Summary
This two-day class will teach all attendees the basic design thinking techniques necessary to integrate user needs into an agile development process.
- Understand how design thinking complements the agile methodology.
- Learn techniques for creating innovative interface solutions.
- Experience how a user centered approach helps resolve issues and provide fast focus.
- Integrate early user feedback mechanisms into sprint planning.
Syllabus
Each section of this fast-paced workshop will start with a classroom-style introduction to the general concepts, followed by a highly practical session where the training is put into practice. By the end of the two days, attendees will have followed an extremely condensed version of the initial stages of a design thinking process.
Day one: Overview and data gathering
- How design thinking helps, and how it fits into an agile process
- Developing software with users in mind – context, goals and problems
- Getting things right in the initial design
- Constant measuring – quant and qual techniques
- Fitting into the agile process
- Observation skills
- Good observation techniques
- Exercise: observe an interaction
- Experience mapping (a kind of affinity diagramming)
- How to get everyone’s observations in to one place, and organized
- Exercise: create an experience map
- Scenario creation
- How to make observations useful for product design
- Keeping features out of the discussion as long as possible
- Personas and scenarios – the who and what of your new product
- Exercise: create user scenarios from the experience map
Day two: High-level design and planning
- Design charette – everyone has design ideas
- The first idea isn’t the best one – concept of design exploration
- Level playing field for all team members to contribute design ideas
- Scenario-focused design
- Exercise: run a mini-charette to explore design ideas
- Paper prototyping from user scenarios
- Don’t waste money coding bad designs – create design ideas on paper first
- Introduction to paper prototyping techniques for maximum flexibility
- Exercise: create a paper prototype from scenario and charette output
- Prototype usability testing
- Get user feedback early in the process to ensure you stay on track
- Exercise: run a paper prototype study
- Sprint planning
- Only after you know what features test well with users can you plan the work to build the product
- Exercise: create a User Story Map to help you plan and prioritize sprint work based on system functionality, ensuring early demonstration of business benefit
Team members should expect to attend both days. Participants will work in small multidisciplinary teams for the duration of the class.
Benefits
The benefits of the user centered design approach include less waste (time spent building the wrong thing), faster time to market, because no unnecessary parts are built, and higher user satisfaction with the end product, because user needs are taken into consideration from the earliest planning stages.
This training will give product team members a new user centered vocabulary and mechanism for planning the work they undertake.
Working in cross-disciplinary teams during the sessions will demonstrate to attendees the need for workplace collaboration and an appreciation of the different skills that individual disciplines contribute.
Attendees will be able to apply what they have learned as soon as they finish the training.
Details
Price: US$ 18,000 – see our Pricing page for more information
Duration: two days of highly interactive classroom style learning. Subsequent coaching calls as necessary during your implementation process.
Prerequisites: high availability from your main business and technical staff for the two day workshop. This workshop brings team members from multiple disciplines together in one room to learn together.
Next steps
To find out more and to discuss how a design thinking workshop can improve your whole development process, contact us by email at info@ [this site’s domain]