Speakers

Jeff Gothelf

Jeff Gothelf is managing director at neo.

Jeff is a super sharp interaction designer from New Jersey.

As director of user experience for TheLadders.com, Jeff worked at the Agile coalface, integrating design thinking into a traditional Agile process. Since then, Jeff has become one of the world’s leading proponents of Lean UX. His recent articles for Harvard Business Review catapulted Lean UX into the consciousness of the business world, something we’re all thankful for.

Now running his own consultancy, Jeff is in huge demand as he travels the world coaching design teams on how to work more effectively. So if you’ve been struggling to incorporate lean or agile thinking into your design practice, you don’t want to miss his session and workshop.

Jeff’s book, Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience, will be available from March 2013.

Better product definition with Lean UX and Design Thinking

Talk

Requirements-driven product definition is a sure-fire way to get 100% of the wrong product launched. The assumptions that requirements are based on are usually not accurate enough to determine the exact solution those requirements dictate. Instead, teams should focus on creating a series of hypotheses that define potential solutions to their business problem business problem and then work together to learn which of these hypotheses are keepers and which ideas to kill.

In this session Jeff will provide an overview of how to apply the ideas behind Lean UX and Design Thinking to project definition and planning. Using a series of case studies from large companies such as Paypal, TheLadders and Sesame Street as well as a few select startups, Jeff will cover:

  • how recognizing your assumptions increases the speed of finding the right solutions
  • why cross-functional, collaborative teams bring better products to market faster
  • why managing towards outcomes generates better solutions
  • how a Lean UX approach, coupled with Design Thinking, brings out the entire team's creative insights

Lean UX: Building a shared understanding to get out of the deliverables business

Workshop

The days of heavy specifications and documentation are numbered. The new currency of web and software development is shared understanding within nimble, small, dedicated teams. In this workshop, Jeff Gothelf will teach you the collaborative, cross-functional ideals behind Lean UX and demonstrate the power of highly cooperative teams.

Through several hands-on exercises that demonstrate how people work together to build a shared understanding, you will learn to:

  • Reframe requirements as assumptions
  • Create experiments to validate those assumptions
  • Minimize the waste in your UX activities
  • Collaboratively solve tough design challenges as a team

This workshop is for web designers (interaction, visual, etc) and the product managers and developers who work with them. You’ll take away practical skills to encourage greater team collaboration, rapid design tactics, shorter feedback loops and increased product validity all while increasing team productivity, efficiency and camaraderie.

Reasons to attend

  • 1Spend 3 whole days improving your UX skills
  • 2Meet your peers and share new ways of thinking
  • 3See world class speakers from the UX industry

"I came. I listened. I stayed. Great event, great crowd, great venue. Learn, network, enjoy."

Don Norman Speaker at UX London 2009