It is time for Thinkstage 2019: the conference for those who create products. This year Thomas Geis (ProContext Consulting GmbH / UXQB) is keynote speaker and leads a workshop in the run-up of the conference:

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Keynote: Human-centred design starts with human-centred specification (Thomas Geis)

It doesn’t help, you will do it anyway (you will specify). The question is “when”. In particular in development situations, where teams are geographically distributed and stakeholders don’t necessarily clearly state, what they want (not to say that they know or agree on what their users need) a clear common understanding of what has to be delivered is crucial for the project to not end up in Babylon and become a negative reference. But stakeholders are not IT Professionals and tend to have a rather “notationless” style of articulating themselves. To reach a common understanding between stakeholders and supplier in a project asap, it is crucial is to specify the system in the way the users will anticipate it. The keynote introduces core elements of a lean requirements specification that is truly user-centred and helps sponsors and stakeholders to “get their head together” right at the beginning of a project.

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Workshop: Specify fast – for going in the right direction even faster (Thomas Geis)

In the “agile age” many projects believe, that specification is an unnecessary burdon and scetching solutions is the most effective approach to get started. However, in the beginning of every project, it is crucial to have a common understanding of the intended outcome among stakeholders. Otherwize, once alternative solutions are being sketched, discussions can become endless about which direction to take and all the sudden the need for drafting a specification arises.

Over long years, Thomas Geis has been practicing a (two to) three-day workshop approach to specify and structure the requirements in the very beginning of a project such that the specification is purely written from the perspective of its future users. This way, the specification itself becomes an appealing piece of information that enables creatives to start sketching and is being referred back to again and again in the project . In the workshop you will apply the approach right away as if you were in a real project.

You will take away:

• the how to structure real user tasks as a first step in the project
• how to assign proper user requirements to each task
• how to identify good questions for continuous user research
• how to look good as a facilitator after three days with a “cool specification”

Get more information about the workshop

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