UX Australia 2012

Description

If you’re a UX practitioner trying to move an organisation toward a UX-sensitive, design-thinking, quality-minded transformation, you’ve got your work cut out for you. Perhaps you’ve just come from UX Australia, and are fired up with the inspiring stories from your peers. You’ve taken workshops on form design, visual thinking, and idea generation and are ready to spread the gospel!

But you get back to the home office and its business as usual. After a few weeks the conference is forgotten and you’re in a meeting room with the Dev lead and he’s telling you why ‘undo’ is too expensive in terms of SQL calls to implement.

One way to inject some excitement back into your life is to volunteer to lead a workshop for your co-workers. You’ll get some quality time with a group of your coworkers, maybe even a few bigwigs, and you can help move that culture by dint of the sweat of your brow.

People LOVE workshops! Perhaps you’re attending one at UX Australia! They’re social, informative, and usually there’s nibbles.

This half-day workshop provides hands-on activities and insight gleaned from a series of workshops Jay’s designed and run at Atlassian. These workshops were attended by developers, product managers, designers, and QA engineers. Jay collected feedback after each one and strove to improve the next one based on participant response.

Although Jay’s attended dozens of workshops at conferences over the years, some of the considerations going into the communications strategy of the workshop had eluded him. He’s learned the hard way which points to iterate, and reiterate, and reiterate, as the workshop progressed.

Workshop structure

Goals: We’ll work through exercises to tease out the marrying of your goals and participant goals. What are your goals? What are the participants’ goals? Some creativity is required to match these up sometimes…

Design: We’ll talk about structure: about the introduction, instructions, hands-on work, and summation. What kinds of things do people like doing? We’ll work through pacing, sequencing, breaks, surprises, and rewards.

Preparation: We’ll cover props and prepared materials that lend to the polish and success of the workshop.

Facilitation: We’ll work through guidelines on: How far can you push people? How much rope do you give them? How do you manage that bored and disaffected dude at the far table? And most importantly, what to do with yourself while everyone’s busy with the scissors and glue.

Outcomes

• You’ll work through exercises that give us an opportunity to discover the hidden workshop in you or refine ideas you already have.
• We’ll run through a set of exercises that you can use to help flesh out your workshop structure and keep the focus on learning and doing rather than passive listening.
• A list and a strategy for finding resources and inspiring examples from other disciplines like Ted Talks and improv theatre.
• How to communicate the goals of your workshop so the participants are clear on what they’re learning.
• How to shift your thinking from talking to facilitating.
• You’ll leave with the Workshop Design Kit which summarises the workshop and is a reference for building your own workshops.

Target audience

This course makes no assumptions about the participants except that you have the willingness to engage your coworkers or clients in a fun way and share what you know, or even what you don’t know. Designing a workshop is a great way to learn!

Materials provided

Workshop Design Kit – a digital and/or paper set of checklists, worksheets and hints that you can take with you to use as your launch your workshopping career.