A UX Conference Unlike Any Other Returning in 2017

Adventurous User Research Techniques for Uncovering Deeper Insights

Marc Rettig · Monday, April 18 · 8:30am – 5:30pm

Transform the way you think about conducting strategic research and its impact on your organization. Push beyond the conventional usability tests, field studies, and interviews with groundbreaking research methods, including Situation Modeling and the World Café technique.

Make conversation a core research tool, inspiring more effective insights between designers, developers, and stakeholders. Grow a shared understanding of your users’ needs through creative and collaborative research approaches.

Marc is a renowned leader in research methods designed to blend with your organization’s culture of design and decision-making.

The Day’s Agenda

Morning

Implement groundbreaking listening and conversation techniques

  • Identify when, why, and how to effectively use the World Café technique.
  • Expand your research toolkit to listen and gather all points of view about customer needs.
  • Facilitate group meetings to maximize the customer insights collected from conversations.

Run a Collective Story Harvest to uncover rich user insights

  • Use the power of storytelling to glean insights about your current user experience.
  • Identify common patterns and unmet needs using advanced synthesis techniques.
  • Surface more from your customer stories, employing lenses from a variety of perspectives.

Afternoon

Expand conversations with Situation Models

  • Learn a structured way to deepen conversations with your users and stakeholders.
  • Use art-based methods to bypass users’ internal filters that often hide insights.
  • Uncover game-changing opportunities users struggle to articulate in interviews.

Unpack your toolkit of collaborative facilitation methods

  • Learn how to run anecdote circles, empathy walks, and participatory narrative inquiries.
  • Collect proven tips for successfully applying creative facilitation techniques at your office.
  • See examples of organizations who have used these techniques to deliver breakthrough products.

Uncover novel research methods to collect deeper insights

Expand your portfolio of research tools to foster effective conversations about your customers

You will practice a wide range of techniques only used by the most adventurous researchers. Learn how to work more collaboratively with your team to understand the users’ biggest needs.

Break the pattern of repeating the same conversations without any new lessons learned

All too often, the same stakeholders assert their voice and opinions about the users, while others stay quiet. You’ll see how to facilitate effective conversations for involving all team members and generating a well-balanced view of the customer.

Get to the essence of the users’ problems with art-based techniques

We hear it often when discussing research findings: “I feel strongly about this, but I’m having trouble finding the right words…” With techniques such as Situation Modeling and Participatory Narratives, you will learn how to help team members articulate deeper insights about your users.

You’ll see how to:

  • Influence your organization with an innovative and strategic research plan
  • Involve your internal stakeholders in the process of understanding users
  • Gain advanced methods for in-depth conversations with users
  • Confidently facilitate effective group meetings
  • Move from debate to open dialogues with the World Café
  • Use storytelling and modeling techniques to gather rich insights about customers’ unmet needs

Use conversation as a strategic research tool

Add new and innovative techniques to your research toolkit

By expanding your toolkit beyond interviews and field observations, you’ll get to the nuance and subtlety about users that isn’t possible with traditional methods. You will come away with methods for collecting insights about feelings, emotions, and contextual elements to inform your product decisions.

Communicate more effectively with non-designers, stakeholders, and influencers

Involve all collaborators to meet your users, collect insights, and cultivate user empathy. You’ll see how assigning your team to focus on different dimensions of the users’ experiences leads to a significant increase in team buy-in and involvement.

Work more strategically throughout your organization

By taking advantage of advanced facilitation and conversation techniques, you’ll cultivate stronger, more productive relationships with the decision makers who matter most within your organization.

Create breakthrough product and service experiences

Employ innovative research and facilitation techniques to transform your industry with revolutionary products and services ahead of your competition.

Expand your research skills through hands-on practice

Throughout the day, you will practice and refine your skills with innovative research techniques. Marc will provide facilitation guides and tips for implementing all of the techniques with your team.

Marc Rettig Expert, Advanced Design Research Methods

Photo of Marc Rettig

Here’s what Jared says about why he chose Marc for UX Immersion: Interactions…

Every time I talk with Marc, I find myself hanging on every word. His thought process about how we can grow our design research capabilities is far beyond anyone I’ve ever met. Yet he can bring these ideas to such an incredibly compelling level that I’m ready to go off and do everything he suggests.

Marc has built his expertise by working with his clients at Fit Associates, where he’s established a worldwide reputation as a leader in ethnographic research. Marc blends his clients’ cultures of design and decision-making, to help their companies make products better for people. He’s pushing the boundaries of design education at both the Carnegie Mellon School of Design and the MFA in Design of Social Innovation at the School of Visual Art in NYC.

Spend a full day in Marc’s workshop and I’m sure you’ll come away with an expanded toolbox of research techniques that will drive your designs in entirely new directions.