Facilitation is a necessary skill for a designer. It is equally as important as being able to sketch, visualize complex concepts, and technical skills like Axure or Photoshop. By having deep facilitation skills, the chances that the design recommendations and solutions are accepted both by your immediate superiors, but also the business stakeholders you are working with increases. It is too easy to dismiss a design solution if it hasn’t been communicated correctly. If the needs the design solution is meeting and goals it is helping users accomplish are not understood, then the design will be dismissed or suffer from “design by committee”.
Within Perficient XD, facilitation skills are not only valued, but they are fostered by encouraging our team members to share their working internally in a pitch and critique the design review process. When time allows, our designers pitch their concepts to available designers and developers to collect feedback that helps to evolve the design. By going through this process, when the time comes to present the work to our clients, we have a stronger message around the design rationale, and the true value of the design concept is better communicated.
Our team member’s facilitation skills also come into play when we run interactive stakeholder workshops and participatory design sessions. Our designers step outside of the “designer” role and give the creative power to our clients for a short time to capitalize from their professional experience and domain knowledge. This is normally a unique situation for many of our clients, and our facilitation skills are what guide our clients through these new waters. The results are a better understanding of the end audience a design is targeted to, the business and technical constraints a design has to reside within, and additional requirements and priority based on how stakeholders visualize the design solution.
Recently, I had the pleasure of writing an article for UX Magazine that speaks to the importance of strong facilitation skills for designers. I welcome you to check it out – Why the Best Designers are also Facilitators. Also, next year a book I am co-authoring with Russ Unger and Dan Willis will be released from New Riders – Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation. The book will offer very practical how-to advice, guidance, and direction on maturing your own facilitation skills.
Art work created by Dan Willis
The Importance of Facilitation Skills
by Brad Nunnally on November 28th, 2012 | ~ minute read
