I was counting down the days to attend the UX Intensive Berlin, expecting it to be the best representation of UX workshops in Europe. The Adaptive Path team is almost a "legend" within the field, and they managed to cover those promises with a very competent and receptive team. While I was trying to distill the main positive outcomes out of those days,  I realised I was already applying some of the techniques provided on the sessions.

My first impressions on the full four days workshop were mixed with excitement, working hand by hand with great creative people, and enjoying a city that I absolutely love... This along with a solid structure of workshops ordered by the flow of a project; Design Strategy, Design Research, Information Architecture and Interaction Design made it more than worth it.
The sessions felt nicely tied up together, finding special interest in the Design Strategy and Interaction Design days. Maybe due to the clear value I found on the exercises proposed, those two sessions made much more sense to me.

Getting some fresh air out of the UK sphere is always worthwhile, in an scenario with a wide presence from Germany and the Scandinavian countries one can observe how people experience and consider UX in slightly diverse ways...A couple of interesting observations are the spread use of Linked In to keep in touch, which I find mainly professionally focused and sort of conservative compared to the use of Facebook in the UK. As well as a low representation of twitter users...

So what are the "juicy" outcomes?

The four sessions were connected by the use case of a Boutique Hotel. Having a tangible example to work with on the different sessions helped bringing a sense of focus. But on the other hand, the particular hotel model as the ideal representation of an experience that grows and evolves, has been already used many times before. By the last day I was not quite sure whether I wanted to hear of any new developments of the "Hotel Ganache"...

Design Strategy Day - mainly focused on four key elements;
Focused, Definition, Customer Value and Scope.
It was mainly about how to find the focus and definition of a project.
Detecting insights for business opportunities, prioritizing them and defining what to create -  hence producing an articulated proposition that everybody shares and creates customer value. Even though it sounds pretty straightforward it never is in real life, we worked on a variety of techniques to make this happen.

From doing storyboards sketching first ideas, to polish them into an "elevator pitch", we were working towards a solid strategy that would guide the future stages of a project.
In this way, planning for future releases as well as being able to say "NO" to ideas that would dissolve the focus of the product, were relevant steps to achieve so.

Interaction Design Day - inspiring and fun day that combined exercises from research and models to ideation and prototyping.
The modeling exercise capturing the experience of us all arriving at the hotel was brilliant. Each of the groups took different approaches and it was very handy to get those as examples for future personal projects.
Models can be quite time consuming to get right but offer a great overview of the whole experience as it is. They should show pain points, opportunities and calls to action.

The concept of Design Principles was just so valuable, helping wrap the evaluation of ideas and moving the project forward. They combine the structure findings of research with the best ideas of ideation. They should be catchy and focused, unique to the product. Using analogies helps making them stickier.

Other bits & pieces