(From uie.com’s All You Can Learn library, requires highly-recommended subscription.)
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Frame the Question
4 things frame collaboration:
- What you’re doing
- What you’ll end up with when you’re done
- Why it’s important
- How you’ll do it
This sets up 3 important expectations:
- Makes others feel like participators and shifts them from observer to collaborator mode
- Knowing what they’ll end up with and why it’s important encourages them to invest in the discussion and pay attention
- Explaining what you’re doing and what to expect allows the team to trust you while you work towards your goal
Plan the workshop so that you finish with an outcome, either a single thing or a list of things:
- Words
- Diagrams
- Sketches
- Worksheets or canvases
Sample set up:
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Facilitate the Discussion
Facilitation has four stages:
Open & generate (divergent thought)
- Open-ended questions
- Anything goes!
- Create as many options/ideas as possible—you’ll edit them later
Analyze
- Sift through options to learn more about each one
- Probe w questions such as
- What is this made of?
- How does this work?
- Where does this come from?
- Can you provide an example?
Synthesize (convergent thought)
- Discover affinities among various options
- Probe w questions such as
- How are these options similar?
- Different?
- Related?
- Create docs such as affinity maps, diagrams, relationships across time etc
Decide & close
- Which ideas are most important?
- Most feasible?
- Which do we like the most?
- What are we carrying forward?
- Prioritize and vote on the outputs of the workshop
Probing
Probe at both divergent and convergent points to help the team understand the problem space
Ask questions to create new possibilities:
- What have we missed?
- Are there other ways to think about this?
- Can we apply similar ideas from other contexts?
- Are there additional possible inputs—or new ways to think about existing inputs (divergent)?
- In what ways can we compare inputs (convergent)?
Sample Activities
- Wrongs activity
- What do you hate about the current system?
- What’s broken?
- Missing?
- Outdated?
- Insufficient?
- Annoying?
2. Goals activity
- Captures goals from every indv in the group so nothing gets lost
- Analyze goals as you collect them and group by similarity
- Prioritize and vote on goals to achieve the project’s goals—probably short term, medium and long term goals probably aren’t decided here
Collaboration
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Austin’s website has more resources on running UX workshops so check it out at agux.co
About Austin Govella (from uie.com): Austin Govella is an Experience Director with Avanade Digitalwhere he helps enterprises reinvent how they connect with employees and customers. Prior to Avanade, Austin worked for Comcast Interactive Media where he worked on early versions of Comcast Xfinity. In 2009, he co-authored the second edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Webfor New Riders/Peachpit, and he’s spent the last few years studying how agile teams, lean companies, and user experience designers can work better together.
Austin Govella has designed successful user experiences for the web and mobile since 1998.
