Four Core Concepts for Fast User Feedback
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Developers on an Agile project depend on fast, accurate user feedback to guarantee that you are solving the user’s problem. But often Agile projects have to operate without real, current customers on the team and need to build up the design and research skills to get good user feedback.
This session is for anyone who has the job of getting user feedback. We’ll teach best-practice techniques for working with users in the situations that matter to an Agile team: understanding customer needs, getting feedback on design concepts and testing baselevels, and we’ll practice key skills.
We’ll introduce the 4 key concepts from Contextual Inquiry (CI), the standard industry practice for user field research. Taught by one of CI’s originators, this session boils down the underlying concepts into behaviors a developer can pick up and use successfully without major training.
We’ll discuss how to do initial field research to understand users’ needs and strategies; how to drive feature design from this data; and how to iterate a user story with end-users to define detailed UI and behavior; and how to test iterations with users to discover where problems lie and prioritize future iterations. (1 hour)
After introducing the techniques and showing how they can be used, participants will practice these techniques on a sample problem, with coaching from the instructor. (30 minutes)
- Know how to talk to users and what to do during a customer visit
- Know how to set up customer visits to get the best feedback
- Know how to get customer feedback at all phases of design: up-front design, detailed design, and feedback on a completed iteration
