What we had to learn

For example, our UX team has worked with a fashion-based company and it was a welcome climb for us. We were initially confused about their terminology and struggled a bit. However, the exposure helped us understand the client and made the rest of the workshop a smooth sail. To paint a better picture, here are some examples of what we had to learn:

• Principals: People who own the brands
• High Street: Young fashionable brands like Uniqlo and Zara

If you read these out of context, you’d probably link principal to your school’s principal, and high street to expensive brands. These are some of the terms that we learned during the workshop and had to get adjusted to.

How a typical Stampede UX workshop runs.

I don’t fancy myself as a fashionable guy, nor do I engage in finding out the latest trends, so an industry like fashion was a huge hurdle for me to leap over. What I learned from that workshop was that, depending on our interests and experience, certain industries can be easily understood while others can be alien. Learning your client’s language is not easy, but is necessary for UX.

What we had to do

If  you’re still with me, I thank you for reading thus far. At this point you’re probably interested in knowing what you need to do to better understand your client? There are a few points that I’d like to share with you from what the UX team learned as a whole.

Step 1: Be prepared

This goes without saying. In a workshop, your client expects you to lead it, and lead it well you must. As the UX facilitator, you’ll need to guide them along the agenda and be able to answer questions that are part of the UX process. While being able to answer these questions effectively on the fly is great, not all of us are gifted with this talent. Here are some tips on how to be prepared.

We bring a LOT of Post-it notes.

1. Learn the industry. This goes without saying. Start by doing research on your client, and then follow-up with their competitors. Identify what terms seem to be strange to you, but are used by the client and their competitors.
2. Have the agenda shown visibly in the room. You and your clients can refer to this to know where the workshop is presently at. Instead of this being part of your slides, have it visibly shown on a whiteboard or a signage that you can put up somewhere.
3. Make sure your materials are ready. At Stampede, we prefer to use large sheets of paper to draw our diagrams. So we always bring extra rolls of paper, markers and post-its.
4. Bring along some sweet delights. What I mean by this is to prepare a bowl of candy for both your team and the client. The sugar in these will perk the person up and also prevent them from dozing off.
5. Do a quick rehearsal of the workshop. This is especially important if you are new to running a UX workshop. Work with your team and run the workshop internally before you face the client. By doing so, you can also pick up on areas where you can improve or omit from the workshop.

Once your client sees that you are fully prepared, it puts away some of their uneasiness and allows them to open up and speak freely. This leads to their use of industry jargon.

Step 2: Listen first

The purpose of the workshop is to learn your client’s problems and to also figure out who their customers are. The workshop will go smoothly when both parties are engaged with one another, and this doesn’t happen when both sides are trying to speak. Be the listener and respond promptly. Some areas that you should focus your listening attention are:

• The problem. To fix a problem, you need to fully understand what is causing it in the first place.
• Goal of the business. By learning the client’s goal, it will be easier for you to understand their expectations.
• Who are their customers. This part is essential for creating user personas, and who better than the client to describe the customers.
• Pick up the jargon. If a word seems to be used in a way that is not common to you, chances are it is being used differently by the client. Make a physical or mental note on this.

Step 3: Speak out

What better way to understand the client’s tongue, than to speak their lingo. The second step is a crucial pre-requisite to this step, as it takes whatever you have passively learned by listening, to actively learn the language. Now some of us don’t like making mistakes, but being able to owe up to it shows that you are willing to learn. This in turn leads to the client being aware of your situation that you aren’t familiar with their world.

Client participation goes hand-in-hand with communication.

Start by using the industry terms when talking to the client, chances are you might nail it’s usage or get it wrong completely. Don’t worry, nothing bad will come out of it. Instead the client will likely correct you and give you a clearer definition of the term. While you are speaking, make sure you don’t neglect the listening part as it never really ends until the workshop is over.

Practice, practice, practice

Like learning an actual language, practice and experience will improve this skill over the number of sessions. Once you get the hang of it, you can start to dive into more varied industries that widens the types of projects that you and your company can take on.

Have you come across a client, where you had trouble understanding due to their use of jargon? Do share your experiences with us. We’d love to know more about it and in turn, learn from it.

The post Tales from the UX Workshop: Learning to Speak your Client’s Tongue appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Running a UX workshop is a user experience lesson by itself as there are several types of personalities that can be identified from the involved participants. One participant might be very eager about the project creating a dominating presence, while the other might be too shy and nervous and keeping him/herself recluse from the beginning. This is where the UX workshop facilitator truly shines, by navigating around different personalities so that every participant becomes involved. Everyone has a say in things and their opinions are valued.

Deriving from our experience running this UX process, here are a few commandments in facilitating a UX workshop.

Thou shall be super prepared

There is a quote by author Joe Poyer.

Thorough preparation makes its own luck.

While luck itself is commonly linked to a coin flip, the quote itself means that being prepared will reduce the the risk of things going wrong.

Over the years we learned that the most impactful decision to reduce risks and uncertainty was to implement a checklist. Checklists are helpful, simple, and gives everyone a baseline of things we should agree on before starting the workshop. It can cover items such as, what stationery to bring (markers, pens, post-it notes, flip-charts, tape, ideation cards etc.), a list of participants, an agenda of the workshop, a brief flow/script of facilitation and many more.

For first time facilitators, you might want to hold a quick rehearsal with your internal team a few hours or a day ahead of the workshop. As you gain more experience overtime, you may find that this is no longer needed.

Thou shall have an agenda

Having an agenda lets everyone in the workshop know what to expect, what will happen, what they need to do, and plans moving forward.

Picture this, your clients arrive on that day hoping for a significant outcome from the workshop. They have allocated a huge number of hours or days out of their busy schedule just for it. Because of this, it is of the utmost importance to let them know what will happen during the workshop and what they will need to do and expect. By having an agenda, they won’t feel overwhelmed with uncertainty and everyone’s goals are aligned throughout the session.

Thou shall delegate

This is a lesson we learned the hardest. Stampede is made up of such talented people – sometimes we individually become too ‘enthusiastic’ and do everything by ourselves! However, realistically we can only do so much. If a person is able to focus on something, the better the outcome will become.

As a workshop facilitator, you can’t be doing everything at once. Delegate someone to take care of the note-taking or recording, or someone to bring in the refreshments at the start of the workshop. Ask someone in your team to alert you if they see someone is disengaged, or one part of the session exceeds its time limit – so you can keep the workshop back on track.

Thou shall be realistic

As a rule, you cannot possibly cram all UX activities in one day.

Decide what sort of activities will take place in the workshop. If it is only about identifying the user persona and journey, in my experience, the two itself would take roughly a day and a half. If there are no prior identification to the user personas beforehand by the clients, it would probably take more days. There will be many discussions going back and forth, especially if it involves quite a number of participants. To not overwhelm everyone, dedicate at most a two-day session just for one method. Some of these methods are the user persona, user journey, card sorting, and usability testing. Schedule an additional session if another method needs to be accomplished.

Thou shall be friendly yet determined

As mentioned, facilitating a UX workshop is a user experience lesson by itself. You need to be able to exude a friendly aura so that everyone feels relaxed and comfortable with you. In general, being friendly means that we become too lenient about things. We can go overboard with time limits, or one participant might just sit and stare into the screen while the others offer feedback, or worse, they might be too shy to participate at all and we don’t want to ask them so many times as not to humiliate them.

There is no shortcut around this. The first step is to identify the personality traits every participant have. Commonly seen are, The Shy One, The Rambler, The Off-Piste, The Assertive One, The Space Cadet and The Yes Man/Woman. This article frames a good way on how to deal with each personality trait – granted it is for user interviews, but a good guide nevertheless.

Thou shall have fun!

I shall not lie, after so many workshops, I still get anxious about facilitating one after another! Above all, we should bear in mind that what we do in these workshops is to help each other. We help the client to discover the best experience their users could have, and as the custodian of their business, only they could provide us that.

As a UX workshop facilitator, if you project yourself as having fun, your positive vibes will show and rub off on the rest of the group. However, if you are anxious, that will show too.

So, smile, enjoy the attention and focus on keeping everyone involved!

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