The meetup

Lean UX open is a meetup taking place frequently (every other month or so) with 16 spots open to participants every session, providing the participants will prepare sharing something they know or have experienced concerning agile UX or lean UX in a 5-10 minute lightning talk and participate actively in the following open space discussions. The topics to prepare and share can be presented as simple as just talking about it, no PowerPoints necessary (but the option exists if you want to).

The agenda for the sessions is the following:

1. Everyone lists what they can share in a lighting talk
2. We vote on what we want to hear
3. We listen to the chosen lightning talks
4. Everyone lists what they want to discuss in an open space session
5. We vote on what we want to discuss
6. We discuss the chosen topics in an open space format

The next meetup event might be full, but join the waiting list and prepare a talk anyway, there are usually many drop outs during the last days before the meetup.

The past

12 January 20178

• Lea explained how she had involved the developers in UX activities
• Martin shared his team's Lean Startup process that further "forces" developers to do discovery activities
• Emerald talked about her struggles with trying to get hold of users in a complicated SaaS project setup
• The rest of the time was spent discussing the topics in the above mentioned talks

1 September 2016

• Martin spoke about using the Cynefin sense-making model to know how to approach a design problem
• Emerald shared her experiences being a UX team of one
• Klas gave a presentation about his kids being agile and how we could learn from them
• David held a talk about using sketching as a team building tool, thus creating a conversation between people and becoming design-driven
• Martino explained how he did UX in a Scrum context, having the same rhythm as the developers
• The open space discussion were about how to create hypotheses that work as user stories, how to measure the value of UX, how to get developers to be more UX:y and teaching UX principles to everyone around you.

20 April 2016

• David told us about a rapid messaging exercise that prevented a disaster
• Martin gave a primer on Google Venture's Design Sprints
• Jimmy talked about benefits and drawbacks of Lab vs. Field testing
• Hannes shared a story about scaling from 7 to 30 people in 3 months
• Christina held a talk about the curse of knowledge i.e. that some people know other things than other people and they don't know they do it
• Thê-Minh spoke about getting user insights from another continent
• The open space discussions were about when to use qualitative and quantitative research methods, tips for long term usability research, using themes/epics to communicate user value to the dev team, working with US at remote locations, roles such as requirement analysts' place in Agile and mob programmers vs. UX:ers. If you weren't there, you missed something :)

10 February 2016

• Jimmy taught us about user research basics from a psychology methods perspective
• Ida told us how she is sharing user insights with the rest of the organisation
• Maryam explained why feeling bad about the process is sometimes good
• Martin ranted about why we UX:ers are so bad at collaborating in an agile project and how we should do it
• The open space discussions entailed how to survive in a waterfall organization, best practices on how to get people to buy in to LeanUX methods, some more about sharing user insights and how to get a continuous feedback loop with a limited amount of users far, far away.

16 November 2015

• Anneli spoke about helping the whole team to empathize and connect with the user.
• Maryam explained how she decided not to innovate in the project, when she found that there already was a pile of ideas.
• Martin proposed doing mob design instead of design studio, since mob programming is very successful (in the teams that dare to try it).
• Hannes pointed out that information rust, so do LeanUX! :)
• Annika spoke about risks when doing Lean user research, stuff that you miss out compared to when doing "full" user research.
• The open space discussion were about how to recruit good UX people, how to remotely do user research, what basic structure that need to exist in a company for enabling UX work (such as buy-in and understanding) and if the UX role will disappear in the future.

16 September 2015

• Martin spoke about comparing traditional UX with LeanUX using the Design Thinking framework. Video in Swedish here.
• Chris explained how he used the role of critique in the design studio process.
• Maryam talked about different bias in user research and to always count that in.
• Dan described how he had used trigger material during interviews to get a deeper understanding.
• Hans discussed a hunch he has about why designers only do iterative stuff, developers do only incremental stuff, and how to combine them fruitfully.
• We ended with a discussion about several interesting topics intertwined.

30 April 2015

• Jens spoke about Pirate Metrics, a few key metrics to be used for a good enough analysis of the business.
• Nina explained how she onboarded herself as a UX person in a distributed team who had never worked with a UX person before. Nina used story maps, high-level mockups and story telling.
• Martin talked about how to do easy-peasy user selection before research and test, and told an anecdote about a current project where user selection made all the difference.
• Dan described how he kicked off a workshop using simple design templates and got people to be more creative by setting boundaries.
• We discuss these 3-4 topics that were selected from a whole bunch of discussion ideas:

5 February 2015

• Hannes told us about doing Service Design and not just delivering a document but actually continuing the project with the same group of people doing LeanUX methods. And also about doing LeanUX with the support of Service Design thinking.
• Christopher talked about how Johnny Cash had given him a metaphor for agile development and what he thought was lacking in it. He found salvation in Jeff Patton's Story Mapping exercise and explained how he had performed it.
• Martin #1 had a talk about how to create effective teams. He had some great ideas about how to help with team collaboration and understanding, such as visualizing your mental state of the day during the morning meeting so that everyone understands how you feel and can approach you in the right way during the day.
• Martin #2 spoke about how the Discovery phase and Delivery phase of Agile could work together by using the Build-Measure-Learn cycle in both these phases to support both exploratory work and actual production.
• The following discussions were about how to present research findings in a great way to the rest of the team, how to help your team to collaborate and questions and details about some of the above mentioned talks.

27 November 2014

• Annika explained how she works LeanUX-style (with continuous user testing and experimental approach) in the SVT Flow project
• Maryam discussed why and how you should do user testing without taking notes
• Martin presented a couple of ideas on how you can use the design studio method to get buy-in for the feature or your design
• Vasily enlightened us by talking about UX from a developer's point of view and why we should collaborate more