Presentation: TweetSafety Not Guaranteed: How successful teams ignore the rules to create successful products

If you’re looking for simple solutions for building successful products, don’t come to this talk. This is the talk about how hard it really is to succeed, and how the best way to succeed is to ignore the best practice, avoid playing it safe, suck it up, and get used to it.

As long as I’ve been in software development, I, and others I know, have been seduced by seemingly simple and self-evident process ideas. But, in spite of our best efforts, we fail. Agile development, User Centered Design, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup all offer promise. They all seem to address some of our worst shortcomings. And, while we may experience some success, in the end, we still have big challenges

In this talk, you’ll hear about companies that started with the best of intentions. But in the end, deliberately broke their process and learned a few counter-intuitive things along the way: The most user-centric companies learned to lie to their customers, skip research and trust their guesses, and stop worrying about usability. The most agile companies learned to deliberately ship bad code, and to stop planning more than a few hours in advance. Design Thinking advocates adopted Lean Startup thinking. And, Lean Startup advocates adopted Design Thinking. In the end the most successful companies end up with a process soup that’s not true to any single process style, and definitely not simple to explain to anyone.

In the end you might end up with a few clever ideas to try in your organization. But what I hope you take away is a willingness to abandon the false security of any process approach, and focus on succeeding in spite of your process.

Presentation: TweetThe New UX Design

User experience design isn't what you think it is.

If you thought UX design was something done by a small exclusive group of artistic experts, you’re wrong. If you’re a UX designer and believe this is a craft only experienced and gifted people are good at, you’re wrong too. But there’s good news. In this talk you’ll learn how over the past decade UX work has profoundly changed to become a practice everyone participates in. In fact, it’s become a necessity that they do in order to create successful products.

During this talk, you’ll get out pen and paper and learn to draw a simple back-of-the napkin model you can use to explain user experience to anyone. Jeff will describe the 10 biggest misconceptions about user experience design and the reality that’s usually the opposite of the myth. Regardless of your role in software development, you’ll learn how you can participate in activities that help you empathize with the people using your software and then make decisions that help identify useful, usable, and beautiful products.