Leisa Reiselt was the final speaker before lunch - she blogs at disambiguity.com.
At the end of a rather mundane presentation on the advantages of agile development over the waterfall approach, Leisa raised a challenge: how can we combine the principles of agile development with those of user-centred design? The short development cycles or sprints in agile development don't leave much time to involve real users in the process.
Leisa's suggestion is to combine development work with testing, user feedback and research in each sprint, and to lengthen sprints to make this practical. So, in a given sprint the developers would be working on the next changes in functionality, while at the same time the user design people would be getting user feedback on the development work done in the last sprint. Simultaneously part of the team would be doing research to help define what needed to be done in future sprints.
Seems like an interesting idea - certainly worth taking to the next stage and trying it out.
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