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.

Product development in agile is always at risk of favouring velocity and developer's skills.

Favouring velocity means that when it's time to select stories, the team will elect to do many short stories to keep velocity on the rise, or stable.

Favouring skills mean that easy implementation may be selected, or sometimes tricky solutions which will give the developper the satisfaction of solving a difficult problem.

The outcome of the story's execution and value to users is an important criteria, and I'd like to introduce you in this session to a technique that helps prioritize against two sets of criteria: technical difficulty and value to users.

Using Personas, a tool from product design which I will explain, and a simple grid, this technique makes prioritization incredibly easy - which then enables the team to focus on getting stories done, rather than figuring out which stories.

User Experience design is a product design discipline which sits throughout a product's lifecycle, from inception to development to maintenance and all the way to retirement. Waterfall enabled the discipline to have ample time and produce extensive design, in a "big design upfront" approach which rarely involved technical capabilities, and resulted in difficulties in build. The adoption of agile by product development team has offered UX a unique opportunity to work in a much more joined-up manner, and expend the design into the development, enabling the entire team to react to change.

As a UX designer, I have over the last 7 years developped a solid appreciation of working embedded in an agile development team, and would like to share my experiences through 3 specific projects, sharing my learnings to help development team on-board the UX practitioner, their tools, practices and skills.

This session will be a case study over 3 projects, highlighting the learnings and steps of the integration of UX into the development cycle. I'm taking Alistair Cockburn's sequence of SHU-HA-RI to detail the progress of my practice and will pay great attention to sharing sufficient context that my experiences and outcomes can be translated to your own projects and team setups.