 Most beginner UX designers have no idea how important facilitation is as a skill for your career. Hi, I'm Dee. I started my career as a UX designer 15 years ago and it wasn't until I learned the skill of facilitation that my career really took off. Facilitation allowed me to transform my career to be more senior, more flexible, earn more money and be more strategic in my role. When I started my career as a UX designer, I thought it was all about solving every problem on my home, creating the most perfect, beautiful designs, knowing all the best software tools to use and being able to find every single answer without getting input from anyone else. It was only later in my career that I realized this is the beginner's mindset for a UX designer. A really great UX designer knows that they need to get input and insights from multiple stakeholders across the whole company to really solve problems in an innovative way. And this is what facilitation can do for you and your career. So what is facilitation? Facilitation is guiding people through a step-by-step structured process that enables everyone to make decisions and solve problems together. And what does this really mean for a UX designer? UX design problems are usually complex with lots of moving parts that affect each other. When I ran my first UX workshop, I had just got a new job at an education company and I was faced with a complex challenge. I needed to improve the user experience of how students communicated with their teachers in an online platform. So there were many different people and different parts of this problem. There was the students and what they needed to do when the stress that they were under. There were the teachers and the number of students that they had to manage. There were lots of moving pieces just in the communication between those two people and lots of different needs and challenges and problems from two sides. But there was also the technical side. The software developers that worked at the company had built the online platform in a certain way and they would need to make changes and they could also give insights into why it was working that way today, why they had built it that way and how it could be built in the future. And then there was also the visual UI or graphic design team that really was in control of the whole style and brand of the online platform. So already there were so many different people across that new company that I had started working at, so many different people that I knew that I needed to talk to and get input and insights from. That was when I really decided, hey maybe I should run a workshop and get these people together. Maybe I can't do this all on my own and figure out the perfect, beautiful design solution that would answer this problem without connecting and asking all of those people for their input and insights. So as you can see, I was dealing with an overwhelming amount of different stakeholders and pieces of information and it would have taken me months to sift through all of this and try and figure out what the most important insights were, what direction we should go in and come up with some kind of creative solution. But instead, I decided to try and bring all these different people together to come up with creative solutions together in a structured way and that's when I realized the value that workshop facilitation could have for my career and since then I've run tons of workshops across all stages of the UX design process including co-creation workshops with users to help them identify and surface their biggest problems and challenges and sessions with the research and design team to help us identify what kind of questions we would want to ask when we do research with our customers and prioritizing features with the core leadership team. There are so many different types of workshops you can use to enhance your UX design methods. Facilitation allows you to be part of the strategic process and be part of the conversation at the really early stages of product development instead of only doing the execution work decided by other stakeholders. What really surprised me was how easy it was to learn facilitation and start using it immediately. When I ran that first UX workshop, all I did was find some information online, learn what the exercises were and then run the workshop the next day. First there are a few things you'll need to do to prepare like to find a clear UX goal and outcome you want to achieve in the workshop then decide on the team the people that you want to include reach out to them and invite them and tell them what's involved then prepare the workshop location this might be remote online or in a real room then you might need to prepare things like whiteboard tables sticky notes and markers and if it's a remote online workshop there's multiple tools you can choose from like Miro or Mural then you'll need to choose the workshop exercises that you're going to run through with your participants there are hundreds of different workshop exercises to choose from you can find so many online the exercises you choose will depend on your UX goals and the stage that you're at in the UX design process for example you might be in the research stage the ideation stage or the testing stage and there are tons of different workshop exercises that can help with all of those things once you've established the team you've got your goals and you've set up the workshop space you'll also want to establish the ground rules for the workshop so that everyone knows what to expect you can do this by sending an email before the workshop starts you'll need to set a schedule and an agenda which you can also put in that email and keep visible while you're running the workshop make sure you've ended with a clear decision and clear next steps for the people in the team and then you can take all the insights and output from that workshop into your UX work going forward so that's why you should learn to facilitate workshops as a UX designer do you think facilitation is an important skill for your UX career yes no maybe leave your opinion in the comments below if you want to take your UX career to the next level and learn how to design and facilitate UX workshops then check out our one hour free training the link is in the description below if you liked this video and found it useful don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell for more videos just like this on career advice i hope you found this helpful and see you next time