Job requirement: Facilitation

I got worked up in a tizzy recently and had to have a drink with international sex symbol Dennis Wixon. I told Dennis that some of our lab work (which includes protocol analysis and RITE method) can feel like administrative busy work, especially if the person doing that work is an outsider to the project team. The role becomes meeting organizer. Organize the meeting of target users and stakeholders. It’s possible to be brought in to projects without an understanding of the business goals, the target customers, the design requirements, the purpose of the product, and the design decisions that need to be made. Not knowing these things, doesn’t set up the person doing this work to make very good design recommendations. Do the designers want an outside perspective? Not really. They have enough opinions from others. Do they want a meeting organizer? Yes, but is there more?

Dennis reminded me that facilitation skills are essential. I didn’t like the answer at first, but he’s right. There are many stakeholders involved in problem identification and generating solutions. There are designers, janitors, product managers, cooks, engineers, testers, marketers, executives, accountant’s, receptionists, lawyers and their lawyers. Researchers can be good people to facilitate the formation of stakeholder’s interpretation and conclusions of user’s behavior. Researcher can know which verbal reports are useful and useless pieces of data. The good researchers know the important differences between a sequence of thoughts generated by users solving problems and social verbalizations used to commuicate through descriptions, justification and rationalization. It is the researcher’s job to get stakeholders looking at the best data. Lead them through their own analysis and interpretation of observations. Influence their conclusions. Faciliate the process of making good product design decisions.

I have not thought much about what it takes to be a good facilitator. Experimental psychologist, sociologist, anthropologists and other social scientists that research people aren’t necessarily educated in the art of facilitation any more than designers, engineers, marketers and business managers. Researchers that know how to facilitate a group of stakeholders to make the best decisions from good data will be highly regarded. It’s the researcher’s facilitation skills that can make the difference when dropped in to projects to coordinate the meetings between target users and stakeholders.