Workshop type: Online workshop

Workshops are an excellent, people-centered way to get work done. From a participatory session that replaces a standard meeting, to a full-blown, multi-day experience, workshops get teams and clients to explore options, analyze alternatives, and come to consensus. But successful workshops don't happen by accident. They’re time- and resource-intensive to plan and deliver, and require particular skills and knowledge. UX practitioners are uniquely positioned to develop and facilitate excellent workshop experiences. However, workshop approaches and how-tos aren’t often taught in school or on the job. The Art and Science of Workshop Design gives participants a flexible framework for building and facilitating workshop sessions - ranging from better meetings to multi-day collaborative experiences. Starting with the foundations of workshop design and delivery, participants will learn how to leverage design thinking methods to create collaborative sessions that are fun and effective. They will explore design activities, tools, and techniques, and develop their unique facilitator’s stance. Participants will have the hands-on opportunity to create and practice leading an exercise, and will leave with a customized Action Plan to take the next step - which may be leading a working session on the job or delivering a workshop at a future conference. The workshop is itself structured as a template that models and demonstrates workshop design. The presenters will peel back the layers of each component to show how it has been built, how it contributes to workshop goals, and how it can be adapted to different types of meetings and groups. This layering also enables the workshop to offer value to participants at all levels of experience: the foundations and main components of workshop design will be made clear for beginners, and each topic and activity can be engaged at either higher or deeper levels. Participants will receive a workbook they will use throughout the day and which will be a valuable resource as they plan and carry out their own workshop sessions.

• Topic highlights include:
• The narrative arc of a workshop
• Establishing the participation contract (e.g. agenda, expectations, "Yes, And")
• Many roles and skills (vision, logistics, activity design, facilitation)
• Managing participation (opening and closing the "fourth wall," engaging all voices)
• Well-Being in the workshop (healthy snacks, physical movement, centering)

Content is the whole point of the digital products we create. It needs to be omni-channel, ready for AI and machine learning, and easily maintained. It needs to be connected explicitly so computers can extract meaning and deliver it in a meaningful way to the intended audience. Information architects, content strategists, and product managers are responsible for creating the foundation on which to build information spaces. Since Designing Connected Content was published in late 2017, it has been applied to many situations. The conclusion is that this framework of designing from the bottom up--starting with context and designing resources for consumption on any interface--is transformational. Organizations have used it to: * Create a shared language for talking about the work they do * Build complex and dynamic websites * Change the way they approach content * Create personalized experiences in various mediums This workshop will cover not just the process, but the application of the process to many situations. We’ll start by learning to create domain and content models and then move into how to design content and interfaces. Along the way we’ll talk about how to get others to go along and create alignment and shared understanding from the start.

In modern digital publishing projects, content modeling can feel like a high wire act, balancing an organization's big communication dreams against the ugly realities of design, technology, and legacy content constraints. Tilt too far in either direction, and the project falls.

Fortunately, there's good news! By approaching content modeling as a communications challenge rather than One More Deliverable, it's possible to design better, more accurate models in less time than you'd expect. In this workshop, we'll use iterative exercises familiar to developers and designers, to examine an organization's content multiple perspectives. We'll build a complex model together — *fast*.

We will cover:

Domain/Entity Breakdown

Attendees will produce a light entity-relationship diagram using a "Jobs to be done/Messages to communicate" model. This exercise will use a "canned" example organization. As attendees move through the exercise, they will be encouraged to examine the entities they have produced, and ask what makes one type different from another? Other topics to be discussed will be when to splitting and consolidate types, and composition.

Initial Inventory

After an explanation of what a content inventory is and the purposes it services, attendees will be given a "canned" inventory spreadsheet and asked to answer analyze it in a variety of ways. This will include using the inventory to spot trends and outliers, performing a gap analysis and Keep/Kill/Combine exercise through a content audit, and discussing how content governance can be brought to bear on these issues.

Data Dictionaries

Attendees will Build a spreadsheet that describes the properties, property types, and rules for one entity type. This will be a table exercise, using pre-printed paper sheets ready to be filled with answers. Attendees will be encouraged to use the entity-relationship diagram and inventory to drive their decisions and answer questions like what properties are needed? What relationships are necessary? So the rules reflect the content you’re actually working with?

Wireframing

Attendees will be asked to produce or dissect a wireframe and explain how it maps to the data in the content model. During this exercise, some tables will be decomposing a screenshot and others will be wireframing from scratch. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions about content relationships, curation, and automation. Are there new types being identified here which were missed when building the data dictionary? What are their properties and relationships?