This document outlines an agenda and presentation about successful collaboration between designers and clients. It discusses establishing shared experiences and understanding different professional cultures to improve collaboration. Through role-playing exercises, it explores how breakdowns in dialogue can occur and best practices that lead to success, such as empathy, shared activities, treating collaboration as a design problem, and going beyond superficial engagement to deeply understand each other. The goal is providing philosophies and tactics for collaboration to transform potential conflicts into harmony.
2. Introduction 5 minutes Exercise: Role-playing 25 minutes Philosophy and Tactics for Collaboration30 minutes Exercise: Role-playing 25 minutes Wrap Up 5 minutes Agenda
3. Today: Designers, working with clients In our fields we have a lot of assumptions about the natural relationship between designers and clients. Let’s look at how to create harmony instead of conflict. Who are we? Do you identify with designer? Or with client? Or something else?
4. Portigal We help companies discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves
5. Take a fresh look at people Use existing ideas as hypotheses What to make or do Refine & prototype Launch Iterate & improve We work throughout the development cycle Explore new ideas
6. American Lens on Global Experiences Kyoto Amsterdam London Indonesia Istanbul California Paris Taipei Bangalore
7. American Lens on Global Experiences Canadian Kyoto Amsterdam London Indonesia Istanbul Toronto Paris Taipei Bangalore
9. Exercise: Role Playing You are the end of a project and are sharing your final deliverables with your client (your client might be internal or external; you might be freelance, internal, or with an agency). Actor 1 – play yourself, as a reasonable, effective designer Actor 2 – play the “worst” client you can imagine Audience – take notes about what happens – what are the breakdowns, failures
35. Shared experiences This isn’t just about going to a restaurant – this is a new challenging experience for all of us. We were there to do fieldwork, to do ethnography, to go into Japanese homes. But this happens whenever we do fieldwork; we’re driving around, getting lost, sharing out of office time, informally, solving problems together, being uncomfortable, dining out. This produces great relationships, you get a lot of insight into what kind of people they are.
37. Workshops Shared activities can also be diving into the work together; we have clients join us in the field, read over field notes, come to our office and work through data together, we also do these workshops where people generate ideas. Often, our role is to facilitate them to get the information they need, in many ways we’re stepping back and letting go, we’re not solution givers, we are taking them to the point where they discover solutions. This can challenge our own feelings of where our expertise is, but again, we are letting go. And interesting things can happen; if you can feel confident about yourself as someone that is enabling OTHERs rather than being yourself the master, then you are in a different position to make things happen.
39. Go beyond meeting them halfway Understand Create Create Create Create
40. Go beyond meeting them halfway Understand Create Create Understand Understand Create Create Understand
41. What you can do - Consulting 101 Be on time, especially if they are on time Use their communication tools (Email? Telephone?) Emulate their work artifacts In other words, speak their language
53. I’ve got a tip (that you didn’t cover) that works well for me… Yeah, I’ve got a question for ya… One new thing I learned today is… @steveportigal steve@portigal.com +1-415-894-2001 Portigal Consulting www.portigal.com
54. Coming in 2012! A book by Steve Portigal The Art and Craft of User Research Interviewing http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/user-interviews/
Designers and clients – broad terms. You may still have a client if you work internally, for an agency, or freelance.
Discussion and scribing – what do we think it means?
You are the end of a project and are sharing your final deliverables with your client (your client might be internal or external; you might be freelance, internal, or with an agency). Actor 1 – play yourself, as a reasonable, effective designerActor 2 – play the “worst” client you can imagineAudience – take notes about what happens – what are the breakdowns, failures
You are the end of a project and are sharing your final deliverables with your client (your client might be internal or external; you might be freelance, internal, or with an agency). Actor 1 – play an unreasonable, arrogant designerActor 2 – play the best client you can imagineAudience – take notes about what happens – what are the breakdowns, failures
If you are freelance and they are not, then you have a very different life than they do; cherish your freedom but understand their constraints. This is a very American example, but what do you see? Get an example from Julie for Korea. Or an example from Financial – security, etc.? Story about contempt or dimsissiveness from Avaya HQ in NJ.
the overall corporation did NOT allow wireless in any of their buildings (a telecommunications company!!!) so the HCI group had to get special dispensation from the bureaucracy to get it in their offices so that they could carry around laptops and collaborate and communicate;also they would have their flash drives confiscated and ipods sealed up upon entry into the building to prevent theft.... which also really prevented collaboration and just getting-work-done; USB ports blocked out on laptops (as was Google Docs) for collaborating and sharing files; so these people are trying to be creative and to collaborate with you but this is what they have to deal with. Understand it, and how that affects how they are dealing with day to day stuff
What are the tools that not only reassure but provide information in the way they need it, the way they want it, the way they know how to use it. This is about a familiar tool for something they know - timelines
This is something they aren’t familiar with – an innovation process – so put it in their terms