Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation

by Russ Unger, Brad Nunnally, Dan Willis

Facilitation skills are the foundation of every successful design practice, yet training on this core competency has been largely unavailable—until now. Designing the Techniques for Successful Facilitation is a complete guide to developing the facilitation skills you need to communicate effectively and design fully engaging experiences. Learn to take control as Russ Unger, Brad Nunnally, and Dan Willis show you how to use your skills as a facilitator to deftly extract information from different types of people in various scenarios and address any problems and needs that arise along the way.With this book, you will learn how

Bring together different cross-functional project teams, stakeholders, and clients while balancing their needs, goals, and requirements with those of users Prepare for activities through agenda setting, planning for different types of personalities, and identifying the method of practicing that works best for you Perform group facilitation in workshops, brainstorming sessions, and focus groups Manage individual facilitation activities through interviews, usability testing, sales calls, and mentoring Conduct one-to-many facilitation activities such as presentations, virtual seminars, and lectures Understand how to manage Q & A from audiences of all sizes

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Business, Teaching

265 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 19, 2013

About the author

Russ Unger is the director of experience planning for Draftfcb, the largest advertising/marketing agency in the Midwest. He has been involved in the information architecture of large-scale public-facing sites for such companies as Oprah.com and United Airlines. He has taught courses in Web and interactive design and contributes to Boxes and Arrows. He also serves on the board of the Information Architecture Institute.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A kind of general book about facilitation in different situations: workshops, user research, presentations. The tips are very basic, so it's good for introduction. What is great: tons of nice stories from practitioners.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the different insights from experts. The book however tries to cover too much ground and I was looking for more depth into group facilitation, not user research.

[Jacob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started strong, but quickly devolved into a series of insights that were pretty basic. Not focused - tries to cover too much territory in too little space. Possibly useful for college students, but not very useful for professionals with more than a year or so of experience.

[Jackie Bach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Easy to read and follow, but it didn't quite offer much insight. I read it for my work UX bookclub and found it to be a good conversation starter for the group. Due to the fact that even if you didn't read it, it was easy to participate in the general themes of the book.

[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started off good, but then it sorta just fell flat.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for usability professionals - beginner to expert.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as relevant in an institutional research atmosphere. This book touches the surface in a reader-friendly fashion. However, deeper discussion would have been more appealing.

[John Fletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blah. Not a whole lot of substance. Too high level summary for good real tactical changes and learning in facilitation.