Adobe Max 2015 - Full-Day UX class

There was a time Adobe and I were basically joined at the hip. I was an Adobe Certified Instructor for 18 years. I ran 5 user groups, including a UX IxDA one. I was an Adobe Freelance Professional where they'd send me around the country doing demos and such. Finally, I was an ACP or Community Professional. We were the ones who would write articles, I did video tutorials and helped tech edit a few books. I also spoke at a lot of conferences, so I was asked to do a full-day UX workshop.

While I was at Highway 22, I came up with a deck of cards that when in the company of stakeholders, they allowed you to come up with a design plan. First you put down the starred cards, and then depending on what you knew, and didn't know, you'd lay down cards until you had what you needed. The front said what it was, while the backs show the What it is, the Why you'd do it, and the How for the Junior designers.

What was the problen Consumer Health was trying to solve??

That is a good question and one we really didn't know in the beginning. The concept of what Consumer Health meant to IBM was most likely one of partnership with various businesses wanting to take advantage of Watson.

No one I initially worked with had ever worked with UX prior. So it comes to no one's surprise that I was completely ignored in the beginning. We met every week, and otherwise, I wasn't invited to any initial meetings with the team. So here is what I did.

How it was solved solved it

This is what I proposed for the class, but as an app. One that would a) let you put the plan together, b) allowed for those elevator rides with the VP wondering where the project was at as red green and yellow for the project at a quick glance, and c) allowed the team to get assigned to those deliverables like a project management app.

Since it was only a day class, I gave them a current state analysis with demographics, persona, competitive analysis so they'd have research to pull from. (I'd have more pictures from the class itself, but I was teaching)

In the early morning I went over the roles for UX. I felt it was worth the time for the 60 in the class to understand the different things we do in UX.

I then went over What they needed to know before they dug in to design something. We went over the research I had given them and why it was important.

How I measured success

Starting in the early afternoon they started with the requirements, brainstorming, sketching, and then finally wireframing. I knew we didn't have any more time than that. We had presentations at the end of the day.  I hope they all enjoyed themselves as much as I did. As you can see, there were some interesting submissions.