Last month at IxDA Interaction 11, we hosted an evening in our office in Boulder full of food, drink and discussion, to bring some of our learnings around Lean User Experience to the larger design community, and in particular to attendees of the annual international IxDA conference.
We had such a great time with it, and started so many great conversations, that we decided we had to do it again at SXSW. This Saturday, at Adaptive Path Austin, from 6-9pm, we’re hosting deLUX REdux, and you’re all invited. (Register at Eventbrite.)
Since we’ve been working with Eric Ries on his Lean Startup track this Saturday, we thought an event Saturday evening was a great way to share what we’ve learned with a wider community. And since we’re on the topic, why don’t you come see our own Parker Thompson on a panel with Eric at 9:30a, and join Janice Fraser from LUXr and myself on a panel at 12:30p with Dave McClure and Laura Klein.
So what is the event all about?
For the past year, we’ve been sharing ideas and discussing new ways to approach design and product development, to create better products, make happier customers, and reduce waste. We’ve been doing this while creating better integrated, more collaborative, more responsive teams. In that time, a number of us have been getting together on a regular basis to really sit down and discuss what works and what doesn’t, and to try to distill these ideas into principles and techniques that are repeatable and practical.
We’ve been itching to engage with the larger design community to start to break down the culture of Big Upfront Design, the Cult of the Rockstar Designer, and the culture of necessary infallability; to fight the blind application of Waterfall and to disrupt the antipatterns we’ve found so antithetical to effective collaboration with agile development teams; to encourage patterns that allow designers to embrace early customer feedback, and to test hypotheses quickly; and most importantly, to foster a deeper collaboration with the very folks who have the biggest impact on what we build. We’ve seen over and over that, when done correctly, a light-weight process gives designers more control, not less.
It’s out of this series of discussions that I first arrived at a framing of the problem space that I talk about in Enough Design, and it’s also through these sessions that we’ve found a growing community of designers, product people, enterprises and other developers who are working to develop better techniques for integrated product development. We’ve found the conversation immensely valuable in our practice, and we hope to learn and share with more of you.
So if you’re a designer in Austin for SXSW, or just someone who cares about usable techniques for bringing Lean principles into the development of compelling User Experience, come join us on Saturday for deLUX REdux. This is a free event, but space is limited, so please RSVP through Eventbrite.
Thanks so much to Adaptive Path for sharing their Austin office with us, and to everyone at LUXr, Hot Studio, Sidereel, Cooper, IDEO and the Balanaced Team for their help making this happen.
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