I will talk at a high level what design research is and why we are building a Design Research department at WMF. Then, I will describe how developers can do fast and easy design research on the UI of what they are building. There will be time for discussion and question / answer.

Here is an etherpad - feel free to take notes, or add comments, etc.
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/DevSum2015_designresearch

Design research and user centered design - what is it? why do we care? I will show some examples of how it is applied (Grameen Foundation and IDEO) and what we are doing and what we are planning to do with this new little department called design research. Discussion will be seeded with ideas about collaborating to support design thinking and user centered design further into our decision making and making processes. Also, Engineers ask to learn design research and how to do it (especially usability testing) to un block UX bugs and build in a way that people are more likely to use functionality. we will discuss this too, and our path toward DIY usability testing.

Link to the presentation. Content I spoke and links to videos are in the speaker notes.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FioOPUmkLCPgRU0Yma3NJwjiPmDUNSwn-j0T6r3MGo8/edit?usp=sharing