Facilitated Leadership

This workshop has already happened. But don’t worry, it will be happening again in the future. For now, please see our list of upcoming workshops.

Creating effective designs isn’t hard. What’s hard is getting designs through organizations and out into the world.

Effective collaboration is essential for getting UX work done. The best UX designers do more than exhibit technical skills, they’re also effective facilitators. They help their teams build a shared understand about design problems. They include other people in their design process. They move their teams forward when the teams get stuck.

A UX designer who involves other people at the right time is more likely to help the team reach their goals. Good designers know how to recognize opportunities for when collaborative activities can move the design team in the right direction and how to facilitate these activities.

What You’ll Learn

• Effective collaboration is critical to the design process.
• Facilitation is an important skill for UX designers to have.
• It’s important to include people outside of the design team in the UX design process.
• The concept of pyramid evangelism.
• Effective techniques used to facilitate an activity.
• How to choose the best activity for a team based on the goals they need to meet.
• The challenges of facilitating different types of people in groups.
• The benefits of “wait time” after asking a question.
• What microleadership is, and how it works.
• The benefits of public recording.
• The roles of divergence and convergence in facilitated activites.
• The complications that arise when one or more team members are remote, and how to deal with these circumstances.
• Collaboration tools useful for facilitating remote activies.

Presented by Kevin Hoffman

Kevin M. Hoffman is an information architect and design strategist that has been building web stuff since 1995. He is the author of the forthcoming Rosenfeld Media book, “Meeting Design for Makers and Managers.”

He founded the distributed design network Seven Heads Design, a network of highly experienced digital design thinkers who operate independently but love working together. Seven Heads clients have included Walmart, Nintendo, Carnegie Mellon University, Central Park of NYC, and public media companies such as WNYC and WHYY. Formerly he served as Experience Director under Jeffrey Zeldman’s Happy Cog, winning awards for work with clients like Zappos, Harvard, Fonts.com, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.