It’s like one of those adventure movies where the hero, surrounded by their motley crew of misfit recruits, is looking across the valley at the approaching army, thinking, “What did we get ourselves into?” That’s the sense I get after talking with UX professionals about the challenges their organization faces as they move to Agile [...]

Peer into Your Future You’re about to see a project we’ve been working on for several months. A brand new conference bringing the newest, most critical thinking around two separate and important topics: mobile design and Agile development. These experts will dive deep and get to the nitty-gritty details that will make you a stronger [...]

In the last two years, the UX world has seen some drastic changes. Our designs, and the processes to get to them, are undergoing a transformation that forces UX designers to rethink what they do. Users’ behaviors change based on how they view digital content. The desktop computer is no longer the norm for reading [...]

Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious.” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious. The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at [...]

UX design in Agile can be a frustrating experience when teams are more focused on delivery over the quality of the experience. But the thinking underlying major Agile methods such as XP or Scrum can be applied to UX design, too. On Tuesday, January 24, Anders Ramsay is going to show you how in our [...]

Producing a brand new event is exciting. Lots to think about: the speakers, the topics, and the locations. Yet what immediately separates one conference from another is its name. Back December 2011, we asked your help in naming our brand new conference. There weren’t a lot of details other than it’s a 3-day consisting of [...]

The Agile development process is accused often of being too focused on delivery over the user experience. But that’s not to say that Agile is the bane of UX. Anders Ramsay believes it’s important to distinguish between Agile methods and Agile values. Many, such as fast prototyping and shared understanding are also valuable in the user experience world.

The term Lean UX is bandied about quite a bit these days. Along with it, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is just a buzzword, a new way of working, or simply a new description for what people in the UX realm already do. Jeff Gothelf of The Ladders is a champion of Lean UX, so Jared Spool sat down with him to find out what Lean UX was all about.

The migration to agile and lean development methods has thrown a wrench into the world of user experience professionals. Now on unfamiliar ground, these professionals want to know what new techniques and tricks help integrate UX into the development process. As we study what makes teams successful, we realize that the successful teams aren’t doing [...]

Story mapping is a way to build a model of user experiences. More than that, in the Agile context, it allows you to tactically plan for what should go into each release. It is a way to get everyone on the team thinking and talking about user experience. Getting people into a discussion mode starts to create a very collaborative environment. Jeff discusses how to create a story map and how it fits into the Agile process.