AP UX Week '07: Smoothing the Way: The Designer as Facilitator
[Live blogging from Adaptive Path UX Week 2007. Smoothing the Way: The Designer as Facilitator by Jess McMullin]
51% of IT projects are "challenged." If you add the projects that get canned you are looking at a 2 out of 3 failure rate.
To solve this, designers need to increase their influence in organizations.
User Centered Design is such a tool.
Understand > Solve > Evaluate > Resolve
What's next? We have an opportunity to pivot. We can use the skills we already have to think about what the business needs.
Move to Value Centered Design. Where is the intersection between business goals/ context and human goals/ context. Think about ROI and Return on Experience.
Business Centered Design as a companion.
- Using design methods and tools to understand business needs and context
[Whew, these slides are fast and furious]
Traditional facilitation v. Design faciliation
We are trying to get past roadblocks, to unlock ideas, and help people reach their potential; to reach the most value.
But design facilitation is a little different, it has a point of view. It is about creating results for people. Cooperation is not the desired outcome. We are aiming for great experiences.
We need to break the review and approve cycle.
[Exercise: draw a house]
Build and design TOGETHER.
Design facilitation tools
Stickies all over the place. Sketches for everything from everyone. Product boxes to express a tangible representation of something that won't ever get a box.
Build raw things and polished things as you know more. Use backcasting to figure out the ideal outcome, then work backward from there. Think about what is required at each stage and map that out in a more formalized map.
Mental modeling is also very powerful.
Secret Sauce: 3 techniques to take home
#1 Iteration Zero
Replace the kickoff with something from out in the world.
#2 Anticipate the trough of despair
This is that part of the process where people feel overwhelmed.
#3 Near Time Turnaround
Use live capture in a meeting. Capture what is happening to preserve the process for later.
[Example of this method]
Work in pairs to guide the conversation and capture it. Feed this back to people in the meeting so you leave with a deliverable.
6 principles
CASTLE
- Codesign: do things together, avoid review and approve
- Agendas: peel back layers and explore the roots of these things. how do people really feel.
- Simple: if things are to complicated people can't participate.
- Tangible: use sketching and stickie notes
- Literal: think about how literal our representations are, we want to stay in the middle somewhere
- Evidence-based: use field research and any data you can find to guide your work
There are a range of tools we can use, and we want to pick the right tool for the job.
Do this yourself
Get in the habit of working with other people. Show your work at every stage. Peel back the layers of why we are doing what we are doing. Don't take the first answer as canon. Dig into the situation to understand what you are really dealing with.
Start with ourselves but then you need a partner in crime, a champion who supports the way that you think. Pilot your approach to start small and find success. Publicize this success to share the value of your work.
Remember
- Value centered design
- Work together to break review and approve cycle
- Partner, pilot, publicize
Q: Swimlane documents?
A: This is about showing, in parallel, user experience, business process, and technology process. Start with what you understand in a particular scenario and work with that. Then ask what needs to be in place from business and technical perspectives to make this happen. Later you can layer a scenario on top of this as a comic or series of storyboards.
Q: How do you negotiate in a situation where you have a formal process?
A: Either claim that it is part of the pre-existing model or go underground and pilot in secret.
Q: What happens when people at a high level try to get too deeply involved?
A: When senior people won't play along, you must figure out who they listen to. Work in their network of social influences. Invite those people to your sessions and demonstrate the value of your approach to those people. The other way is to show outcomes.
Q: How do you sell "designing the box?"
A: It is about the character and personality of the product. It is about constraining ideas into a particular format.
Q: How do you do this remotely?
A: One thing is that if you have sold this approach you can plan to fly people in. Remote sketching tools are useful. You can do things asynchronously with shared documents and other techniques. Use screensharing to do rapid turn-around.
It's just not as good as working in person.
Q: What's the one take-away?
A: Start working together and stop being afraid of showing your own imperfections.
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