 a new product. You might have a few stakeholders there, some customer representatives, some people representing the technology, maybe even marketing. So a product owner might start out by explaining what the value is and what they're trying to accomplish in the marketplace. But then someone on the technical side kind of want to dive deep into some of those implications but before they can do that, the marketing guy is like, wait a second, how are we going to market this? And there's another stakeholder there from another part of the company that goes, wait a second, how is this going to impact my part of the business? And pretty soon what started as a fairly structured and organized conversation has sort of devolved into a model of inefficiency. Now you may have this open conflict, you know, just two people butting heads. And that's painful and uncomfortable, but at least it's out in the open and you can deal with that. Sometimes you just have people talking past each other. They might sometimes seem like they're having the same conversation, or maybe they're even in violent agreement but they just can't seem to connect. And you had this plan of what you wanted to accomplish by bringing all these people together, but you just can't seem to keep this group on track. And while this may be tempting to just sort of write this off as just another waste of your time, this time you're going to do something a little different. So while all this chaos is going on, you just step up to the whiteboard. And you start writing down what's happening. Start capturing the conversation. You don't have to do anything else. Just start writing down what people are saying. And soon some people start paying attention to what you're doing. And maybe someone asks a question or someone offers a correction or an ad and now more people are paying attention. And once you know that the room seems to be having some pretty good agreement on this, well now you start drawing. And it's nothing fancy, you know, just some like boxes and squiggles and just something that kind of starts to represent the conversation that was going on in the room. And now more people are paying attention. So in a very short period of time you took this chaos and you started to align people and bring people together so that by the time you're done it actually feels like you got something accomplished. So what this is called is graphic facilitation. Now if you're familiar with that term what you might think about is maybe you've been to a big conference and there was a keynote and there was some person on the side with like a big four by eight sheet of paper and they were like quickly drawing what this person was saying. And these were great artists and you're like wow that's really good drawings. Or maybe you've seen some people tweeting out like their sketch notes from a session. And you're like wow they can really draw. We're not talking about that. We're gonna focus on two very simple things that all of you can do. And I know all of you can do this. I've given this session lots of times and I've never had someone not being able to do this. I've done this with lawyers. So if lawyers can do it, you can do it, all right? We're gonna focus on note-taking and wireframing. And why I picked those two things is note-taking if if you're able to capture this publicly it helps facilitate communication so brings everyone together. So we all have the same idea. And then wireframing, well if we're trying to deliver value to someone, usually that means someone's gonna have to do something to an interface somewhere. So we're usually having conversations about what that might look like. So but you can apply this on multiple domains. You know whether it's process flows, architectural diagrams, you can use the techniques we're gonna do to solve a lot of different problems. But that's what we're gonna be focusing on. And one of the nice things about this is you don't necessarily have to plan this out. Like you can sort of apply this technique just sort of anywhere. Like once you feel something going off the rails you say hey this is what we're just gonna do. You don't have to necessarily plan in advance. I do have some bonus content if we go if we have some time at the end about how you can do some structured sketching. So you know if we're good on time we'll get to that. So the three things that we're gonna focus on that you need to be able to do this and again focusing on on the wireframing and note-taking. You gotta understand some simple user experience basics. Some basics around sketching. And then you have to be able to listen to what people are saying, quickly process that and then enhance that with your output. Those are the three things we're gonna work on today. So on the UX side now obviously UX is a big and deep discipline and I could spend days just talking about how awesome UX is and what we can do around that. But just to give us some context you know I just want to talk about four things. You know goals, users, solution context and then before you get to your solutions. So goals are really important and I know that seems obvious but having worked with a lot of teams what seems obvious is not always happening. So not only do goals tell us like where we're heading and when we think we're done, done-ish, done for now but often how we define our goal defines which direction we're gonna take. So it's really good before we start thinking about what our solution might be that we just align on what we're trying to accomplish. Who are we doing this for? There's lots of people that we could serve in the world but we can't be everything to everyone. And in this case if you have the research awesome. If not for until you can get the research and really understand who your customers are I would argue that consensus meets correctness. What I mean by that is if everyone has their own idea of who your customer is one of you might be right. But everyone else is gonna be pulling in a different direction and then you don't have team alignment. So if you can all agree on a target then at least you're pulling in the right direction and you're probably close. And I don't mean consensus is not compromise. If you said well I think we should go after vanilla ice cream lovers and someone else's I think we should go after chocolate ice cream lovers. You can't agree say well let's just target people like strawberry that satisfies nobody. But you can say you know what for the sake of this exercise let's agree that we're going after chocolate and then we can do the research later to figure out if that's the right direction or not. But if you don't have that alignment you're just gonna be wildly divergent as a team. So you got this idea this need that people have that you're trying to satisfy. That need does not exist in a vacuum. It's part of a much bigger puzzle. There's other things around it. It may be part of bigger goals. There's things that happened before and after it. Where does this need take place? How do people solve it now? And all of this just helps you to establish the context of what you're gonna be sketching about. But again that's where this applies to you may do slightly different activities if you're not talking about wire frames but you just want to understand what is the context of this problem we're attempting to solve. And then you can start to visualize what that solution might look like. And when you're having these discussions it helps to capture it publicly. If you just have a conversation different people can like leave and think that they decided you know two people can walk away thinking that you decided something different. When you write it down it becomes real. And if you take it notes on your own you know I mean how many people like type out notes and then like email them out later? Yeah. How often are those the like among the thousands of emails that go unread? Right? It's great it helps you it helps you clarify the thoughts if you're the person writing it down. But odds are people aren't going back after that meeting go let me just check and make sure that those notes came out exactly right. And even if they do go back and look they might not really remember the conversation where as if you're up on the board and you're writing it down in real time people can give you feedback. You can generate discussion based on it. When you're doing that couple quick tips use the words of the people who are speaking as much as possible because it makes them feel heard and if people feel heard they're more engaged. Now some people are let's say not as succinct as others and it's a little hard to write what they would say. So in that case you can you know someone gives you feedback you can say let me see if I understand you what you're trying to say this and you can summarize and then they have the opportunity to say yeah that's what I meant or no you got it wrong here's what I meant and then you can then you can capture that. Check for agreement when someone says something is everyone on on board or not and ideally you want to get actual like yes I agree or no I don't but sometimes that's uncomfortable. So at least you can look for body language. People who are leaning forward and engaged they're there with you someone who's leaning back they've got their arms crossed and they're looking off to the side they might not be on board and that's a good person to bring into the conversation. So what do you think about what we're talking about they might have a different opinion but they don't yet feel comfortable sharing that but it might be some really important content. Alternate colors when you're taking notes and this is hard and we're going to practice this a little bit but it makes a huge difference especially when you're in a big room. It's hard to kind of parse a lot of text especially handwritten text. So you alternate colors it just makes it easier to see where like one point starts and the next one starts. And same thing use all caps I learned this from a building architect that's how they write. If you're looking at print part of how we understand words is not just the letters but the overall shape of the word. The problem with lowercase and especially cursive though is when we're in a hurry our cursive often just degrades to like a bunch of squiggles that we can barely understand. So writing in all caps slows you down a little bit and will tend to be neater so that everyone in the room will be able to understand what you put down. And lastly if you're the one doing this understand the power of the pen. You're the facilitator you have immense power and you can use it for good or for bad and sometimes unintentionally like if you made a point during a session like wow that's really interesting and I write this down and go okay cool you're like yeah my stuff was heard and I ask you for something you give me feedback and go that's really interesting who else has a point. Now she's thinking well I just got completely ignored. I'm not going to bother doing this again and she shut down and if we want to do the best work we need everyone engaged we can't afford to have people shutting us out and shutting down. Now if maybe I don't agree I can say hey that's really interesting what do people think about that and then we can have a discussion and then we can capture whatever the result is about discussion. So be aware that if you're the one writing you have immense power. Now sometimes you can diffuse that power by saying oh you have a point here let me give you the marker you can you go up and write what your idea was and then also you start engaging more people. All right so that's all I want to say about like no taking let's get to sketching. Now some of you might be thinking but I can't draw as you see I can't really either. Part of the problem is we think about sketching as art. Right I found this I did not do this by the way. I found this one online and it is quite frankly it's a beautiful wireframe I mean look at this there's like cross hatching going on in here for shading I mean they really drew this in like perfectly straight line I'm assuming they use a ruler for that. It's really it's a nice looking wireframe I want to show you my version of this. Before I do let me actually point out a few things so what do we got here we got like a logo and the name of the company you got like a navigation bar down here like a header some text couple images in there sidebar with some stuff. All right so keep that in mind that's my version of it. And I'm guessing all of you can do something at least this shitty right but it's the same elements there right you know in in sketch language a box with an X in it means image goes here and I'm not going to draw one right so you got like there's the logo and here's the name of the company there's our navigation you know that's going to be a header there's our text our images and our sidebar. It's all still there and I guarantee mine took a lot less time to do than theirs and you still get it right if we're talking about what we wanted this page to do you understand what the intent is especially if I'm there explaining it we're drawing it together so you don't need to be artistic about it this is meant to help communicate. All right get out of pointer mode here come on you can do it there we go so if you can draw a straight line a squiggly line a circle and the alphabet whatever alphabet that is you have all the skills necessary to do what we're going to do today. All right now we break it down what do we got here sorry web page yeah so but you can and you can tell that just from these like simple lines and boxes right same thing you know up at the top maybe that's the header little navigation bar and two blocks of content and maybe that other one over there is like a text box with a button next to it that's just squares you all can draw squares you know again like I said sketch language a box with an X in it means images go here we add a couple images to this now there's a couple ways we can look at for text sometimes we just want to show that there will be some text so straight lines or squiggly lines is enough to say there's going to be some text here I don't care what it is right now I'm just showing you there's going to be some text here sometimes we might care about what kind of text it is so we might kind of tag it you know that's a navigation bar here's a header here's a description we'll tag it sometimes we want to be a little bit more directional because the type of content is a little bit more germane to the conversation we're having we want that take two we might write in some specific content around that and typically in sketching we'll tend to combine all of those three techniques there might be some areas where we just kind of put some lines in because we either know what that is or we don't care for this conversation some things we tag and some things will write some actual content okay one more time breaking it down this was YouTube's homepage a while ago let's take a look at some of the components up at the top here we've got the logo and one of those little hamburger menus big old search box a couple buttons up there big big ad featured video secondary videos lots more videos what does that look like is a sketch all right we got a logo up there a little hamburger icon for a clock buttons ad featured video secondary original sketch yeah you guys with me yeah yeah I want to check for agreement here yeah you guys with me all right cool one little tip before we actually get into sketching is a lot of people start by drawing a box but we usually don't know beforehand how big our contents going to be is we're having this discussion so if I was in this thing and I go oh hey I'm gonna I'm gonna draw a box around this I go there there's my box I go oh wait a second I actually need three things on there and I then I add my third well now I got to my borders kind of going through there it looks kind of ugly so I often suggest if you need an anchor just give yourself the corner since mostly in the Western world we kind of do left to right top to bottom that tends to be how we think design wise as well so give yourself a corner if you need an anchor or not at all and box it at the end and then we are done you go oh yeah we added my out of the box and I can just make you know make my nice little square and they gave my sketch alright last tip your turn had a lot of people standing over there so if you guys either there are some tables if not if you have like a like a notebook with you then you can kind of draw while standing and follow along that's cool because you can all you'll all kind of work with each other over there before we get into this I'm going to teach you guys little game because we're going to get loud I've done this a lot we get loud so I want to keep us on track so I can do as much with you as possible so that means we got to kind of bring it down and refocus quickly so who knows the game where I raise my hand and I say can I have your attention please and when you see that you raise your hand you stop talking and you look back at me and if you see other people raising their hands you stop talking you raise your hand and you look back at me and we'll bring the whole room we'll get quiet really fast so I want to practice this real quick so just start talking randomly just talk to the person next to you just babble out loud gibberish I don't really care what I say can I have your attention please all right you guys are good at this game good cool all right so there are bundles of markers on every table or if you have a pen with you that will be helpful if you're you if you're in the side there and using your notebook grab a sheet of paper or two and a marker prefer markers to like ballpoint pens because a nice fat marker keeps us from being too detailed but if we're not for run don't have enough markers pen is fine and what I'm gonna do just to keep it simple kind of like what I did with the YouTube example I'm gonna put up a page and I'm gonna give you one minute to sketch that page one minute is not a lot of time so don't get too precious you guys ready yes yes okay good here is your here's your page it's an old PayPal home page you get my timer going but go ahead and start sketching while you do this you get extra few seconds while I get set up here all right one minute sketch this page images quick speed halfway done halfway already five seconds all right pencils down as they say I just want you to show the people at your table of the people that you're standing near I want you to show each other what you did because there's no wrong way of doing it but you get to kind of just see how other people interpreted the same thing so just show your table take a minute see what other people did all right can I have your attention so that was fun so let's do it again you can flip the paper over we're going to save paper so you can use the other side yeah so I mean again they're just two boxes like a text box might be longer and a button might have something in it so from a sketch perspective they're just boxes so links again so again if you want to just do text that's underlined or sometimes if I'm sketching on a whiteboard and I'm doing something I might grab the second color and might just you know since links tend to be colored and do that as a color so there's you know there's different ways you can do that all right I'm going to give you your next page this was a CNN this morning no comment on content I just grabbed the morning screenshot so take another minute sketch this page actually you guys are lucky because the old CNN screenshot was much more complicated you believe that 30 seconds is gone already see what other people did that was similar to what you did look for other examples where they represented something differently think about what you liked about theirs that you might want to incorporate into your own sketching style hey can I have your attention please guys are good at this all right so if we live in much more than a web-based world so let's do one more mobile so if they might need another sheet of paper if there's a some space on the paper that the page you have this will be our our next drawing so this is the Amazon front page for the Amazon app one minute ago this is usually like a relief after the complexity of CNN oh that's so simple all right can I have your attention please now for the next one I'm not going to give you an example look off of I'm gonna make it up who here has ever bought something online okay who here just doesn't like raising their hands when they get asked questions I'm pretty sure all of you have bought something online before next we're gonna draw a shopping cart and what I mean by that is when you go hey I like that thing I think I might want one and you hit the button that says add to cart and then you see a page that shows the stuff that you want to buy that's what we're going to draw and I try to be really specific about this because when I first started teaching this workshop I would go around afterwards and collect pages and I saw examples of the shopping cart on the right there and the first time it happened I thought well that was just quirky and then when it happened a second time I said I'm not a good communicator so I'm gonna be very clear we were talking about either a mobile page or a web page or something that has the stuff on it that shows what you want to buy you've all seen one probably multiples so I'm gonna give you 90 seconds this time to make up your own shopping cart all right I mean those might be things like maybe there's a product image of the thing you want to buy or multiple things might have a price on it maybe there's a quantity and then a total sometimes there's ads like other stuff you might like place put in a coupon code sometimes you can even put in like your location and check shipping cost before you proceed done good pencil down yeah you're done sorry I don't have prizes there's no price for for being first sorry I apologize alright 15 seconds left all right now what I want you to do is walk someone else through your your shopping cart explain your sketch to them all right it's okay to being groups of three to just take a minute and walk someone through your sketch what do you got good stuff all right can I have your attention please what do you guys think I got a mic here too you've just drawn four different things is this on get the mic on anyone have any thoughts while they we get the mic turned on here what was this like so do you think the time helped or hurt you yeah so start up yeah I am I'm yeah I'm trying to bring down your standards I like I love that yeah cool any other any other thoughts anyone else got a there so everyone else can hear you yes it's I mean it's simplifying the things because we are short of time right and we have to convey maximum out of it so we are not adding complexity we are not adding too many fancy things which are probably not required the difference between the first three and this one you already give us a visual representation what we need to do so we just copy that says this one you just get the idea and you have to like think how we do it and it's different from each person has something different yeah what the functionality we want is there but that's a really interesting thing because when people have different ideas sometimes the words won't bring out those different ideas but then you draw it you go oh I thought you and you thought huh I saw I'll share a quick story I was doing a workshop with actually with the lawyers I mentioned earlier and we're you're kind of kicking off this product that they wanted to build and we got to sketching and one one of the lawyers is walking me through a sketch and he goes oh and here's the calendar I was like whoa wait a second we've been talking about this idea for three days and you never once mentioned a calendar so let's have a discussion about that and I honestly don't know because it didn't occur to me to ask at the time if he'd always had that idea in his head and just somehow I didn't as a facilitator I did not elicit that idea or if somehow the act of visualizing inspired him to say ah this fits here he came up with it on the spot doesn't matter we added a story to you know our story map and we had a discussion about what why that was useful and it was really it was really helpful and someone over here to comment good one one more may someone over here you're on the floor first three examples you have already given the mind map yeah so we know what the third example like you know when you said 90 seconds that that's where it's okay probably I need to do that mind it was tough what oh one more you got me you got time collaboration without conflict I like that so yeah the structure of this is is very intentional I give you those I tell you what to draw basically because I want to get you comfortable just with basic sketching language without having to think but obviously that's not the real world right you're gonna be given ideas and have to work with it so but now that you do a couple so you're familiar with sketching a little more comfortable before I drop you into a less comfortable environment and as it was already mentioned we're emphasizing speed over quality and it's not like you're going to go back to your team and someone's gonna say hey let's sketch ideas that could be like standing over you with a stopwatch going go right that's not gonna happen but you do need to keep up with the ideas as they're coming out when you're having these discussions you know people are gonna be throwing stuff out fast and furious so if you're still trying to be really particular with that first idea and someone else is on the third idea you missed the second idea so being able to do this rapidly helps you keep up with the conversation this is about again about communication not creating a deliverable put an asterisk on that we'll come back to it though one last little tip interfaces are typically built on a grid and this will just help you be a little bit better with your sketching and how you kind of visualize things so let's go back to that that first that PayPal and look at where does the grid fall in this page you can start to see some rows right you know the row there navigation row you know this big row up here and even if we look at this bottom area this here we can actually break that into multiple rows as well there's sort of let me get the pencil there's like the image row the text row the link row there's those a couple of rows and then we go columns and this is basically broken into thirds you know it's lined up off these the thirds off this bottom one but this image right here basically takes up two columns while this one takes up one so once you start to be aware of grids you can start looking at the other products you use and say is this lined up on a grid what what does that grid look like how can I use those types of things in the designs that I do all right so now the other bit of this I said we kind of have to be able to listen to what people say quickly process that and then enhance it with our output and I really there must be like a word that better encapsulates that but I haven't been able to come up with it the closest that I get in terms of an activity though is improvisation you guys have like improv theater improv comedy there's no what that is good so anyone not know what that is okay so so so if you and I are part of here you can stand up here with me don't worry I won't make you do anything if if we were in an improv group improv it just means that we don't know the script before we're going to do something so we might say something like okay we're going to act out a scene but we don't know what it is so someone you know give me a profession and people would just yell out professions so yell out professions what lawyer so lawyer how about a location give me a location Mumbai maybe more specific a park we've got two lawyers in a park they need to solve a problem what's that and with a banana so two lawyers apart with the banana what's the problem that they're trying to solve what's that how to eat the banana so we got two lawyers in a park trying to figure out how to eat a banana absolutely ridiculous and obviously we've never heard of this before we haven't practiced this and it takes a certain amount of skill to be able to then make it up on the spot thank you that's it we're not actually going to improv that scene though it would be fun and when most people think about doing improv they go they're probably even more afraid of that than sketching but the good news is is is that all of you were awesome at improv when you're about this high right because when you're a kid everything is improv because your friend goes hey we're in space you go yeah we're in space and there's aliens over there coming to go right aliens over there coming to get us right that's all improv and the good thing is it's kind of like a muscle it can atrophy but you can build it back up again you can strengthen it so we're going to practice that just to you can prove to yourself that you can do this too so I want you to pair up so you know you don't you can you don't have to be at a table just find a pair someone to pair up with if you do not have someone to pair up with raise your hand if you're raising your hand look for someone else raising their hand so we'll make this work so find a pair I see no hands so does everyone have someone to do this with I got one hand over here got one over here so why don't you guys connect over there and what everyone else have someone to work with alright so here's the here's what we're going to do we're going to plan a party and you're going to work together to plan a party one of you is going to start and the way you're going to start is you're going to say I need to plan a type of party for a person such as I want to plan a birthday party for my wife or I want to plan a wedding for my son or whatever pick a type of party and who you're going to plan for and you're going to set the stage by making that statement now every statement that follows has to start with the words yes but for each person so I might say you know if I'm one person I say okay I want to plan a birthday party for my daughter yes but I don't know what your daughter likes yes but we can ask her okay yes but didn't you want it to be a surprise so like you just go back and forth every statement starts with yes but so I'll give you a few minutes to have this conversation and plan your party all right go ahead but oh the statement slide yeah there we go all right now I want you to switch roles so the other person gets to start and set the context but this time instead of yes but we're going to do yes and all right so go ahead start and plan a new party other person starts same same opening statement but this time it's yes and and please go yeah I was getting diminished by saying yes but okay and in the second way okay any other thoughts hard to express things that you wanted to say no to when your statement started with yes interesting so even when the butt was there you didn't want it it was hard to say no interesting there pass the mic back so everyone can hear the conversation when we had the first scenario we never came to a kind of a conclusion or any you know it just every statement we were hesitating to talk but then when we had the yes and I'm you know the very constructive discussion going on we were able to complete right one not the party was planned anyone more over here with the one first one yes but it seems although it started with yes it seemed quite negative approach to giving some feedback or adding on to the conversation but with yes and it was like okay there's something more I can give to you there's something more I can add on to what you want to do great thank you so sometimes a takeaway from this is that and is good but is bad that's not necessarily the case and opens a conversation and but constricts it and there are sometimes in the product development process where we want to open up to new ideas but there's sometimes we want to winnow down ideas and so that there are an appropriate time for each technique so sometimes we're going again one more sometimes we want to focus and find reasons not to do something we're gonna do one more just to you know I like to have a meaning to these games you know the idea to practice improv but if we're going to do them with the ones that have like a business application for this next one you're going to work as as teams in your tables might split you guys into two groups over there maybe you guys that are sitting can come up here what you're going to do is you're going to tell a story as a team as a table one word at a time so if I was at this table and I might go first I might say once upon a time there live a man okay so now we're telling a story about a man and then it continues around the table one word at a time so don't do once upon a time they're lived a man no that's two your word is a if that's the one you choose to do you also don't have to create the actual world longest run on sentence so you can end it you and sometimes you can end with tonality like they're lived a man when you bring things down it tends to indicate that's the end of that sentence doesn't stop the next person from picking it up again but you know that's one way to end it or if you feel like the last person did such a good job of ending that sense you can just say period and that's your word and you can sort of end that sense period and the next person can start a new sentence not a new story a new sentence that continues that story so you're going to work together as a team to tell a story so again I'll give you a few minutes you know for those unit tables you might you guys might want to join a table here here why don't we split you guys up like in half and half you can kind of tell a story there half you in the back and for you guys over here you can kind of come up here just so you can kind of be near each other one other thing I will ask of you is again it's going to get loud if you want your team to be able to work with you they need to be able to hear you so you need to be able to speak up all right if it helps to stand some people find it helps to stand that's fine that's up to you so go ahead start telling your stories as a team if you go completely off the rails just start again all right can I have your attention please let's bring these stories to a close can I have your attention please you guys can during the break feel free to do this all you want thoughts about this exercise it's tough it's tough what was tough about it when the story started I kind of framed some words in my mind thinking they're going to take it up yeah but how the words view those words didn't make any sense yeah and I had to think of new word to maybe again give it a start because not everybody was thinking in that sense to give it a start or a story we just need more words to make it together and that's never happened in like a meeting where you're talking about something you have an idea where you think that conversation is going and then it goes somewhere else and you kind of have something else in your mind and now you're behind because you weren't really paying attention right we all do this right so people can hear you also it's like what we learned in the morning you have to be creative and unique okay we had to pay attention to where the story was going so that we could think the right thing fast so that we can do it you have to be really mindful really pay attention to what's going on it's very spontaneous as well spontaneous yeah back here good energy after lunch good energy after lunch awesome I told you we're not napping in this in this one one more over here I just really like running across the room apparently when there are too many people adding to a conversation it goes nowhere and everyone seems to be going in a totally tangential direction and it doesn't lead us anywhere so how did you find the interaction amongst your team did you end up gelling together the store or was it just going off in different directions well we were but then you know we start off and then it goes in some other direction and then we try to use various bus and however try to you know get them back to track but everyone is just thinking so differently right so it is hard to converge hard to convert but it brings that it helps bring that difference to the surface right now you're at least aware of what those differences are what last comment which is supposed to what she mentioned I mean I had some difference of opinion there but what I felt was it is sometimes good to be in the flow going to be in the flow sometimes it is not what I thought of but it is sometimes good to be in the flow in which everybody understands yeah and we all have different parts to play in this in this story right sometimes we get to add a pivotal concept like once upon a time there was a that next word is going to set the direction of this story but sometimes our word is something like uh or the and it's not as exciting but it's still an important role the story doesn't exist without those connecting words so sometimes our role in telling the story can be a pivotal role and sometimes it's a supporting role so anyway I like these games because they uh they show um they have a sort of a lesson to them but again what I wanted to do is really demonstrate that you have this capability to think on your feet to think creatively to kind of get out of your normal patterns and that will help you with any kind of facilitation sketching or not that you do you can do this so for me these are like mental calisthenics I'm not suggesting you do these games with your team though hey they're fun knock yourself out um but again it just helps you redevelop your improvisation skills so let's uh this is recap briefly we talked a little about some UX basics we did a little bit of sketching a little bit of improv so now we just want to kind of put that all together holding on time doing good on time awesome so the last sketch I had you do was a shopping cart so we're just going to finish the checkout process there's typically two more things you need to finish a checkout process you need to give the person you're buying for the entity you're buying from money because otherwise they might be reluctant to give you whatever it is you want and then you have to tell them where to send it so usually we have a shipping page and we have a billing page now the way we're going to do this is we're going to pair off again and one person is sort of going to play the product role if you're playing the product role it's your job to tell the other person here's what I think we need at this step in the process now if you're if you're the other person it'll be the the sketch noter so when that person is telling you what they need I want you writing it out and I want you writing it out so that they can see it and then they can give you feedback to make sure you're getting it right remember the tips I gave you before use their words alternate colors especially if you're taking turns you can grab the other person's marker now you have two colors alternate colors try writing in all caps once you've discussed the idea for a little bit then I want you to switch to sketching so if you were taking notes then I want you to drive the sketching and start sketching out something that represents what you were drawing and if you're the product person give them real-time feedback yeah that looks good or I'm not so sure about that or what if we did it this way give them feedback now in a real-world situation we'd probably be doing it on a whiteboard we can erase and redraw we don't have enough whiteboards just got one so we're going to do it with the markers but feel free to cross out start again you know good it's more to have the experience it's easier when you have a conversation with a whiteboard so I'm going to give you about three to four minutes to do each page so do the first one we'll do let's say we'll do shipping first pair up one one of you is the sketcher one of you is the product person I'll tell you when we're about halfway done because that'll be a good time to sort of switch from note-taking to sketching and then we'll do a second round for the payments page and that way you can switch roles so each person gets to experience both sides of it all right any questions before we start in the back sorry yeah let's do that we can do the shipping page first for four minutes and then we'll switch roles and do the payments page okay any other questions before we start no all right off you go so that's that's the one end round one I know some of you are probably a little frustrated because you didn't get to capture as much as you would have liked or sketch the full thing out that's okay we're just here to have the experience we're not here to actually build a product so you'll have plenty of opportunities with your own teams and your own products to do lots of this stuff so now I want you to switch roles and do the other page so I said we did shipping oh you did both all right well you can do more sketching then you guys are ahead of the curve so switch roles so that if you were the sketcher now play the product role if you're the product person play the sketcher spend the first part with notes and then start sketching I'll let you know when you're about halfway through attention please great now what I want you to do I want everyone to take out their phone what does that say you have a question okay hold on I know you're quite hold on there'll be questions at the end and yours is a good one I want everyone to take out their phone all right launch your camera and take a picture of it remember when I said at the beginning that you're doing communication but not a deliverable well there's kind of can be an exception to that because in many cases what I found especially when we're working with a great cross-disciplinary team this may be as far as we need to go as far as deliverables go you can take the sketch and start building off that start designing off that you may not need any more documentation than that especially if the right people are in the room so if you do a sketch let's say and you already have a visual style guide and everyone agrees that that's what you're going to build great we know what it's going to look like we'll apply our styles we can start building it or maybe a designer is going to take it I don't need to do a formal wireframe the designer can take my sketch and start working with it and developers can start building the back end so sometimes that picture is really all we need sometimes we don't even need a picture if we have like a war room that's all whiteboards sometimes we'll just leave the sketches up and that'll be what we go off of until we don't need them anymore then we erase them and sketch more so sometimes just having that picture is all you need now we've had a lot of practice but I'm imagining some of you still might not be comfortable doing this in front of your team am I right yeah still feels maybe a little nervous to go back and do this that's okay I want to talk about something called progressive desensitization it's a big word but really all it means is let's get close to the thing that scares us a little bit at a time and the airline industry used to be really great at this I think they've cut a lot of the programs but for people who are afraid of flying they could enroll in this project and the first thing they would do is drive by an airport that's it drive by an airport you're getting close not that close but close to the thing that scares you flying and then when you're used to driving by the airport you might go into the ticketing area they're a little closer that might be nervous for you hard but just do that until you're comfortable with that then they'd take them to the gate and they could see a plane and that could be pretty frightening but you know you're not going to get on it so that's okay and they would do that until the person gets comfortable and then they'd get on a plane but they knew it wasn't one that was going to take off but they would just get used to getting on the plane and eventually they would fly and obviously this is in the airline's best interest because if you have a few who are flying they get no money from you so helping you get over that is good for them but this is an example of progressive desensitization so while we're in this sort of magic realm of conference land this is cool we're all doing this together but it can feel a little hard when we get back into our own teams and I don't want you to lose this so if you don't feel comfortable just jumping in I want you to think about how could I step into this experience maybe you do start by just taking notes yourself just to see if you can keep up with a conversation it's more about yourself than the team initially and then maybe you walk up to the whiteboard during a conversation and you start taking notes publicly but you're not really facilitating you're just kind of capturing what's going on and eventually once you do that the facilitation will naturally happen same on the sketching side you might start just doing some drawings yourself maybe you'll share them later but it's just how can I do this in this environment responding to the conversation I hear I hear before you get up and start doing it in front of people so just think about what's a small step that I can take to take what I've done today and move it forward in my own practice one other approach you can use and that's faking it as an example what I want you to do is I want everyone to put your legs together if you're standing or you're sitting if you're cross-legged on the floor it might be a little tough but put your legs together cross your arms hunt your shoulders put your head down and just get really small all right just make yourself small and in a very soft voice I want everyone to say I'm a rock star yeah okay now stand up everyone stand up and I want you to do your best either like victory pose or like hero superhero pose either one and I want you to say I'm incompetent you can sit down see it doesn't work our mind and body want to be in sync and we can use that to our advantage this comes from research Amy Cuddy did CUDDY she had a great TED talk on power poses and there's been research that shows that two minutes in a power pose actually changes your brain chemistry how cool is that so what you can do with that is even if you feel nervous even if you're not sure that this will work you can put on a positive stance you can walk with confidence up to the room and in your own mind you can think today I am going to take responsibility for my team getting something done and you do it and after a while you won't even realize you're still faking it all right any questions I know there's a question you had a question over there all right the question was how do you do it in a distributed environment I hate this question but I get it all the time it's really hard but sketching is actually easier if we have time I will talk about design studio which I have is one of the few things that is very collaborative which I have found I can successfully do with remote people one thing that I find works well is either document cameras or you know other virtual meetings so that you can see what the other person is drawing but anytime you're doing doing something this interactive remotely it requires an extra level of effort on the facility whoever's facilitating to make sure that everyone gets heard especially if most of the team is in one location and you have like one or two outliers who are remote and it's on the responsibility of those people who are in the same location to make sure that they're including those outliers with document cameras and other things like document cameras just like it's like a stand with a camera on the top that just looks down and so that way someone can draw and other people can see what they're doing but I find that that is better than the digital drawing tools because you know using a mouse and other thing is just it's not fast so it's it's too hard and any other questions I'm gonna do it on time so people are outside this is in my case but the team is sitting at once which is a place or 14 people at one place sort of someone is sitting at one another place and we don't need to do any kind of testing so let me see if I understand I have to ensure that I so you say your product owner is in one place you're the product and your team is somewhere else so I would encourage you to look for a way to incorporate it for the simple reason is that the more your development team feels bought in on the solution especially because they helped create it the more they're gonna be enthusiastic about building it and I would also say that you know I'm a UX guy I have a pretty high opinion of the design deliverables that I do but good ideas can come from anywhere and while it is normal for me to assume that something is easy when it's actually hard occasionally I will not put forth a design because I think it's going to be hard and then my developer goes ah there's a framework for that we just dropped I'm like really oh I didn't even think about that so the more that I involve my team about what I'm trying to accomplish for whom and why and and and make bring them into these activities the better the solutions are at the end it's not it doesn't matter where the ideas come from just that we find the best ideas so I just encourage you to even if it's not the easiest to just try it and see what happens and it might not work the first time don't be discouraged try it again any other any other questions what do we have till 3.15 all right well if there's no other questions I do have we do have some super special bonus achievement unlock content and it's only be a few minutes but it sometimes comes up like yeah you can do this without planning right you're having this discussion it's not going anywhere like hey let's let's take some notes publicly and let's start sketching does help bring a team together but sometimes you know you have a problem that you need to solve and you want to kind of bring multiple brains in on it especially multi-disciplinary brains and so there's a technique called design studio which is the worst name ever because try googling design studio you get everything because every creative group or advertising agency calls himself a design studio if you do add the word sketching to it like design studio sketching you'll find more info okay that's my rant on that anyway design studio basically how it works you identify a focus area you sketch individually altogether for about eight minutes you share with each other and you rinse and repeat there's a couple variations but this is the general recipe now I've seen some really like cool templates out there that you can download here's like six you know little little squares and you can see this little menu bar at the top and that's fine but when I teach techniques I like to be able to do things with whatever materials I tend to have in front of me I also find that six can be a lot four seems to be plenty and four is really convenient because I can take a piece of paper and fold it in a half one way and fold it in a half the other way and I got four squares and we probably can just run to the printer grab a stack of paper and run back to the conference room but I find four up is pretty good because the first idea is kind of obvious the second idea you're probably cheating and it's a variation on the first idea the third idea now you got to start thinking about something different and the fourth idea wow you really got to kind of go off you know really out of that proverbial box so I find that four ideas in eight minutes is pretty good so again in the eight minutes session we know what we're trying to accomplish each person sketches four different ideas and then we post them on the wall and we give positive feedback only now why positive feedback only one most of us are not skilled in either giving or receiving critique and if you give someone negative critique and it inadvertently comes off as maybe a little personal or maybe they just take it personally again they're shutting down that's not helpful we want people open so we get the best ideas out and what I found is that when you give someone positive reinforcing feedback the things that you comment on will tend to live on to future rounds and things that don't get comment commented on tend to die on their own so it's not really necessary to do as much of the negative feedback so we do one round of four ideas we get our positive feedback and then we do it again and we can do the same four ideas we did before we can do two of our original ideas and steal two ideas from other people we can do four completely new ideas just four more ideas based on the discussion the feedback we just had amongst ourselves and again then we put those up collect positive feedback only for the third and fourth rounds we do a single idea on the whole sheet of paper for the eight minutes and this gives us a little bit more of an opportunity to pick what we think is the best idea and go deep on it sometimes you don't even need a fourth round I've certainly gotten to the point where it feels like a team is coalescing on an idea you know at the end of that third round and we decide to kind of cut it off there but if there's still lots of ideas out there a fourth round can be very helpful and you can repeat this exercise for some key areas of your idea of your product idea now why is this useful one you gather lots of ideas if you only have five people doing this exercise that's 20 ideas that you start with on the first round it shortcuts the feedback loop dramatically I mean think about the old way of doing it if I'm the designer and you guys are giving me some feedback I'll talk to you for a while I will then go off into my space I will design something awesome and then I'll bring it back to you and you'll give me all the negative feedback on I'll go oh okay I didn't think about those things and then I go back into my space I do something else and I come back and we do these rounds and it takes a while we can get these four rounds of feedback within like an hour so what might have taken almost a week before we get done in about an hour so really shortcuts the feedback loop everyone's involved when you get everyone's sketching people are bought in especially if you have developer sketching if you have stakeholders sketching they're part of the idea and that means they have greater buy in because they were part of the process that created it what's also I've found is really interesting is that you know something like I said sometimes we can use the one of our sketches as the guide we don't have to go any farther but if it's something where design is then going to take that input and then create a set of wire frames one your designer UX people have tons of ideas to work with and whatever they come back with is going to be familiar to the team so it's more likely to get buy in and again I've seen people all up the chain do this they might be a little skeptical I remember one workshop where I had a C level guy in the workshop and he didn't know he was going to be sketching and so I introduced the exercise we start doing it and I see him look to his right and look to his left like are we really doing this well everyone else is grabbing paper I guess I'm sketching too and at the end of the workshop he was on his way out and he stopped and said you know I was a little skeptical about that sketching thing that really worked out well that's a great way of unblocking people and again just bringing them bringing your team together so you get to this pretty good result and you do it together so that's all I have I can take any question any more questions people have one favor I will ask is that if people could bring the markers and the pages up to the front on your way out so that it really makes it a faster cleanup for the next person and lastly if you want these slides you send an email to msm at zip.sh with the subject line Agile India 2017 you'll get an email back with instructions on how to download the slides so again I'm open for any questions and thank you very much this is really great I was kind of shy about doing this stuff too but I can see the value in it I'm thinking that these exercises might be really good in helping the team get to know each other and become more productive there's so much value I think in just learning like any time with each other and doing things like this and having fun at the same time do you agree having that sound right here oh absolutely I think it and I think because of the nature of sketching we can make it multidisciplinary so it can break down those walls between like along the design side and on the engineer side and the product side you know it reinforces that we're all in this together like this product succeeds based on all of us not just on the work of one of those one of those teams why am I talking to the mic I have a mic here so absolutely and even we were having a discussion earlier she was asking about the improv exercises what's the business value of those and she had the great idea of doing an icebreaker with those because you guys laughed a lot and that happens all the time they're fun you can bring a business meeting into it and if you're bringing a diverse group of people in it you need that icebreaker at least do an icebreaker that has relevance to what you're doing so the improv exercises can be good for that too okay if you have your team do you have to drop give them a quick run-through of how to sketch first or sir so the question was if I have a team do I give them a quick run-through of how to sketch I will do sort of an abbreviated version of what I did before in terms of like hey here's a page and here's what it looks like is in a sketch look here's a box with an X through it I will draw like just a simple wireframe just to give people an example to kind of set their expectations level set them and then we just kind of dive into it right so they don't have that expectation like I have to produce art right anyway anyway it's actually fun thank you and I'm just trying to see if you can point us to some resources then we can find out more such activities and stuff like that which type like sketching activities so for the sketching if you like do google searches on either on sketching or graphic facilitation there's other other books and other stuff out there and how was game storming so when there is a book of like improv exercises that have like business value I think it's called game storming but I might be wrong if you tweet me or something email me I'll look up the book I'm trying to think about anyone else all right again thank you so much for coming