Surprised I’m still surprised

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference on Agile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can take advantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric, omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve been doing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When I was preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar to the pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of our Agile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’ve been doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me and feels like common sense.

But no fear! A number of people approached me immediately after the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about how inspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they can do things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to other experienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference to many of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.

I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put into practice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experience and the context of all of my learnings in different situations.