Ethnography 101 and UPA 2010
My talk on Ethnography 101 at the Usability Professionals Association in Munich went well. The audience was very receptive and about 50% of them participated in the group exercise.
The feedback on my session was very good. It was about a 4.5 on a 5 point scale, including one person who seemed to not like me or the presentation at all.
The most relevant and informative presentation that I attended was by Andreas Hauser and Daniel Markwig of SAP. I took a lot of notes in that one. They discussed how they adapted a major UX initiative to fit within a Lean process, which is very similar to Agile. The solution was thousands of screens in a complex ERP suite called Business By Design. They didn’t do the typical whining about how hard it is to be UX in an Agile world where documentation is antithetical to efficiency (?huh?). They explained how they used a pattern library combined with use cases and wireframes, to produce a recipe for UX that developers followed.
The overall atmosphere of the conference was very positive. People seemed very smart and focused, and spoke a common UX language, which was interesting to experience.
I really liked the shop windows in Munich. I posted a Flickr photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43883838@N02/sets/72157624030593401/show/with/4647416633/