the stakeholders.

In this session, I'll share my experience of over 10 years as a designer and researcher on agile teams, as well as my experience as an agile coach supporting teams featuring developers and designers.

Throughout every step of any project, we are asked to give or receive feedback. Is this on brand? Does this capture the experience or problem we’re trying to solve? How complicated is this? How do we feel about the way a design looks? Whether we’re discussing this with our internal team, other departments at our company, our clients, our bosses or our peers, the art of giving actionable, useful, contextual and valid feedback is one often lost on all sides.

The challenge with feedback doesn’t end with giving it. Receiving it can be challenging. As people in a creative field, we are setting ourselves up for criticism of our work (and feedback can certainly feel overly critical) every single day. Whether it’s a casual white boarding or brainstorming session to presenting “final” comps to the most important stakeholder, we need to be ready to address whatever reaction people come back with.

The bookends of the feedback experience present separate but very real challenges. They are often challenges that we are never taught to handle - or at least maybe not handle as well as we should.

Over the course of this workshop, we will explore why this is so difficult, the common mistakes on both sides, ways to elicit great feedback and some best practices in turning even the worst feedback into a productive conversation. If anything needs to fit more into a conversation around user experience, around agile, and, indeed, around product, in general, it’s how to keep things moving forward with a truly successful feedback loop.

This workshop will include interactive activities and require participants to give on-the-fly feedback based on the best practices discussed over each part of the presentation.