You’ve shared your design. Now what? — What is the single worst question to ask after presenting a design? If you think “What did I do with my life?” you might be right. The one I am thinking of, though, is: “So what do you think?” You may have heard that it’s good to keep questions open-ended…

Somehow I got you to click on another article about facilitation. It was my clever title, wasn’t it. The last one was about formal facilitation, setting up a workshop to get structured responses from participants. In this one, I’ll talk about behaviors to get meaningful input outside a planned workshop. …

If you’re a designer these days and someone isn’t bugging you to learn to code, they’re probably telling you to work on your “soft skills”. By which they mean, “You gotta learn to work with people. Designers are facilitators.” I’m here to tell you that they’re not wrong. Facilitation is…

Facilitating is an essential skill for designers, because design–perhaps more than any other discipline in modern product development–requires engaging multiple perspectives. It’s how we make high quality, usable, and inclusive products. Facilitation is just that: a family of techniques and methods used in collaboration sessions to draw in multiple perspectives. …

When you get a terse email and perceive it as a personal affront, that’s your mindset working. When you feel your defensiveness growing during critique, that’s your mindset working. When you choose to exclude someone from the design process because you think they just don’t get it, that’s your mindset…

Surviving Design Projects is a card game I designed to teach creative teams how to deal with difficult situations. At its core, the game involves story-telling. Players tell stories about difficult situations and then offer suggestions for managing them. The hardest part of design isn’t doing the design. It’s working…

A playbook for keeping discussions flowing — Here are three conversations you might have in a typical week as a design professional: Discuss the results of a usability test Plan the tasks for an upcoming sprint Critique some design concepts And not just these: You probably sit in all kinds of conversations. I propose that all these…

Keeping Participants Engaged, Listening, and On Track — There are three hallmarks of conversations during the design process: People think they have better things to do, and yet… Everybody has an opinion, and so… Meetings likely end without clear direction Sure, there are other challenges. Maybe you’ve had a meeting this week where someone showed up completely unprepared…

I’m new to working on design teams. On my last project, one of my teammates wanted to spend more time doing research, which the rest of us thought was unnecessary. Additionally, this team member struggled to follow the design decisions, and it was clear they wanted to approach the problem…

I’m starting to get behind on one of my tasks and I’m afraid to tell my team lead about it. How can I approach them without getting in trouble? Signed, Falling Behind Recognize the problem That you’ve recognized this is a problem is the most important step. This is far more difficult than…

Dear U in Team, I turned 40 this year. At every event — conference, local meet-up, industry happy hour — the participants get younger and younger. The speakers get younger and younger. They’re either talking about technologies I don’t understand or repeating concepts I’ve studied for decades as if they’d…

This post is repurposed from my book Designing Together: The Collaboration and Conflict Management Handbook for Creative Professionals. I was inspired to dig it out by Peter Merholz’s recent post on principles for great design team. …

Your design is wrong until it’s not. For me, knowing things are wrong (at least at the beginning of the project) gives me comfort. The process for getting the work right is starting out wrong. “Your first idea is wrong” embodies the experimentation mindset in modern design philosophies like LeanUX…