Peter Merholz Asks Jess McMullin About The Designer as Facilitator

by Peter Merholz

August 23, 2007

Peter Merholz had the chance to speak with Jess McMullin, Principal at nForm, a user experience design consultancy. Jess presented “Smoothing the Way: The Designer as Facilitator” at our UX Week 2007 conference.

Peter Merholz [PM]: Good morning, Jess. Tell us about your session and what you mean when you say “The Designer as Facilitator.”

Jess McMullin [JM]: Good morning, Peter. In our practice, the thing that has become a barrier for us in delivering successful projects is how our clients and the different stakeholders on a project work together. In the last couple years we have focused on saying, “How can we better work with a business in order to understand what they really need and to deliver a successful project?” The things that derail projects are much more around different people having competing priorities, really different understandings of what the project is trying to accomplish, different visions for the project, and a general lack of alignment between decision makers and important internal constituents in the organization. So the session at UX Week is about working with internal teams to overcome that set of competing viewpoints and get people moving in the same direction.

PM: That is interesting because I’ve felt for a long time that one of the most significant roles of the user experience practitioner is as the facilitator. Oftentimes people think of designers as being the creators, the genius with the spark, or the person who comes up with the ideas. But with our design methods, the process is best done with a larger team and the role of the user experience person is to facilitate the team working together. My question for you is: Why, of all the roles on project teams, has facilitation seemed to locate itself within design or user experience?

JM: The reason that a designer ends up being the facilitator is because all those skills that we’ve cultivated — empathy, listening, observation, synthesis, creating tangible artifacts that people can reference and discuss — and we would use in a user-centered perspective, we can use to facilitate a consensus and get people talking from their different frames of reference so that they can actually articulate what’s important to them.

PM: Companies hire meeting facilitators to come in and address the issues you’re raising here. What is it that a designer brings to the discussion that is perhaps lacking from the typical meeting facilitation?

JM: A lot of the work that we do as facilitators is using particular design methods to help people communicate. For example, a simple tool that we use is sketching; we have people sketch their ideas for what’s going to happen and then to share in the group why they drew what they drew. The point isn’t to actually draw the solution, but to help people articulate what is important to them about the project, and by doing several iterations of that, people come to a greater shared understanding, and that kind of design tool set is I think what sets the designer apart.

PM: How does the idea of tangibility fit within what you’re saying?

JM: When something’s concrete, then people are able to refer to it much easier. Human beings struggle with abstract concepts that are ephemeral, like a vision or a mission statement, people struggle cognitively to relate to them. When we start to use concrete artifacts, tangible constructions, such as a sketch, a fake product box, a poster, or even press releases and newspaper articles describing some future state, that tangibility gives people something that acts as a shared reference, so that they can actually point to it and say, “Oh, I had this understanding about that.”

There’s a certain requirement when you’re creating a shared reference, a touchstone. It needs to be able to talk to people at their own level, and it needs to be able to speak to, say, technical requirements, business concerns, and the concerns of the customer. We create concrete artifacts so that people can actually start to see their own and other people’s viewpoints. That’s why concrete work is so important in the facilitation practice that we do.

PM: So tangibility is important so that people can relate to it from their own personal viewpoint, but you mentioned something else there, too, when addressing the “future state.” What has your experience been with future states and what is important about imagining the future, as opposed to simply describing kind of the current state?

JM: We use a few different tools to think about the future. Some of them are very concrete, like creating the artifacts from the future, and some of them draw on more traditional planning techniques, like scenario planning and back-casting, and the thing that’s really critical about exploring the future and creating tangible instances of what that future might look like, you’re able to navigate towards something that’s much more interesting and much more compelling and innovative for your organization.

PM: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in trying to help organizations with this kind of future state visioning and how have you kept people on the right path?

JM: There are a couple important things. One of them is that we talk about outcomes as the core of the future, and we try to map the activities and the product into generating outcomes, and that results-based approach is something that’s valuable in managing future state vision. Also, we don’t look at necessarily just one future state — when we take an approach like scenario planning, we’re actually looking at alternative futures and we’re able to recognize that some activity might take us more towards this set of outcomes versus this set of outcomes.

And, finally, I think that it’s well worth thinking of the future as a prototype, a sketch of the future but certainly not a prophecy or infallible crystal ball. We need to recognize that it is to help manage expectations around future state.

PM: Do you have a story of how you’ve used your facilitation tools on a specific project?

JM: We we’re working with a large educational institution, who has a top-down mandate from the executives to do great new things with the web, and they’ve made some key strategic decisions, but there was certainly not a clear understanding of what the web can do for that client.

They wanted to do great things, and they had great ideas, and they asked if we could help in developing a more concrete vision. In that work, we used two particular tools.

We used what we call experience maps, where we did some research and created a very large — as in put it up on the wall large — pictures of what a typical student or faculty member’s experience was like. Then we used that as the key focus in a series of workshops with the business about whether this is the right experience, and what kinds of things do you see happening in order to support the right experience in the future.

The other thing we used with them is something called a results chain, where we identified four key success metrics and the outcomes we wanted to generate. Then we worked backwards from those outcomes into the kinds of activities the organization will need to undertake. As we work backwards, we look at the interim outcomes for each of those activities so that you can see how eventually you will get to this final set of outcomes. We’re able to demonstrate the value of the different activities that the web team there will be conducting, not only as a final set of outcomes but the interim benefits to the organization and to end-users, as well. So in working with them, we’re able to have a much clearer articulation of what needs to happen in order to achieve the great goals that they have there.

PM: Thank you Jess, you’ve done some great work.