Workshops, the UX designer’s trojan horse

Viviana Doctorovich is a Senior Experience Designer at Clearleft. Here’s some of our notes about her talk at Interaction South America 2014.

For designers, workshops do the trick to get through the wall as the trojan horse did back in Troy.

Have you ever been a client? Been to the doctor, had someone fix your laptop?
What were you thinking? How were you feeling when you were depending on their advice to get that done?

These might be some of the feelings you had:

• Fear of the unknown
• Fear of loosing control
• Fear of miscommunication
• Lack of trust

Workshops are a great way to get through that wall.

Every second you spend on them, you are also:

• Educating
• Creating shared ownership
• Talking and listening
• Gaining trust

The workshops might be about:

• Personas
• User centered design
• Research findings
• Emphathy building
• Creating user champions
• User journeys

Workshops are always an opportunity to teach about the processes. By taking the clients and colleagues with you in this journey, when you arrive to a conclusion everyone knows which decisions were made in the way, avoiding last minute changes later down the road.

In addition to that, we need to make sure they are also fun and effective.

1. Decide your strategy

What is it that you want to get out of the workshop?
Is it some specific deliverable? Is it solving team issues? Is it something else?

2. Pick your participants

Sometimes you need people who have very specific knowledge about the users, sometimes you don’t.
You may need to include people who don’t know much about the project but are still important stakeholders you need on your side.

3. Pick your weapons

Carefully select the activities around the workshopees.
Make sure it is a great experience from begining to end. You want it to flow to achieve that you need, to provide opening activities and closing activities or a series of those combined.

It’s amazing what you can do just with this:

• Post it
• Drafting dots
• Sharpies
• Flipchart paper

There’s plenty of literature about the kind of activities you can run.

In general It’s good to mix group activities with individual activities. There’s been a lot of studies around this. The people on the group would follow whoever the most powerful on the room is, so we need to make sure everyone can speak for themselves.

4. Create the right atmosphere

Book a nice room, with natural light and wall space. The kindergarden look, works great for this. You need them to feel relaxed.
If possible, ask workshopees to dress down and comfortably Also, play around with the way you layout tables, have that in mind when you get to the room.

5. Earn your participants’ respect.

This will have an impact in the way you can relate with them.
Respect is not something that’s given, you have to earn it.

One tool to earn trust is to be assertive, in a behavioral kind of way, expressing yourself effectively while respecting others.

There’s 4 general attitudes workshopees might engage in:

• Passivity. Say yes when they don’t mean it, then explode, feel ashamed and go back to passivity.
• Assertiveness. Clearly state their opinions and feelings without violating the rights of others.
• Aggressiveness. Violate the right of others, be even insulting or humiliating.
• Passive aggressiveness. Try quietly to sabotage what’s going on, like war prisoners.

The state you want is Assertiveness. Here’s some things assertive people do:

• They use I satements, and state needs and feelings clearly
• They speak in a calm and clear tone of voice
• They don’t allow others to abuse or manipulate them
• They are good listeners.

6. Set the rules

Set the right boundaries. At the beginning ask them to turn off their devices and to keep just one conversation going on at once. Everyone must participate.
Ask them to comply with the rules. Ask them if they want to add or remove any of the rules and then post them on the wall so everyone can refer to them.

7. Warm them up

Give them an opportunity to get confortable with each other. There’s lots of resources to do this, like ice breakers or a chat pack.

8. Listen

Once they start coming up with ideas. Listen to them. Michael Bierut says: ‘Listen first, then design’. He sees himself as a facilitator.

Listening is not the same as hearing. You have to focus on the full message, including body language.

Reflecting is a good practice for active listening, it consists in repeating what the person jus said, in your words, to check if your understanding is correct or not, like “It seems to me that you’s saying…”. This gets people motivated, they feel they are being actually listened, and talk even more.

Sometimes people are not agreeing about something very important, in this situation, you can use what’s called “position, interest and need”.

• Position is what people say the want. Example: “make the logo bigger”
• Interest is what they really want. Example: “increase brand awareness”
• Need is what they must have. To get to this you have to identify stuff which can take care of their interest and analyze the alternatives. Example: “new identity”

9. Take control of difficult personalities

There’s 3 possible spaces:

• Parent (nurturing or controlling)
• Adult
• Child (free/adapted)

You need to balance them, to get to an adult space. If you find difficult circumstances, you can apply the 60 seconds rule in which nobody is allowed to speak for more than 60 seconds so everyone can participate.

10. Stay out of the way

11. Celebrate

Every time you achieve a milestone it’s very important because people leave with a sense of satisfaction. Thank them for the work they’ve done.

I hope this helps you to bring down the walls on your organization and let Interaction Design in.