So before I get caught up in the helter-skelter that Agile2009 promises to be, I must hurl up some words around UXCampLondon, which ran last Saturday at the offices of eBay in Richmond.

I didn't do my usual trick of obsessive note-taking - I'm experimenting with listening instead of transcribing at the moment - but a few choice morsels made their way into my notepad.

Adrian Howard did a good session on "Why your development team needs to do User Experience", making a few lovely points:

• A small amount of design education can both empower a dev team to make good decisions and simultaneously free up UX folk to work on the tough design problems;
• It's not enough to tell developers what to do - they need to know why. This again helps them make correct micro-decisions during implementation, and I like to think it's a bit more collaborative. I likened it to the often-missed final clause in user stories: "As an X, I want to do Y, so that I can Z";
• Code is a design tool: it's an expression of abstractions;
• Technical authors can act as a good input to user experience; they have to document the how-to and frequently feel pain points and inconsistencies;

Adrian also helped, with Leisa Reichelt, facilitate a session called "Agile UX Moan". Held in that dangerous post-lunch spot, it gathered a pretty decent crowd of folks at various stages in their adoption of agile, and with positive and negative experiences to draw on. My only note from this one is a point around Product Owners acceptance of work: frequently it's tempting to accept the minimum, when a story has been delivered that matches the words on the card. Acceptance ought to come not when the minimum has been delivered, but when the card has been implemented to a requisite level of quality - and this should include a desired user experience.

Alred Lui did a nice talk on "Emotions and Design", hung off the peg of Mobile UX. He's a designer working for Motorola, and spoke about using emotions to differentiate otherwise similar products. One memorable example was audio tools: whilst a waveform editor might be the most efficient and easy way to manage editing audio files, for certain uses things like virtual effects pedals or sample-triggering soundboards themed around hip-hop actually make more sense. And he won me over with a slide proclaiming "Never underestimate the power of fun and cuteness" :)

And Cath Jones did a great skit on user journeys, which I'd really like to see repeated under looser time constraints. She did a nice job of breaking journeys down into six types: A-Z, Desperately Seeking, lattices of contextual content, Rooted To The Spot, Away We Go, and Are We Nearly There Yet. Cath - get the slides online and please rerun this one soon :) In particular I liked a metaphor she used a couple of times around having users feel like they're accelerating towards their goal - getting faster the nearer they are to it.

I ran a very short session at the start of the day, a meta-piece on the workshop Joh and I are conducting here on Thursday. I was interested in other design practices that we could plug into this, perhaps as part of retasking the workshop for a more design-literate audience. It was fantastic to have a pile of useful feedback from a group of smart, enthusiastic designers. In particular they wondered about:

• Having teams manufacture personas based on transcripts, then presenting personas back to the room to highlight differences in emphasis or interpretation;
• Thinking carefully about the wider context of use;
• A rapid concepting session early on, getting as many ideas out and discussed in a first iteration;
• Taking some of the activities from these trading cards and plug them in;

A really top day: great talks, a crowd of (mostly) new faces for me, top venue, solid wi-fi, and everything seemed, as a visitor, to have gone like absolute clockwork. I know these things are hard work, particularly when they're made to look so effortless, so can only offer thanks and hearty congratulations to the organisers. I'm already looking forward to the next one :)