Create a User-Centric Culture with User Research

Jonathan Horowitz presented the following deck at the Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup on 2/3.

Create a User-Centric Culture with User Research from Jonathan Horowitz

Event Description:
Research can improve team synergies which create opportunities for better products and a team that is happier with their results.  In this meetup Jonathan will share insights for how research can be used to create both a user-centric culture and a catalyst for team bonding. Whether you are looking to introduce an internal research practice for the first time or looking to improve on an existing one learn how these methods can work for you. The second half of the event will be a group exercise to uncover bottlenecks in your own organization implementing user research and how this can be solved.

Agenda:

6:30-6:45 - Networking
6:45-8pm - Presentation / Group Exercise / Q&A
8-8:30pm - Announcements / More (Optional) Networking

Bio 

Jonathan Horowitz is a local user experience design leader with 15+ years experience working on consumer and enterprise digital products for startup and Fortune 500 companies. His core specialties are user experience strategy, design and research. In the workplace he is passionate about working with cross-discipline teams uniting them to collaborate and motivating them to deliver. Some highlights of his recent work include higher education applications, tools for budding entrepreneurs, financial applications and automated systems. Jonathan works at Citrusbyte, a design and development consultancy here in New York City leading teams as a Product Strategist and Designer.

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Note: This event is being co-promoted between Agile / Lean Practitioners,  Digital Product Design, Lean Product Best Practices,  Software Product Management and the UX Lab Meetups.

RSVP Now for this event.

NOTE: Note this post was updated on 2/6 to include Jonathan's Deck.

1/13 Rolling out Lean in a Global Enterprise

The challenge is simple, take a 100 year old 40,000 person old school publishing company spread out across dozens of cities and countries with a wide ranging portfolio of products, services and cultures, and develop a single framework and common taxonomy to make the company more innovative, more nimble and better equipped to deliver more value to customers. Jonathan Bertfield, a product strategy consultant working with the Chief Product Office at Pearson Inc, will talk about how his team is attacking this challenge using Lean principles and tools as both the implementation methodology and the ultimate goal. 

Bio: 

Jonathan Bertfield is a Product Strategy Consultant with two decades of experience working with media and education companies in the UK, Israel, California, New York and Australia. He has worked for publishers such as The Learning Company and Scholastic as well as leading several start ups in the ed-tech and publishing domains. Consulting clients include Sesame Workshop, News Corp, The Associated Press, Business Insider, Pearson, The Blue School & Bloomberg, with a focus on delivering strategy guidance around product innovation and driving product development process change, including applying lean start up, customer driven development and business design approaches inside large enterprises. Jonathan is an instructor at General Assembly running workshops for multinational enterprises and has been a coach in the business plan competition at NYU Stern for 7 years. Jonathan has an LLB from the University of Leeds, UK

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Note: This event is being co-hosted with the Lean Product Best Practices Meetup group.

RSVP Now for this event.

12/10 - Co-Hosting Nir Eyal author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products with Nir Eyal 

What makes some products so engaging while others flop? Nir Eyal explains the psychology behind the world's most habit-forming technologies and provides practical advice for increasing user engagement.

About the Presenter:

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir founded and sold two companies since 2003 and has taught the "Using Neuroscience to Influence Human Behavior" course as a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, Nir's writing frequently appears in TechCrunch, The Atlantic, and Psychology Today. He is the author of the bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products.

Agenda: 

6:30pm - 7:00pm Networking

7:00pm - 7:40pm Nir Eyal Presentation

7:40pm - 8:00pm Q&A with Nir Eyal

8:00pm - 8:30pm Announcements & Networking 

This Meetup event is a collaborative effort between the 

Agile / Lean Practitioners

and 

The UX Lab

RSVP NOW for this event.

Digging In – Pro Interviewing Techniques for Agile Practitioners

On 12/9, Adam Hulnick, gave the following presentation at the Agile / Lean Practitioners meetup.


Event Info
In this lean and agile age, more and more teams are doing some level of user testing on their own. Many of them find, however, that getting a user to talk is not as easy as it looks. Users don’t always want to talk, or they’ll get started on the wrong topic. Sometimes they lack the words to express how they feel about an interface or product. Sometimes they think everything is “fine.” How can you dig deeper to get more info from a user, especially if they are digging in their heels? How can you get people talking, keep them on topic, and find out what they are really thinking? Join us on December 9 to learn some of the professional UX researchers’ tricks of the trade. 

Bio: 

Adam Hulnick is a seasoned User Experience researcher. He’s currently heading Research & Insights at We Are Experience, though he has performed user testing in numerous contexts and with countless different types of stimulus. In the thousands of hours he has logged doing user research, he has picked up numerous techniques to get the data his clients need. 

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This event is being co-promoted with Lean Product Best Practices, Software Product Management NYC, and UX Lab Meetups.

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NOTE: This post was updated after the 12/9 event to include Adam's presentation.

Transitioning from Manual Testing to Automated Testing

On November 18, Bill Rinko-Gay presented Transitioning from Manual Testing to Automated Testing at the Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup.

Event Description:

Transitioning from Manual Testing to Automated Testing will cover the following topics:will cover the following topics:

• Agile ROI thinking for automated testing
• When to automate
• Overcoming common objections
• Automated Tests are Software Development
• Where in the architecture to automate
• Who automates

This will be a discussion where the above will be the framework but we focus on answering participants questions rather than presenting an approach.

Bio:

Bill Rinko-Gay has over 30 years experience in Software Development, most of that time in QA. Bill’s career and the Software QA profession progressed together until Bill realized that Agile was the demonstration that the QA profession had failed to deliver. Since 2005 Bill has been helping to re-imagine Software QA in light of Agile methods, taking advantage of the specific skills and knowledge of the QA SME and incorporating that into Agile’s self organizing teams.

11/11 - What Does Lean/Agile look like at Facebook and The Economist?

This Meetup features industry professionals with stories about products and experiences within their respective companies. We'll be hearing about the structure of their teams, and the pros and cons that go with it, as well as, looking into what we could be doing as a community to make us more effective as individuals. 

Case Study: Victor Brunetti (Product Designer at Facebook)

Victor currently works at Facebook, previously part of the Hot Studio team. He believes in delighting users through a combination of utility and joy. For over a decade he's executed cross-platform, multi-channel digital experiences, rich data-driven applications and marketing campaigns. 

Case Study: Danny Setiawan (Senior UX Designer at The Economist) 

Danny currently works as the senior UX designer at The Economist. Previously, he worked for Yahoo! and has done work for other major brands like MSN, Disney and Sony. Danny is passionate about optimizing product development processes and result-centric UX. 

Fireside Panel Debate: Victor, Danny, and Mona Patel (CEO at Motivate Design)

Mona combines positivity, timeless wisdom, sharp design thinking and a little bit of magic glitter with her 15 years of experience in design and research to help you see around corners and realize a kind of success you didn’t necessarily expect. 

Agenda: 

6:30pm - 7:00pm Networking

7:00pm - 7:20pm Facebook Case Study

7:20pm - 7:40pm The Economist Case Study 

7:40pm - 8:00pm Fireside Panel Debate

8:00pm - 8:30pm Announcements & Networking 

This Meetup event is a collaborative effort between the Agile / Lean Practitioners and The UX Lab.

RSVP for this great event.

Using Paper Prototyping to Facilitate Successful Participatory Design Sessions

Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin presented the following before facilitating a workshop at the 10/28 Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup.


Event Description
How do you get a team working together to be aligned on the value, feasibility, and usefulness of their product ideas?  One approach is to enable team to work together in envisioning the product features via participatory design.  

Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup is pleased to be co-hosting a free workshop on Using Paper Prototyping to Facilitate Successful Participatory Design Sessions with Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin on Tuesday, October 28, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM in NYC.  RSVP now on Meetup.

Description of Event

Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin will lead a workshop where we explore and experience how using paper prototyping can be an ideal communication tool to enhance and enable a successful participatory design session to uncover and/or discover how your end-user would see, navigate, understand or even design your content or interface...

Bios: 

Caroline Romedenne

Caroline Romedenne is a User Experience Designer and User Researcher at Kaplan Test Prep. She is a creative thinker, a design strategist with a passion for people, behavior and education.
Caroline studied Fine Art Photography at the Institut des Beaux-Arts St Luc in Belgium, she worked in fashion and portraiture for many years. After much travels, she gets an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design which has more deeply provided her to creatively conquer wide-ranging and complex work from user-centered, socially networked interaction, to physical installation projects.
Aside from Art direction and other UX-er positions, she is a cultural activist with and for Native American communities, she volunteers over the years designing programs that aimed to bring together different generations through meaningful interactions and cultural experiences.
She is the most motivated when standing at the intersection of diverse needs, ideas and people and ‘making it work’ for everyone.

Tricia Okin

I love learning about people, cultures, languages and why people do the things they do. I’m constantly searching for the “Why?” in a scenario. With all that, my primary love is designing (for) online communities, to connect people to others and to share in storytelling and their histories. In my spare time, I travel to experience new places and people.

My background is a BFA in photography and I completed my MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. With over 12 years of professional experience within the interactive design industry, my work focuses on practices  such as user experience, strategy, interaction design, creative direction, information architecture, and front-end development knowledge. My work includes clients who extend across multiple industry verticals, including education, nonprofit organizations, entertainment, tech, and food & lifestyle. I'm currently a lead instructor for General Assemb.ly's User Experience Design Immersive course in both the New York and London campuses.

This event is co-sponsored with Lean Product Best Practices meetup group.
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Note: This post was updated to include the presented deck post Meetup.