Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation

Russ Unger · Brad Nunnally

Feb 2013 · New Riders

About this eBook

Facilitation skills are the foundation of every successful design practice, yet training on this core competency has been largely unavailable—until now. Designing the Conversation: 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 to:

• 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

About the author

Russ Unger, co-author of A Project Guide to UX Design and user experience consultant, is on the Advisory Board for
the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. His workshops have been
attended by a variety of companies, from lean startups to large corporations. Since 1993 he has helped many
companies incorporate user experience strategies and tactics into their designs.

Brad Nunnally is a Lead User Experience Consultant at Perficient, where he performs UX activities including research, modeling, design, and testing. Over the course of his career, he has helped clients in the financial, healthcare management, public utilities, and pharmaceutical management industries identify customer and user needs, and has developed engaging experiences catered directly for those needs.

Dan Willis is a user experience consultant who has been launching robust websites and apps since the mid-1990s.
He was the first User Experience Director at washingtonpost.com, and he held the same title at PBS.org. He is the creator of UX Crank (www.uxcrank.com), a resource for UX professionals.