Agile User Experience
After talking about how Agile is a state of mind, not a methodology, it was shown that the problem is making time to do a proper job of the user experience, in a rapid Agile world with shorten time scales compared to the discredited waterfall type model.
Because agile encourages teamwork and cross discipline working, this close working benefits everyone.
User experience professionals (or the person wearing that hat !) can prioritise tasks in the issue tracker, and rapidly contribute good user stories for features. It's also a good idea for 'full time' user experience people to pair with a coder right from just a rough sketch (for user interface features) - asking questions there and then is much quicker !
Design Exercise
The game here was braking up into three teams to design a better job center plus web site, with each team being the government, employers and employees.
Great brainstorming fun, and some people really got into character.
We used a Goal Directed Design approach which was a great new experience for me.
We got graphic demonstrations of how user goals will conflict, and talked about using design tools too minimise this.
I hadn't heard this one for many years but was delighted when an attendee observed that the traditional 'whole-project up-front' design/planning approach produced
...a useful notion when you need to sew Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seeds to shift to a more rational development.