Facilitation in the broadest sense means helping or enabling people to achieve a positive outcome. It’s an important and often under-appreciated skill for designers and other UX professionals to gain. It’s especially important as more teams embrace lean UX practices, which shift emphasis away from big deliverables toward facilitating outcomes such as continuous discovery and shared understanding.
Any kind of working session or meeting in which design decisions are being shaped needs a facilitator. The authors of Sprint, the popular book about running five-day design sprints, compare the facilitator’s role to Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven: The facilitator “keeps the heist running.” But you don’t need to run a week-long workshop to benefit from facilitation skills.
As a UX researcher, I use facilitation skills every time I lead an interview, usability test, client meeting or team presentation. You can facilitate kickoff meetings to improve shared understanding of a project’s goals and potential challenges. You can facilitate presentations to elicit more productive questions and feedback. Even impromptu discussions and group whiteboard sessions would benefit from better facilitation.
There are already a lot of great books, articles and resources about methodologies and techniques to use for collaboration. This article is focused more on developing the soft skills to feel more comfortable facilitating UX design, research and strategy sessions. You don’t need to be a full-time facilitator or leader, or even a designer. These skills can be used by anyone in any role to inject more productive collaboration throughout their design process.
Why Facilitation Matters Link
A designer or design team working in isolation is becoming less and less common. Sure, there are still places where a lone designer receives a brief and spends a few days or weeks on it before handing it off for someone else to implement. But more often than not, that initial exchange is just the start of a longer series of conversations.
By collaborating with [clients] on the design, you accomplish two things: You give them a sense of control, and you educate them about the design process. This allays their fears because the process will no longer be unknown to them.
– Paul Boag, “Designing With Your Clients“
In addition to the psychological benefits of collaboration, there’s an increasing need for consultation and communication throughout the design process. The knowledge that informs UX design is spread across several domains, and it changes constantly. Every week brings new technical capabilities, new competitors, new design patterns, new user expectations, new business needs and new stakeholder demands. There’s no way any one person can maintain a deep and current understanding of them all. The result is that UX design is constantly trying to hit a moving target.
Even if you have a steering committee and processes in place to manage change, the knowledge enshrined in user research reports, strategy presentations, technology roadmaps and design style guides will quickly be lost and forgotten without ongoing communication and collaboration by their various creators and champions.
Most of my recent work has been done on large web projects, including website redesigns for several colleges and a municipal government, and an e-commerce website for a manufacturer with over 3,000 products. In these types of projects, questions come up almost every week that no single person can confidently answer. For example, exactly what should go in the main menu? That depends on the style of menu. What style of menu should we use? Is it going to be a mega-menu? Well, that depends on the answer to the first question, what needs to be in it? These kinds of decisions rarely move forward (at least not in the right direction) until the right people put their little pieces of the map together to find the way. Someone needs to facilitate that discussion.
Without a facilitator, collaborative environments are susceptible to something called the bystander effect. Imagine coming across a crowd of people watching a garbage fire in the middle of the street on a nice summer afternoon. “Huh, this is so weird,” everyone thinks to themselves. “One of these people must have it under control.” It’s natural to assume that someone in that crowd must have either started the fire for a good reason or called the fire department. But everyone is thinking the same thing. Nobody’s really in control or taking initiative. That’s the bystander effect.
Something similar happens when unexpected issues arise in teams. Everybody knows that something needs to be done, but they assume someone else must be responsible. Someone has to take the initiative to get the situation under control. Like a scrum master or other “servant leader,” the facilitator of a discussion or collaborative session keeps things moving toward a positive outcome.
Collaborative design is still a designer-led activity. It’s the designer’s responsibility not only to call these meetings but to facilitate them.
– Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Lean UX
When To Use Facilitation Link
CHANGE MEETINGS TO WORKING SESSIONS LINK
The more comfortable you become with facilitating, the more opportunities you’ll find to practice it throughout your process. For example, kickoffs and presentation meetings can become facilitated working sessions. Working sessions generate more immediate feedback and, in some cases, even generate artifacts such as preliminary journey maps, research plans and wireframes — produced in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks.
Working sessions or workshops are technically a type of meeting in the sense that “people are meeting,” but they don’t deserve the same level of disdain that meetings receive. What differentiates a working session from a traditional meeting is that — wait for it — you work on something. Traditional meetings are where people talk about what should happen; working sessions are where things actually happen — decisions and plans are made, artifacts and deliverables are created, outcomes are achieved, progress is made.
This isn’t to say that every coordination meeting or presentation is a waste of time. I’m also not an advocate of turning every discussion into a brainstorming session or “dot-voting” exercise. In the spirit of lean UX, be open and adaptable to whatever will achieve the best outcome, rather than getting fixated on specific artifacts and procedures.
If the team is vigorously debating something that will be costly to change, like whether or not to spend four months building an interactive product-selection tool, it’s worth spending time (possibly even a full week, as in a design sprint) making sure that everyone agrees you’re building the right thing. But if the team is gently debating something small that’s easily changeable, like which order to list items in a menu, it’s probably best to provide informed recommendations, quickly address feedback and move on.
TYPES OF WORKING SESSIONS LINK
Learning when to use which facilitation method requires a bit of trial and error. Fortunately, a fairly robust body of knowledge is available on types of sessions and activities you can use to get started. Note that specific tactics for each type of working session or activity will vary, but the fundamental soft skills required for each are the same.
Here are some collaborative activities that can be used at different stages of work:
- Project kickoff
- Sketch a preliminary customer journey or experience map.
- Brainstorm preliminary research hypotheses and questions.
- Research and discovery
- Invite team members and stakeholders to observe user interviews.
- Collaboratively analyze findings.
- Strategy
- Collectively rate and prioritize requirements, ideas or recommendations.
- Sketch a preliminary product roadmap or action plan.
- Information architecture
- Run a card-sorting exercise to group content into categories or taxonomies.
- Wireframing and design
- Sketch and compare low-fidelity wireframes as a group (as in a design studio or design charrette).
- Collaboratively create moodboards or collages.
- Usability testing and validation
- Let team members and stakeholders observe user tests and collaboratively analyze findings.
In addition to the project steps listed above, periodic or unplanned discussions inevitably come up and would benefit from collaborative decision-making. Prioritizing work to complete before a deadline or within an upcoming sprint is a common example. Another example is dealing with unexpected technical issues that require design changes or compromises — which might mean additional decisions, approvals or consultations to work out. These types of conversations would all benefit from the facilitation skills outlined below, even if they happen in an ad-hoc way at someone’s desk or remotely.
How To Improve Your Facilitation Skills Link
BE YOURSELF — ONLY BETTER LINK
Chances are that you didn’t become a designer or researcher because you love to facilitate group discussions. When I had to start facilitating workshops, I was terrified. At the time, I was content to sit at my desk, working with headphones on. But I found ways to be myself in front of a group, which made me more comfortable and actually carried over to other aspects of my work. It helped that I eventually had a facilitation coach who stressed the importance of personal authenticity and who validated a lot of what I was trying to do.
A facilitation style that works for the person in marketing or HR or senior management (or for your colleague who did eight conference talks last year) might not work for you. Don’t worry about being as charismatic or polished as others. The goal of facilitation isn’t to persuade people, as in a pitch meeting, nor to awe and inspire them to change the world, as in a TED talk (though, there happen to be some facilitators who can do that and use it to their advantage). The goal of facilitation is to help people (or help them help you) solve a problem. Let your source of confidence be your understanding of the process and your ability as a professional to translate inputs into positive outcomes.
Your approach to facilitation should reflect your creative process in general. For example, I hate delivering scripted, formal remarks. I don’t trust them; I expect change. I’d rather respond to immediate feedback and explore new ideas and iterate on the fly. So, I have a “move fast and break things” facilitation style, which seems chaotic to some people, but it works for me because I’m used to thinking and working that way 365 days a year. Other people might have a more methodical facilitation style, and it works for them because it fits with how they’re used to thinking and working.
It’s important to note that your own personality is just a starting point. As a facilitator, you’re also responsible for accommodating other people’s needs and styles. Someone who’s better at controlling the room might need to work on letting things flow more organically, listening and responding to change. Someone who’s a great listener might have to work on being more assertive, or maybe more organized. The perfect facilitator is as rare as the true UX generalist who can do it all. Getting comfortable with your own facilitation style means learning how to build better bridges with others.
BUILD AN ADAPTABLE FACILITATION TOOLKIT LINK
The best facilitators have a full toolbox of tricks. They know when the whiteboard works and when it constrains the conversation. They understand how to use sticky notes or index cards. They know how to separate valuable explorations from wasteful digressions.
– Jared Spool, “Five Indispensable Skills“
To be adaptable, you need a diverse set of activities, tools, resources and techniques. Sprint is a great resource for planning five-day design sprints or even just parts of design sprints, like a team-sketching session. Other resources, such as Gamestorming, Mind Tools and IDEO’s Design Kit have hundreds of activities and techniques to try. You don’t need to try or learn all of them, but the more techniques and activities you’re comfortable with, the easier it will be to manage different situations.
Get comfortable facilitating different types of activities:
- Open discussion
Sometimes the easiest and most effective form of facilitation is simply to let people talk. Even if you have a full day of hands-on activities planned, expect some free-flowing discussion to emerge (unless explicitly forbidden in a particular activity), especially around the start and end of activities, when concerns may be raised and shared understanding is being formed. - Semi-structured discussion
Often, simply letting people talk isn’t enough to make progress. Without some structure, discussion might stall, veer off topic, become dominated by one or two people, or dwell on the same points for too long. A rough framework that breaks a problem or situation into separate parts will help rein in wayward talk and nudge people toward positive outcomes. Break down a broad topic or question into smaller chunks. Instead of asking something like, “What do you think of the website?” ask, “What are the website’s strengths? What are its weaknesses?” - Structured activities
A lot of people prefer more structure. For example, instead of a semi-structured discussion, you could have people write ideas on sticky notes and place them on a template, such as a 2 × 2 matrix, an empathy map, a flow diagram (such as a journey map or a service blueprint) or a business-model canvas.
Also, explore different ways to facilitate structured activities:
- Hands-on activities
People are energized when they get to see something physically take shape. Even if all you’re doing is arranging sticky notes and colored dots on a whiteboard, there’s something satisfying about thinking with your hands and getting a concrete sense of progress being made. Getting people out of their chairs and moving also helps everyone stay awake after lunch. - Individual work
Research suggests that people generate more ideas when they have time to think for themselves before discussing with a group (see Fast Company’s “Brainstorming Doesn’t Work; Try This Technique Instead“). Some people refer to the technique as brainwriting (a term coined by psychologist Paul Paulus). While brainstorming advocates such as Bob Sutton have questioned that research, I find that short periods of individual work help control the pace of a session and give me a chance to collect my own thoughts when things are moving quickly. - Team breakouts
It’s usually best to avoid working with groups larger than 8 to 12, but sometimes it’s unavoidable or preferable to the alternatives, like spending additional weeks of effort on a more fragmented process. Activities that involve breaking the group into smaller teams or pairs are essential to making sure that everyone can participate and that you finish on time. Breakout activities also help you to tackle specific types of work that needs to be done, like creating content or building components of a prototype.
[Source:- CIAT]
