Beyond rocket surgery: Building a culture of user engagement

For this first meetup in a while we'll have not one, but 2 speakers:
Andy Morris will explain us how he's organising UX in the short development cycles forced by agile methods, and Steve Krug will talk (remotely, from Boston) about how Andy and his team have practiced - and built on - the usability testing method he described in his book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy".

Andy's abstract:
Onshape is committed to putting our users at the centre of our Agile design activities. But building a professional 3D CAD application that runs on a web browser is technically challenging, so too are the complex workflows that engineers and designers undertake in their daily work. We are all too aware that working under short development cycles and having so much functionality to validate could create a vicious circle. But how do you make that circle virtuous?

In our research we heard a frustration repeated by many users of other CAD systems: “I asked for enhancements but no one seemed to listen. So I stopped asking”. We doubled down on solving this. Onshape has now created a company-wide culture of early usability testing and integrated support applications to keep our users happy and engaged regardless of location. In this talk I’ll describe the tools and techniques we use as well as how we have built upon “Rocket Surgery Made Easy” to help our developers get more involved in the process of fixing usability problems.

Steve's abstract:
I wrote “Rocket Surgery” to try to make it as easy as possible for people to do their own usability testing. And it’s been really gratifying to hear from all kinds of people who’ve been using the book to do just that.

I’ve been fortunate to be connected with Onshape since it started, because the founders (who I knew from back when they founded SolidWorks) have been more committed to making their product usable than anybody else I know. I’ll talk a little bit about some of the key principles in “Rocket Surgery” and how Onshape has implemented them...and even extended some. And hopefully we’ll have time for questions.

We're looking forward to seeing you!