Our friends at Bolt | Peters hosted their (mostly) annual User Research Friday event last week, bringing together practitioners from the client-side as well as consultants to share stories and discuss best practices. Some of our takeaways from the day are here.
The day before the conference, Steve and Julie co-led a sold-out workshop titled “We’ve Done All This Research… Now What?” for a group of 20 enthusiastic researchers and designers.
Julie and Steve in action
The purpose of the workshop was to practice the process of moving from the data and observations we gather in fieldwork toward opportunities and ultimately to ideas.
We framed this as a research project to inform a neighborhood redevelopment/gentrification effort. Before the workshop, participants first wandered their own neighborhoods…
Thanks to Nick Leggett from Zazz for this aerial shot from their Seattle offices
Noe Valley scene (a San Francisco neighborhood) captured by Julie
…and then when we got together, they the explored neighborhood surrounding Bolt | Peters for more data.
This machine shop just down the street from Bolt | Peters has been there for decades
6th street buzzes, about two blocks from the conference
Break-out groups took the synthesis tasks to heart and, in a very short period of time, collaboratively surfaced promising opportunities and strategies and solutions to address them.
We were humbled by the gentle empathy and creativity of the folks in the room. The morning served as an inspiring reminder of just how much progress a handful of smart, dedicated people can make on seemingly-intractable problems in a very short period of time.
More amazing photos, observations, output, and thoughtful commentary can be seen on the blog we created for the workshop.
The workshop slides are below.
See previously: Steve Portigal’s presentation from User Research Friday 2008
Tags: bolt peters, Gentrification, ideation, synthesis, UI, URF10, user research, user research friday, UX, workshop
[...] Steve and Julie also co-led an aforementioned half-day workshop on the preceding Thursday (you can read more about that here). [...]
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