My company EnergyScoreCards has been taking part in the LUXr program in the fall of 2011. LUXr stands for Lean User Experience Residency, and it’s a program that helps companies to think through their user experience and product issues in semi-structured format.
The program is 10 sessions over 10 weeks. Ours was on a Friday from 10 to 4. Each session starts with an external speaker talk for an hour about their area of expertise, whether user testing, or agile product management, metrics, or other topics relevant to lean startups. The speaker often stays for a few hours or even the whole day, which allows the team to talk to the expert about their specific issues.
After the speaker we do a quick standup meeting about progress made since last week and what the team is planning to do for the day. After that it’s whatever your team needs to work on. Josh Seiden, the program director, is around to help you work through blocks, or to help you frame a particular problem you are working on. He has great experience both on the UX side and product side, so he is very helpful. Our team has worked on big changes in navigation to our product, new alerting infrastructure, some smaller page redesigns. Most importantly, the program helps the team build up capacity and gives us confidence to continue doing a better job both managing the product and thinking of way to improve user experience.
LUXr program itself has many branches, including in San Francisco. Their mission is to help startups become better at producing usable products, and in addition to the residency programs, they have other workshops, and planning things like shorter video classes and other things.
Lastly, I already mentioned that Josh has been amazing as director of the program. Seems like he intents to stay involved with LUXr, but he just announced a new venture, Proof, a new product development studio, which sounds amazing (his two partners, Giff and Jeff, were speakers at LUXr, so we got to know them a bit – they are awesome). They have the dream team of New York UX / Product People working with companies to help them design better products and user experience.
I really enjoyed the LUXr program and would recommend it to any company that feels they need to improve their UX and / or product processes, no matter what stage they are in. Of the four companies in this batch, two companies were pretty late stage (we are two and a half years in with a reasonably mature product), and two were just starting up.
