For the second consecutive year, UX-Republic was the platinum sponsor of La Flupa UX-DAY, the annual meeting place for UX professionals.
The first day was devoted to workshops, the second to conferences. Of course, the most difficult thing is to make a choice between the 4 parallel sessions on 4 slots, because all the subjects are very attractive.
Thursday morning 8:45, we find the friendly FLUPA team as well as participants from all over France, Quebec, Belgium, and of course Luxembourg (FLUPA is the acronym of French Luxembourg User Experience Professional Association).

My day started with the workshop of bono hats moderated by Antoine Blanchard and Martin Deramecourt. It's always interesting to discover new techniques and to advance in the understanding of the springs of group creativity. Invented by Edward de Bono, the hat mechanic is simple: put on a hat and enter the corresponding state of mind to evaluate an idea or concept. As the workshop progresses, we will change hats. For example, at the stage of Red Hat, the whole group expresses its emotions while at the hat stage Grey , each expresses the facts and only the facts, rationally. The great strength of this workshop is to neutralize egos. By providing a fun environment conducive to generate empathy, this workshop promotes the appropriation of new ideas and helps to identify risks and objections at the very beginning of a project.

I also enjoyed the workshop on lean & agile management led by Damien Bonhomme and Alfred Almendra. At first, they make us live an absurd situation with “the game of red marbles” invented by William Edwards Deming. From the beginning of the workshop, we are immersed in a very inefficient system, without autonomy or power to improve. We understand that a bad system will always win against good intentions. In contrast, the second exercise "the supersonic ball" is based on thecollective improvement. It is a question of making sure to pass the ball as quickly as possible between all the participants. In a few iterations we managed to multiply our efficiency by 10. The demonstration is very strong on the empirical approach to continuous work improvement. We instantly perceive the benefits of the methods agile and lean to optimize production systems and methods.

Finally, the first day ended with a User Story Mapping workshop led by Sophie Freiermuth.
I really liked this workshop both in terms of content and form and will therefore give rise to a dedicated article. In two words: according to Sophie, the challenge of storymapping is to capture and organize the knowledge and ideas of the participants. Narrative tools allow you to capture the verbal (what is said) to transform it into a visual (post-it) and organize the action sequence on a timeline. We can then descend into each task and break it down into sub-tasks by going back and forth between the global vision and detail.
Interested in this topic ?
See you tomorrow for a second article on the Best of Flupa 2016!
Antoine Visonneau, UX-Evangelist @antoineviso @uxrepublic