My top 6 tips working with startups:

1. Manage the product. To succeed you need to keep a firm grip on the essence of the idea and the resulting product. You are most likely the only person on the team who has ‘end users’ in mind. Introduce measures for success. Develop the concept but save the details for later.
2. Make stuff, not deliverables. Think white board sketching with the team instead of wireframe tomes. Cohabit with your developers to shape the product throughout build sprints. Communication is essential to make this work.
3. Don’t fall in love with your design. The product/service will transform rapidly from initial idea to your first beta launch. Low fidelity prototypes help the whole team not to get too attached. Iterate, rapidly.
4. Keep your users involved in the process. Beg, steal or borrow, but make sure you test your ideas. Your target audience rarely understand disruptive products that challenge their mental models from day one. Super saver tip: User research doubles up nicely as QA testing.
5. Be flexible. Know what’s vital, what can be adapted, changed, omitted, saved for later. Make sure you communicate trade-offs clearly with the team. Cutting corners doesn’t equal doing a sloppy job.
6. Don’t be coy. We are all perfectionists, so this advice is not for the faint-hearted. If your initial release doesn’t suck you wasted too much time bringing it to market.

Scream if you want to go faster! Fail early, fast and often has never been more poignant advice. Working with startups is exciting and rewarding, if you enjoy making new ideas happen with a good dose of fast-paced energy, rather than a portfolio of delectable deliverables.

UX Clinic on Thursday night was the annual round table staged by the UK UPA. We decided on the format to be able to offer as many fellow UX enthusiasts the chance to meet with some of the speakers as possible.

Kim Goodwin, Kate Rutter, Todd Zaki Warfel, Russ Unger and Nate Bolt all volunteered to tell us about their failures, superpowers and other assorted questions.

Kim stressed one of my favourite points about personas. You’ve got to keep them alive throughout the product development cycle. They are a communication tool to focus the team around user centered product development, not just a way to make research palatable for the rest of us.

Kate reassured me that there are no silver bullets when facilitating particularly opinionated or novice stakeholders. Let them take some ownership to involve them in the process.

Todd suggested that in 3 – 5 years time, UX designers without coding skills will be in the minority. Their team deliver shippable code, unlike many other UX agencies.

Russ pointed out that trying to do UX in a marketing agency may have been ‘his failure’. That didn’t work out well. Referring back to Peter Merholz’s rant about marketing agencies and UX, it’s an experience I share first hand.

Thanks for all the great feedback, we really enjoyed putting on this evening.

A big thank you to Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld media for his ad hoc sponsoring of nibbles for the event.

On Wednesday night UX bookclub (@leisa) put on ‘speed dating’ with the rockstars. We got to chat to Alan Cooper, Kim Goodwin, Kate Rutter, Steve Baty, Giles Colborne and Matt Jones. Way. too. short. but great fun of course.

I got to thank Steve for setting up UX bookclub and giving me a kick up the arse to finish reading more books. They do look pretty on my shelf, but it’s even better to actually get through a few more than before.

Alan Cooper advised me to slap my boss, which I think I’ll save until I need an exit strategy from my startup… He made a convincing case to stop playing devil’s advocate. There’s enough of them out there. We don’t need to shoot ourselves down.

Choice paralysis

Cara Dewsnip started out with a well researched session ‘Getting started in UX – my quest for answers‘. As a newbie to the field she was looking at different ways to establish a UX career for herself. She posed the question: to study or to learn on the job? How do you get one of the coveted places as a junior user experience consultant? The industry seems to favour seasoned professionals, but hardly any of them have any formal training in the field of UX. They tend to have backgrounds in design, reseach, psychology or development.  How relevant is a formal UX qualification? – As one head of industry put it – it’s 90% experience and 10% education. She has teamed up with a mentor from the industry and urges all established UX professionals to volunteer as mentors. Cara concludes that three things will help her achieve her goals: 1 – read books and blogs. 2 – Network and learn from those already in the industry. 3 -  attend conferences/take courses.

I recently noticed a session by Adaptive Path about Tools and Methods for Learning, Navigating and Making a Name for Yourself in the UX Landscape”. It seems many people out there in the UX industry are trying to make sense of how they ended up in User Experience and how to make the most of it.

Next up I joined Julianne Bowman’s session on ‘Bringing UX design into a corporate strategy‘. She shared her strategies for raising the profile of design and user-centered thinking at a strategic level within her organisation. Her painpoints struck a chord with my own experiences of setting up and further establishing user-centered practice in corporate, start-up and creative businesses. She emphasied that as user experience professionals we need to learn to talk the language of business if we want to be heard. As an industry we are ridden with acronyms and non-userfriendly language. She also highlighted the importance of leading workshops at strategic level to showcase the value and our ownership of design thinking in product/service strategy. She brought great examples of how to visualise the design process to enable high level management understand the impact of their (often under-informed) decision making on the quality of any design output.

Andy Budd shows us how to 'design the box'

Andy Budd ran a hugely entertaining session on design games and had us all design the box for Gumtree. A great way to get us out of our post-lunch slump and bond with new friends at uxcamp. What worked well for us rings also true with clients. To tear down barriers between job titles and levels of seniority design games are a great way to warm up the stakeholder team for a day of creative brainstorming.

David and I decided on a session exploring how UX professionals explain their jobs to themselves and everyone else. Deeply frustrated with the notion that he ‘works in IT and can fix computers’ David was keen to find better ways to explain our work and label our roles to help our mums, dates and the rest of us to better understand what user experience is all about. Linking back to Cara’s session earlier we are not surprised it’s a confusingly diffuse field to get into. We are all too used to the fact that no one understands what we do. We nod sagely when our nans think we fix computers or help her set up her email. Then again, as one participant put it, if people do get what we do they think “it sounds a bit wanky”.

There’s still work to be done to educate clients, bosses, nans and hiring managers in the value of user experience and design thinking.

Last but not least, I won something! This deserves a shout-out. Thank you for voting my deliverable (a hand sketched storyboard) 2nd best in show, and thank you Axure for your generous prize.

This was my first time organising a barcamp. I have a feeling there are many more to come. Thank you to all the organisers and sponsors (Gumtree, Vodafone, Amberlight, Axure, Rosenfeld Media, Clearleft, Addlestones, Saros) for putting this show on the road. And a big round of applause to all the participants/speakers.

You can find my pictures of barcamplondon at Flickr.

Soaking up the sun... and the cider