UxLx summary part 1 — workshops
I've been fortunate enough to attend the UX Lisabon conference this year. Let me summarize what it was like for those who weren't there. If something seems interesting and you'd like to check out the slides, you'll find everything in the Coverage page here.

Richard Banfield — Design Sprints
Richard started us off with a little highfiving around the table. I was pretty skeptical about it, but I gotta admit it got us moving. He elaborated on how he sees two kinds of challenges:
- Low stakes e.g. high-five, you know what to do, easy.
- High stakes e.g. make me happy, you don't know the goal yet, hard, need a system, method reasearch to overcome it.
He also mentioned that moving around and physical interaction (like a high-five produces a hormonal response, waking us up and facilitating bonding.
I ended up hanging out a lot with people I high fivedat this first workshop, so maybe there's actually something to it!
The Design sprint
Richard further expanded on the concept of the challenge where goal is not apparent. He introduced us to the Google Venture's concept of a Design Sprint. Its basically a framerwork for a fast, lowcost validation of quickly generated ideas and borrows heavily from the scientific method and IDEO's design process. It generates hypothesis rapidly, then validates them in a timeboxed environment.
The five phases are:
Understand > Diverge > Converge > Build > Test
It's best used for:
- Anytime you need a fast user validation
- When you don't have enough data
- When there's a lot of assumptions
- When you enter new market / design new product
- When you want to avoid politics / include departments
Some good rules when sprinting:
- Everybody participates
- All voices are equal
- Be tough on ideas, gentle on people
Core insights from workshop
- Difference between assumptions and facts can be foggy, but it's really important to focus on which are which

- Design sprints build empathy for other people's ideas and gets departments talking with each other and our users
- If you are not on the same page, it's bad communication, you may need to work on your facilitation skills or go back to the research until you are
- Validation is the most important part of the DS, taking an experienced usability testing professional to do it might be a good idea
- You can iterate your sprint over longer periods, as ideas get more concrete, you might need more fidelity or iterations

Sarah Doody — Rapid Research
Sarah had us work in groups of three to test out her process on rapid research. Our goal was to find out the habits around using their phone, I guess that was an initial exploration to get people familiar with the concept of research.
Sarah made an interesting case study / point when she went over the hype and crash of the Juicero product, a juicer Silicon Valley company that user tested and research only within their founder's opinion sphere and never really went to real users.

Key takeaway: "But a difference between a prospective investor and an actual consumer is that consumers do not have patience for good stories to become good products."
After that, we did a quick usability testing of an Apple hardware repair site. As I've been conducting usability testings, research and product design for quite some time now, this part of the workshop wasn't very benefial to me.
What I enjoyed however are Sarah's point on two types of research, Generative and Evaluative.
Generative (What I call product research)
- Generates new insights for the industry
- You are not solving the problem, just exploring it
- Strategic research that helps you to define the problem for your design
Methods: Observation, Focus groups, Etnographic research, Social media research
Evaluative (What I call usability testing)
- Is our design achieving goals?
- Confirm assumptions
- Identify areas for iteration
Methods: Usability testing, Analytics, Heuristics, A/B testing

Overall, I enjoyed the theory and knowhow Sarah Doody brought to the table, though I found the practical part a bit tedious.
Jody Medich — New Forms of Interaction
Jody Medich is a Director of Design at Singularity University in San Francisco. We went through a pretty fun exercise at prototyping for new interactions like AR or VR. We started with A Day in the Life methodology, when we described what a future could look like for one person and how technology might evolve to solve new problems they might be facing.

Afterwards we followed up with a practical session of creating simple 3D prototypes out of layered plastic and tape. Jody demonstrated how this very simple prototyping method can be using to achieve complex interaction in real space.
It's actually pretty hard to describe my takeaways from this session, as it was focused more on practical prototyping with scissors and plastic and less on theory. If you're interested in the subject, check out this brilliant article by Jody on spatial orientation in VR.

I'll be following up soon with an article on UxLx best talks. Let me know what you think and hit that clap button if you enjoyed the article.
