One workshop I especially liked was Jeff Gothelf’s ‘Lean UX: A Seasoned Approach to Designing in Agile’.

What is Lean UX? Lean UX is inspired by Lean Startup and Agile development theories. It’s about reducing waste: Light faster, collaboration, cross functional, less emphasis on deliverables and more focus on the actual user experience. The more shared understanding we have, the thinner the spec is.

So in essence, our designs are hypotheses; let’s validate or invalidate those hypotheses as quickly as possible so that we can spend time going down the right path and less time going down the wrong paths.

Lean UX brings usability testing to every sprint to validate design hypotheses with customers, and data is used to settle subjective issues.

According to Jeff, when we have the designers, the developers, and the business owners all in the same room sort of working on solving a problem collaboratively, suddenly all that subtly and nuance as to what design is about becomes transparent. The value of the designer becomes even more evident when the collaboration is working at the highest levels. The expertise and the different disciplines that all go into software design and user experience design start to emerge and become very obvious to the team.

I recommend watching this 5 min video where Jeff talks about ‘How to do Lean UX in 5 easy steps’. Or check out his Lean UX presentation on SlideShare.

We should all start an accessibility push in our organizations, here’s why:

• There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.




• With a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older




• In order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

Performance, internationalization, and accessibility are not a feature, they should all be standard.

Why is finding direction (or strategy) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution.

You have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can’t run while you’re reading the map.

And this is the potential problem with popular methods such as:

• iterative design
• rapid prototyping
• agile development

…which are great and all, except when there’s no well-thought-out direction to go in.

So be forewarned – it’s hard to be a strategist. People prefer action. “Ready-fire-aim” sounds so much more exciting and appealing. “Do something!” they say – and it can be hard to sit down and say hey, let’s take at least a couple of days to think about who our customers are and talk to them about what they need.

Speaking with the customers refines and narrows the direction. After all you are fulfilling their needs.

The challenge is to be of service without becoming servile. We shouldn’t elevate any customer to the role of superior being, but treat each with human respect.

The key to becoming a stellar service provider lies in making only responsible commitments. This requires not simply being knowledgeable about what must be done but “no-legible” about how preferences resolve into satisfying results. We must know how and when to say, “No,” because no one can know what will finally emerge as best. Client and designer will have to discover what constitutes best, and this always means stumbling through some uncomfortable territory together.

It’s crazy how much more satisfying to it is when you are able to present an even better solution to the problem they were really hoping for when they were offering suggestions or ideas.

Of course you’ve heard this Henry Ford quote a hundred times:
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Or Tom Kelley’s (IDEO’s general manager) translation of that:
“Customers don’t envision the future, they inform the present.”