From Kat Matfield’s session “User Research in an irrational world”:
1) If at all possible, look at records of what people actually did in the real-world situation, (screen recordings, chat logs, …) instead of putting them into a research situation (in which they will always pay more attention) or asking them to remember (memory is extremely unreliable).
From Gez Smith’s session “Agile Marketing”:
2) Maybe 1 thing goes viral per year. Rest is planted and pushed with fake accounts
From Darci Dutcher’s session “Running killer workshops without killing yourself”:
3) If you use dot-voting and don’t limit the number of votes you get information about the long tail of interests. Not relevant in short retros but maybe for a longer workshop.
4) A retro is a sub-kind of workshop. I never thought of retrospectives in those terms. Nice realization.
From my own session:
5) Putting your cell phone near a mic is a really bad idea (audio feedback)
I also learned about Jeff Patton’s Cups, the sticky note bonus shape and that I’ll try to remind more speakers to repeat the audiences question before answering it.
All in all, a very nice (knowledge) haul 🙂