Facilitating collaborative design workshops

Collaborative design workshops allow you to get decisions made in an inclusive, rapid and multidisciplinary way. They ensure that there is a shared understanding and ownership on a new project, and that it is set up for success right from the start. If you have never facilitated before, do not be fooled, it is much harder than it looks. Make sure you prepare yourself well, and before undertaking any critical workshops, give yourself a chance to get plenty of experience beforehand. Being a great designer does not qualify you to automatically be a great facilitator. There's a whole bunch of skills to develop and to fine tune before you can manage even the hardest of groups. In a collaborative design workshop, you:

• Define the MVP of the project so that everyone know what the requirements are and what the scope of the project is
• Map the customer journey so that everyone is aware of the user flow
• Sketch out the various screens that will be needed against the user flow
• Take notes of any changes to existing screens and how those will be done
• Make lots of decisions together
• Align as a team before you start building

Collaborative design is a ensures that design, dev and the business are working together and iterating quickly, so that we have a better result due to better alignment and shared information and knowledge. We also fail quickly and as a result we all learn a lot more. Collaborative design allows us to rapidly prototype things. Prototyping is is better than talking: it is thinking with your hands. It forces us to try things and learn from them rather than talking about them and trying to make to decisions based on assumptions.  We move past long-discussions in meetings into action fueled, effective workshops.

The wall is the new desk:

Get your group working together at the wall, whether it's displaying and discussing design, or creating a user journey, or brainstorming. Get them to make all work visible. Also working together at the wall means that they will be physically active, which keeps the energy up in the room.

Running these workshops is fun for the group, and also a lot of hard work. As a facilitator, there are a bunch of things that you need to do to ensure the session runs well, and that you get the most out of your time together.

Your role as a facilitator:

Think of yourself as a group nurturer and a process guide.

• Support everyone to do their best thinking
• Encourage full participation
• Promote mutual understanding
• Reach inclusive decisions
• Cultivate shared responsibility
• Reach the goals you set out to achieve
• Have breaks

How to run your session:

You need to prepare. It's really important to have a clear understanding of the goals you have for the workshop, and that you plan activities that will enable you to get to the outcomes that you need.

1. Pre-workshop

•  List your top 3 goals for the session (More than 3 in 2 hrs is usually difficult)
• Work out what you need to accomplish to get there
• Decide on activities that will allow your group to achieve these things
• Carve up your time into activities, time boxing each one meticulously (schedule breaks, introductions, ice breaker and a little spare time)

You will have a well prepared collaborative design workshop all ready to go. Making sure that you have time for each activities is really important. If you don't timebox well, your session will be rushed, out of focus, and ultimately won't allow you to succeed. If what you want to do won't fit into the time you have, then you need to be realistic and cut down on the number of things you;re trying to do in the session. It's always better for morale to have 2 shorter session than a whole afternoon in a workshop.

Supplies:

• A kitchen timer (nothing works better than a big red tomato...don't use your phone, people will ignore the ring)
• Lots of sharpies of different colours
• Sticky spots or stars
• Index cards
• Blutack
• Post-it notes
• Large roll of paper or butchers paper
• Whiteboard markers
• Water and snacks

2 - Workshop time

There are a few things that help when running these workshops, and starting with ensuring everyone understands the point of the session and knows how to behave during the workshop is really important. Never assume people will be ok to follow you blindly, you'll need to make them feel comfortable before they trust you to get them where they need to be.

• Spend 5mins introducing the session and its rules:

The parking lot (keep the team focused by writing all out of scope ideas on cards that are placed in the parking lot wall).

The timeboxes (Show then your timer, and explain why you are timeboxing and how its helpful to them).

Workshop conduct (No talking over others, no shouting, no closing down other people's ideas, no chatting during brainstorms...).

Write the activities you're going to run on the whiteboard, along with the goals of the session, and how much time is allocated to each one.

• Run an icebreaker

This is especially useful if you have a large group who don't know each other well. For groups who do, it's a great warm up. An ideal activity is giving them a sheet of paper with circles on them, and asking them to fill in each one to represent a different thing in 5mins. It gets them drawing and doesn't give them time to worry about it. Get everyone to share how many they managed to complete and show what they drew. It usually leads to some giggles and sets you off in a good atmosphere.

• Run your activities

This is where you all get to work hard. As a facilitator, it is your job to keep everyone within the allocated timebox, to keep the group energy up, to ensure everyone is heard, and that all of the ideas are on the table for consideration. You'll also need to deviate from the plan sometimes, yet still get the right outcome in the allocated time. Interrupt people when they are off topic and ask them to use the parking lot, which you will sort at the end of the session. Encourage the group to work together, support individuals who are struggling for whatever reason (shyness, intimidation, bad behaviour, etc...) and keep control of the session. If you allow the group or any individual to not play by the rules, your session will flounder very quickly.

Don't tell them what you think, help them get there themselves by asking a lot of the right questions. It will have a lot more impact and you won't have to explain everything. The best facilitators can keep it fun and focused at the same time. Practice makes perfect.

• Close the session

Make sure that you end the session on time. People will not want to come to your workshops if they have a reputation for running late. Remind everyone what the goals were and sum up what you achieved as a group today. Make sure any actions that have merged from the work have an owner who is responsible for following up or doing something. Ensure you group ideas in the parking lot, and ask the group whether a further session should take place to resolve those things. If there's no clear grouping, and lots of unrelated things, ask the group how they'd like to handle those.

3. Post-workshop

As your group scurries off to enjoy the rest of their day, you still have a little bit of work left to do:

• Photograph all the walls and whiteboards
• Throw away paper that has served its purpose
• Roll up and keep any that you need for further work
• Wipe whiteboards
• Tidy up
• Write up the workshop outcomes together with photos of the work on a collaborative space for everyone to refer to
• Have a well deserved cold drink and kick back

Resources:

Designing with Stakeholders? Accelerating the design process through co-creation (UX magazine)

Facilitating Collaborative Design Workshops – a step by step guide for rapidly creating a shared vision for execution (Jason Furnell)

Encouraging Participation and Fun During Collaborative Design Sessions (UX Matters)

Become a design leader in your organisation (Surface digital)

Design thinking and the facilitation process (Patrick Glinski)

Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Michael Doyle)

Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration (Scott Doorley)

photo credit: boxman via photopin

Automated wisdom of crowds?

photo credit: paulhami

"The wisdom of crowds" was a book published in 2004 by James Surowiecki.

"New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest)."

Surowiecki says that to be really useful a wise crowd needs:

- diversity of opinion - independence of members from one another; - decentralization - a good method for aggregating opinions.

Things have changes since 2004:

2004 in web terms was quite some time ago, and since then the first release of Linux Ubuntu was released, Apple started using intel processors, Microsoft Vista came and went, xbox was released, as was the MacBook Pro, playstation 3 and Wii. Android was launched, and so was Mac OS X and Windows 7. From a social perspective a lot of things happened since 2004 too. Social networks appeared, grew and folded and in 2006, the largest social network was MySpace, but Facebook quickly took over by 2008. Other social networks like Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, and so on became central to people's every day lives. Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Tumbler, Twitter, Posterous...they all emerged, grew and are not embedded in our lives. And all that since 2004. The web moves fast.

Crowd sourcing has since been used by countless companies, agencies and groups. Threadless is a t-shirt company that uses crows to decide on which t-shirts they print, the British government uses it, web designers, all sorts of people. It's become a commonplace tool. Tech companies have also made use of crowd sourcing to tag data.

This brings me to a cool paper doing the rounds right now:

"The Multidimensional Wisdom of Crowds" by Peter Welinder, Steve Branson, Serge Belongie, Pietro Perona from the California Institute of Technology.

"We present a method for estimating the underlying value (e.g. the class) of each image from (noisy) annotations provided by multiple annotators. Our method is based on a model of the image formation and annotation process. Each image has different characteristics that are represented in an abstract Euclidean space. Each annotator is modeled as a multidimensional entity with variables representing competence, expertise and bias. This allows the model to discover and represent groups of annotators that have different sets of skills and knowledge, as well as groups of images that differ qualitatively. We find that our model predicts ground truth labels on both synthetic and real data more accurately than state of the art methods. Experiments also show that our model, starting from a set of binary labels, may discover rich information, such as different “schools of thought” amongst the annotators, and can group together images belonging to separate categories."

They go on to describe the Amazon Mechanical Turk method (MTurk), which involves getting hundreds of workers to label data. The same method has been used to label large datasets in computer vision and computational linguistics. The annotators are not always very reliable, so the crowd model allows for these flaws to be rectified. The authors present a method that involves as few annotators as possible to achieve the same crowd corrected results.

They use a generative Bayesian model for the annotation process and an inference algorithm to estimate the properties of the data being labeled and the annotators labeling them.The paper is freely available so I won't go into detail. Their results, however, show that a machine can approximate the wisdom of crowds probabilities.

"Experiments with images annotated by MTurk workers show that indeed different annotators have variable competence level and widely different biases, and that the annotators’ classification criterion is best modeled in multidimensional space. Ultimately, our model can accurately estimate the ground truth labels by integrating the labels provided by several annotators with different skills, and it does so better than the current state of the art methods."

And yet more research:

Vassilis Kostakos from CMU presented research last year, showing that a small group are responsible for the votes and ratings on IMdb, Bookcrossings, and Amazon. Additionally, this group have varied voting patterns.

So...

If you're a neuroscientist, then should your review on a neuroscience book or some such should be weighted higher than the review of a layman? I think that it depends what kind of book you're after. If you're a layman yourself, then maybe the layman review is more useful to you. The matter of how qualified someone is to answer a question on Quora or give an opinion on a product is interesting, because it affects the quality of the overall opinions on the network. The figure that keeps coming back (from YouTube, Wikipedia, IMdb) is that 1% or less of all registered users get involved. That is indeed a small number, and how representative is that group of the whole community?

I have a good feeling that using humans for labelling tasks may be a thing of the past soon. It makes me think about how "computer" was a job description once, and doing those calculations was the job a person.