Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product. In addition, focus groups seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences in using existing products and brands.

Research is usually conducted to gain a deep understanding of the client’s target users in order to apply a customer-centered approach to the strategic development of the client’s brand and product in the context of an Agile development process. In addition, research seeks to reveal insights into how the target customers user products in their particular context and feed those findings immediately into the scrum’s decision-making and development process.

User Research takes the position than human behavior and the ways in which people construct and make meaning of their worlds and their lives are highly variable, locally specific as well as intersubjectively reflexive. In AgileUX Product design, contextual inquiry and other methods of user research asserts that we must first discover what people actually do, the reasons for doing it, and just as importantly, how they feel while doing it, so that AgileUX Teams are always making product design decisions on actual customer feedback and behavior, and not opinion or instinct.

As a Lead UX Designer here you will lead efforts to create, concept and design new ways for our community of jobseekers and recruiters to interact in meaningful and engaging ways.

We work quickly, nimbly, and collaboratively. We are an AgileUX team, which means that you will not be designing high fidelity deliverables. You thrive concepting with a team, using sketches and wireframes as conversation starters to explore possible solutions. You must bring your top-notch interaction design, information architecture, and user research skills as well your opinion. Most importantly, bring your passion.

The Skinny:

• Develop a deep, empathetic understanding of our customers
• Create iterative, lightweight prototypes to concept solutions
• Lead cross-functional teams to solve business problems
• Design elegant, efficient and sophisticated solutions
• Prototype, Usability Test, and then Prototype some more (we do testing weekly)
• Be able to defend your design decisions with well-structured arguments
• Thrive in an environment of constant change

The Specs:

• 10+ years experience as an information architect, interaction designer, and user experience designer
• Thorough understanding of design principles
• No fear of speaking with customers (we do that a lot)
• Usability testing – you’ve done it, you love it, you want more of it
• Love of data. We have tons of it. Use it wisely.
• Proof (we’ll ask you to demo it) of taking an idea from concept to implementation.
• Be able to speak to your work clearly and succinctly (we value brevity)

**Note: This is not a graphic design role nor a front-end coding role but should you bring those skills along with solid IA/IxD chops, that’s just more of you to love.**

AgileUX NYC 2012 is a single day, single track conference about designing great user experiences within an agile development process. It will be held in New York City on a Saturday in February.

Overview

This conference is about how great experiences are designed and created within the structure of an agile development process.

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. The day will focus on bringing thought leaders in the AgileUX community to cover the entire lifecycle of software development including organization and cultural change, team building, process design, customer research, design studio and transparent design, user story writing, pattern libraries and mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing. Attendees will walk away with a strong understanding of the complete lifecycle and practical methods they can use immediately.

The Program

The conference will consist of 8 x 35 minute sessions, and 5 x 8 minute talks. There will be approximately 45 minutes reserved for lunch with 2 15 minute breaks.

Speakers will be announced over the next 4 weeks.

Sign up here to get the latest information first.

You can also follow on twitter.

For those needing an additional nudge, besides my recommendation, download and read the excerpt (pdf), which is, in my humble opinion, a paltry sampling of this Nobel laureate’s wit, wisdom, and insight.

Here are some recent reviews of Thinking, Fast & Slow – relatively decent reviews from people that clearly aren’t winning any prizes for writing creative headlines.

Business Week

Salon: The Effect Effect

Wall Street Journal: Why the Grass is Always Greener

New York Times: Two Brains 

We are often asked how and when Design Studio should be used in a startup or enterprise whose product team embraces agile. We hope this article answers some questions about how to effectively use Design Studio (as well as variations on it), and to avoid potential pitfalls so those practicing some flavor of agile UX will be better armed to solve difficult problems in their work.

The description of Design Studio in The Design of Design Studio was meant to serve as the canonical example, and is best suited for the beginning of a significant series of projects focused around one theme, or a set of themes. The output of such a design studio session may span many iterations. There are, however, many variations of Design Studio that can be employed to good effect for the smaller problem spaces within agile processes. For example, a Scrum team may need to explore a more targeted problem space that they identify during iteration planning prior to a sprint.

This should not imply, however, that we use Design Studio during what is sometimes called “Iteration 0,” although there is no reason why it couldn’t be used then. We don’t happen to follow the “staggered sprints” model popularized by Desiree Sy and Lynn Miller at Autodesk. Instead, we solve problems as whole Scrum teams and bring the ideation, design, and development phases as close as possible to the same kickoff point so the concepts can inform story-gathering and estimation sessions.

Read the article on UXMagazine

As a proven way to uncover the shared values, beliefs and practices that inform the decisions we make and the actions we take as social beings, we are poised for a resurgence of interest in design ethnography for interaction design. This new interest is being driven by the designer’s increasing concerns for:

• Context – as computing expands beyond the desktop,
• Emotion – as we seek new ways of evaluating satisfaction and engagement, and
• Behavior – as the explicit goal of behavior change becomes more critical to design practice.

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
This workshop will begin in the studio with an overview of ethnography and common ethnographic techniques in the context of design. We will discuss traditional and emerging digital approaches to ethnography. Next we’ll divide into teams to give workshop participants the opportunity to put these principles into practice as we venture out into the city to conduct our “fieldwork.” Following our short period of participant observation with the “urban natives” we will return to the studio and discuss what we learned. Finally, we will discuss how to apply what we learned to problems of design and brainstorm ideas on opportunities for products, services, and other interventions that could fit into the lives of our subjects.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
- UX professionals
- People interested in ethnography as it relates to UX

WHAT YOU WILL DO
This workshop will begin in the studio with an overview of ethnography and common ethnographic techniques in the context of design. We will discuss traditional and emerging digital approaches to ethnography. Next we’ll divide into teams to give workshop participants the opportunity to put these principles into practice as we venture out into the city to conduct our “fieldwork.” Following our short period of participant observation with the “urban natives” we will return to the studio and discuss what we learned. Finally, we will discuss how to apply what we learned to problems of design and brainstorm ideas on opportunities for products, services, and other interventions that could fit into the lives of our subjects.

WHAT YOU WILL GET OUT OF IT
Whether or not you currently employ up-front research in your design process, this workshop will show how to embrace ethnographic principles in the work you do to improve your ability to:

- Build empathy for the people who engage with the products and services you create
- Improve understanding of the reasons that people use your products and services the way they do
- Identify opportunities for new products or services or for improvements to those that already exist

AGENDA

10:00 – Overview of ethnographic methodology, description of assignment (in the studio)
11:30 – Q&A and snack
11:45 – Ethnographic fieldwork (out in the city)
12:30 – Lunch and discussion
12:45 – Analysis and synthesis
1:45 – Q&A and closing

WHEN
Saturday, November 12th 2011
10am – 3pm

WHERE

The Ladders
137 Varick Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
Map

PRICE
$25

REGISTER NOW

The workshop is limited to 20 people. You will need an ID and be on the RSVP list in order to be allowed upstairs to the event.

The Gamification of Everything (slideshare)

Article in Gaming Business Review
Slideshare & article by Margaret Wallace

The Magic Potion of Game Dynamics

The goal of game dynamics is to drive a user-desired behavior predictably. Therefore we must understand how humans behave, in order to understand game dynamics. And to do this, I’d like to take a psychologist’s perspective and try to understand human behavior though psychological models and frameworks. There are many such models, and they are useful in different contexts, so the criteria for choosing a model/framework should be whether it can give you the understanding you need to address your problem.

The Lure of Game(-ification)

Whether you view him as towering, trendy, or trivial, 22-year-old Seth Priebatschgot people talking after his March 12 SXSW keynote, “The Game Layer on Top of the World.”  Priebatsch heralds our nascent decade as the flash point for games and social influence, whereas the last decade brought us the structure and connectivity of all things social.

Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification

GoogleTalks Video: Gabe Zichermann 

Gamification 101: The Psychology of Motivation

Game mechanics and game dynamics are able to positively influence human behavior because they are designed to drive the players above the activation threshold (i.e. the upper right of the ability-motivation axis), and then trigger them into specific actions. In other words, successful gamification is all about making these three factors occur at the same time. As I mentioned last time, the temporal convergence is the key.

DESIGNING GAMIFICATION FOR THE MOST FREQUENT PERSONALITY TYPES

When  designing game-based applications for a general US population, it may be of interest to examine the frequency of personalities in order to target the broadest reaching gamification strategies.  Many personality models are available for study and although each have their own criticisms in scientific approach, it is interesting to look at these reports as a starting basis for design.

A Gamification Framework for Interaction Designers

Gamification is a hot topic. Missed it? On Google Trends it first appeared as a blip in late October 2010 and then took off in January so quickly that it appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition in March. Investors seem interested, and it already has a sold-out conference and a fast-growing list of agencies that will help you “do gamification.” You can even join a quest to become a gamification expert.

Designing with Behavioral Economics

“Behavioral economics…has emerged as a discipline, bringing together economics and psychology to understand how social, cognitive, and emotional factors influence how people make decisions, both as individuals and at the market level.”

Smart Gamification: Social Game Design for a Connected World

Slideshare Presentation: Amy Jo Kim

The Gamification of Healthcare

“Gamification” is a hot topic in the design community these days and it’s up to us, as designers, to turn it into an opportunity for the good. Check out my presentation on how to design for behavior change in healthcare for more details.

The Cynicism of Gamification

It’s time to get real on gamification. I’ve seen much written about gamification. About what it is, how it works, and how to use it. Gamification as a kind of social mechanism that can be readily imported into a new or existing service to liven it up. To enhance and augment interaction and engagement. To make things fun.

Gamification 101: Design the Player Journey

Slideshare Presentation: Amy Jo Kim

Gamification from a Company of Pro Gamers

Not too long ago, the “G” word (for games) seemed to have a negative connotation in the corporate world. It was seen as a little too relaxed and irrelevant to business, so gaming was never really discussed in the business context. I suppose it was traditionally believed that if you are playing games then you are not working. However, as Dr. Stuart Brown so eloquently states in his TED talk, “play is not the opposite of work.” This is the foundation of gamification.

I hope you enjoy.

@semanticwill