Do you run workshops around alignment, new strategies and concept generation? This workshop will cover how to improve your ability to lead design conversations through clear and productive facilitation skills and how to empower teams to comfortably lead creative initiatives.
Throughout the workshop, we will be sharing practical stories in the form of lightning talks and guiding participants in hands-on exercises. Each section will cover key components of preparing yourself and your audience and allow participants to craft their own tools/methods for running successful exercises with their own teams.
We will also highlight some of the benefits of sharpening these skills and how they will lead to stronger research, more fortified relationships with your team, stakeholders and the potential to grow your career.
Attendees will learn how to:
Facilitators will also share victories, pitfalls and tips/tricks to preparing for the worst, navigating difficult personalities, and the ability to take people on an inspiring journey that lead to successful outcomes.
Prerequisite: This workshop is a good fit for attendees who have had some experience participating in or facilitating a workshop before.
Discovery is the portion of the project that incorporates research, analysis, exploration, and planning to align teams around a foundation. This foundation is the bedrock of subsequent design activities. It gives design teams a way to answer questions and validate their ideas. It reminds project participants what’s in scope and out of scope. It constitutes the collective background knowledge informing your specific product. Great discovery phases make for great projects. This workshop will help participants craft the perfect discovery phase.
Take-aways:
Despite the fact that over 80% of websites collect analytics data, it is almost never systematically used to support user experience. In this workshop, we show how to make your UX practice more effective by combining the quantitative power of behavioral web analytics with the qualitative power of traditional UX methodologies.
The full-day workshop will cover theory of combining web analytics and UX practices, practical training on how to use analytics, and a case study describing how analytics was used for a niche ecommerce site during a significant redesign effort.
Attendees at the end of the day will:
How do we pick ideas and features to build in our Apps? It is a little bit like the game we may have played in Kindergarten, “Duck, Duck, Goose,” where we are waiting for the someone to pick our idea and then we chase them around.
The problem is we need to get an idea in front of our potential users, stake holders, or business owners as soon as possible, and hopefully before we spend loads of time on an minimum viable product(MVP).
Prototyping allows us to test ideas quickly and determine whether they work or not, before even deciding to code. In this workshop, we will explore ways to test our ideas on paper before turning to any software tools. Once our ideas begin to take shape, then we will use Apple’s Keynote software to test basic screens and even UI animations. Last, we will use Apple’s Xcode software to create interactive Storyboards that can be used on an iOS device to allow a user to test our ideas.
Topics Covered:
No prior knowledge is expected of sketching, Keynote, or Xcode. Bring some spare paper and pens to sketch with and a Mac loaded with the latest version of Xcode and Keynote, if you would like to follow along. Lesson files will be provided.
This workshop is based on our experience working with people in many kinds of companies, organizations and communities who are not only trying to improve results, but the culture and conversations from which those results are born.
Most often, attempts to change an organization’s structure or process succeed only to the extent that they take root in the way people relate to one another and to the larger purpose that brings them together. Therefore, if you are working for change at any level, you face the challenges of working with groups of people.
In this one-day workshop, you will experience three methods or tools that can help move a group from debate to dialog, from repeating patterns to creating something new.
You are invited to step away for a day of working and learning with a wonderfully diverse group of people. The workshop will mix Midwest UX attendees – design professionals from all over the region – with people from the Pittsburgh area who work for change in companies, organizations, schools, neighborhoods, schools, and larger systems. We are planning activities so you not only learn from the material we offer, but from the experience of learning as a group.
Through activities and discussion, you will learn a mix of tools for different aspects of facilitated group work. These include:
Prerequisites: Please wear comfortable clothes and bring a notebook!
“There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.” — Benjamin Franklin
Most digital products today exist as a mesh of people, ideas, and connected devices. As technology becomes ever more ubiquitous and shapeless, understanding the purpose, vision, and core activities of our organizations is more important than ever.
A good model can help us articulate and share our understanding by creating an unambiguous snapshot of the “isness” of an organization. These models can serve as a foundational tool to craft better products, brands, and content strategies.
Workshop participants will learn to create such a model in the form of a rigid concept map. Rigid concept maps are a type of diagram made of connected nouns and verbs — little “propositions” of knowledge. These propositions combine to tell a larger story about our organizations and activities by visually describing complex systems with clear language. Concept maps help us represent domain expertise and are a great way to coordinate knowledge between stakeholders, subject matter experts, and designers.
You will learn a five-step process for creating rigid concept maps alone or with a team, as well as important constraints to maximize clarity and discovery. Next, you’ll be guided through a series of activities to develop and refine your maps. Finally, we’ll practice using our maps to tell a story and coordinate understanding with our team.
All workshop activities are done with analog tools including sticky notes, markers, and poster paper. However, the process translates extremely well to digital forms. The beauty of this modeling technique is in its simplicity and adaptability — participants might choose to add a lightweight version of the technique to their own personal process, or bring the process back to serve as the foundation of a new project.
Takeaways:
Prerequisite: The presenter would prefer that you bring note-taking devices with a small footprint (notebooks, tablets) over laptops if possible.
Your boss just told you: we absolutely need to be on the Apple Watch. You’ve heard this before. Last year it was ‘responsive.’ Before that, ‘an app.’ What’s next?
Normally you’d start sketching interfaces. Dummy boxes and lorem ipsum. Offer wireframe sacrifices to the gods of development. Your designs are cool but secretly you know: whether on wearable, mobile, desktop, or Vidichron 2000, *content* is still king. If you could only design the content before the interface, users could explore their favorite subject any way they want – a wibby-wobbly journey across time and space and devices.
Ask us how. How to restructure, reuse, and remix content, making it easier to find, explore, and share. How to involve stakeholders early, and avoid that 11th hour dump-truck of PDFs screwing up your beautiful design.
Design and development, meet information architecture and content strategy. This is an introduction to content modeling and planning. Working with your people and your content management system to bring fascinating journeys to every device.
We’re hands-on. You’ll map out a subject domain, atomize content, and draft a plan to take it to the CMS. We’ll show you how they do it at the BBC and non-profit orgs, and give you tools and secrets to take home. (Our biggest secret: start with content, not interfaces)
Whether you’re waterfall, Agile, Lean UX, or some new religion, take our repeatable process for content collaboration, research, and structuring. Your boss will feel smarter, and your content will be ready for the next digital doodad.
This workshop is for anyone working with content. This means you.
Let’s learn!
When brainstorming concepts or asking users for feedback during research sessions, we as UX professionals have one primary goal – to make the best product and user experience possible. So why on Earth should we intentionally try to come up with “bad ideas”?
Bad ideas can allow us to see design problems in new and interesting ways to help us as designers get out of design ruts, foster creativity, and develops rich insights on taboo research topics. By looking at our designs from a new angle we can critically examine current UX standards, dive deeper into understanding user pain points, and step outside our normal design-thinking process.
By attending this workshop you’ll be able to:
