System Metaphor was and is an elusive practice of the original XP. It has largely been forgotten over time.

Yet in the past few years, my colleagues and I have discovered the stunning power of a genuine System Metaphor on our own shipping product. This makes us wonder why System Metaphor ever went out of vogue.

This session will explore why Metaphor matters. We’ll examine how our own Music Metaphor reshaped our flagship product, even our company, and how the right metaphor can supply the driving beat that can turn your product into a hit.

We have several techniques to become more agile when writing code. We apply design patterns and use practices like pair programming and test driven development. But how can we get more agile in the way we design the user experience of our applications?

In this lightning talk I will give an introduction to UI prototyping and how it can help your team become more agile in the way you work with user interface design.

(This session was given in Norwegian during the Smidig2009 conference in Oslo: http://smidig2009.no/talks/111)

So you deliver perfect code with no technical debt, on time and budget using Agile methods. Yet you remain unconvinced, and the resulting system is no success with users. But why? You even had an interaction designer onboard and “great UX” was part of the requirements list.

Our experienced facilitators will use examples of project failures to show how agile can mess up the best attempts at creating great experiences. Together we’ll discover why that keeps happening and what needs to be done to fix it so that your project can deliver a great experience and real business value that matters.