The entire World Wide Web shouts about the importance of user experience and
user centered design. No matter how big the company is and what methodology it follows, nowadays stakeholders think that UX is important and agree that the tests should be conducted. This should be good news for the user centered design oriented agencies. Here is the reality.

Everyone agrees, saying that user experience is essential and procedures like interviewing, prototyping, and iterative user testing are the absolutely right things to do. This glorious sentence usually follows by the word BUT. This is a few examples:

• But there is no budget for usability testing.
• But there is no time for these procedures, we have to launch as fast as possible.
• But this is too soon - we want to test something that is close to what will be launched.
• But this is too late - the launch is in a week and there is no time for any changes.
• But there are new features and changes outside of initial project scope, which means sacrificing something else. And the easiest thing to sacrifice is user experience research - hey, everyone knows how the product should work anyway, right?

Does any of this ring a bell? In this session I’m going to talk about the ways of fitting the user centered design techniques into any project, and how to make this approach beneficial for all: the client, the agency and the users. We can stay user centered no matter what!