Getting the right content into your portfolio is hard. It’s especially hard when you’re creating a new portfolio or revisiting a portfolio that you haven’t updated in a long time. 

At Center Centre, our students will face this challenge. Most of our students won’t have portfolios when they begin our program. By the time they graduate, students will learn how to create an effective portfolio. 

Ian Fenn says that the goal of a UX portfolio is to get you an interview with a UX hiring manager. In his seminar, Sharing Our Stories: Designing and Reviewing UX Portfolios, Ian recommends creating a portfolio that tells stories about your best work. By including these stories in your portfolio, you can get hiring managers excited to learn more about your experience. 

When you create a portfolio with stories, you can include screenshots of polished, finished work. Many designers do this. However, Ian says you can make your portfolio much stronger by telling stories about the process you took to get to the finished work. 

To illustrate the stories about your process, show examples of work you did throughout the project. You can include a series of interface sketches you did with a developer. You can include photos of you and your team working through ideas with sticky notes on the wall. You can also include screenshots of prototypes that you tested with users. Use examples that highlight your process, not just screenshots of polished, finished work. By showing both your process and your final work, hiring managers get a real sense of how you approach a design project.

Before writing the stories for your portfolio, consider what questions hiring managers will have about your projects. To learn about your process, hiring managers often ask questions like: 

• How did you meet the business goals of the project? 
• How did you meet the needs of the customer? 
• What challenges did you encounter in this project, and how did you overcome those challenges? 

After you consider these questions, craft a story for each project you’ve worked on. Keep these stories short and interesting. For each project story, Ian recommends that you describe the challenges, process, solution, and outcome. 

Center Centre’s co-founder, Jared Spool, recommends you also indicate the duration of the project. The duration shows how much time you had to complete the project.  A project that lasts for one month is often very different from a project that lasts for one year. When hiring managers know the project duration, they can ask how you used the time available to create the best possible outcome for the project.

To infuse the right content into your portfolio, write short and interesting stories. Include examples that support the full story, rather than just showing screenshots of finished work. Create stories that make the hiring manager curious for more information. Remember that the goal of the portfolio is to get you a job interview. During the interview, you can provide more details about the projects in your portfolio. 

Creating a portfolio at Center Centre

We’ve taken Ian Fenn’s portfolio recommendations and applied them to our curriculum at Center Centre. We help our students learn how to create a UX portfolio that’s rich with stories. In our Storytelling course, we show our students how to apply storytelling skills to things like team projects and portfolios. Through stories, students will demonstrate what they’ve learned, what they’ve accomplished, and what skills they’ve acquired at Center Centre.

By telling stories about your best work, you can make your UX portfolio great. In our next post, we’ll explain what work examples to include in a portfolio. 

More resources on UX portfolios

If you’d like to learn more about creating a UX portfolio, consider pre-ordering Ian Fenn’s book, Designing a UX Portfolio. You can also purchase his video seminar, Sharing Our Stories: Designing and Reviewing UX Portfolios, from the All You Can Learn video library. 

Become a Center Centre student

Would you like to create a UX portfolio that will get you an interview? Would you like to graduate from Center Centre with a well-rounded education in UX design? View our full program or apply today. 

When I was a junior UX designer, I often designed alone at my desk. I loved it. I got to listen to my favorite music, push pixels around, then share my work with the team.

Looking back, in some ways I was doing good UX design work, but in many ways, I wasn’t. My work wasn’t as strong as it could be because I wasn’t collaborating. I wasn’t building relationships with designers and developers. I wasn’t using the power of brainstorming to source the best ideas from my team. By working alone at my desk, my design work wasn’t able to move from good to great.

Over time, I learned to collaborate. I began to get input from stakeholders early in a project to avoid disagreements later in the project. I learned how to structure activities like brainstorming sessions so that everyone could participate and share ideas. I realized that once you know how to collaborate effectively, you can produce better results—as a team—than you can on your own.

As I build the Leadership course curriculum at Center Centre, I collaborate with Dr. Jim Tucker, an expert in learning and leadership. Dr. Tucker knows that effective leaders influence other people around them to reach shared goals. They accomplish this through collaboration.

When I asked Dr. Tucker to recommend resources about leadership, he recommended several books, including Humans are Underrated, by Geoff Colvin. Throughout the book, Colvin emphasizes the significance of collaboration skills in today’s workforce:

Employers’ top priorities include relationship building, teaming, co-creativity, brainstorming, cultural sensitivity, and ability to manage diverse employees—right-brain skills of social interaction.

Colvin explains why collaboration is more than just a buzzword or a trend. Collaboration is an indispensable skill. According to Colvin, machines and computers are replacing many jobs that don’t require skills like collaboration and relationship-building. That means a designer who effectively collaborates has better job security.

A New York Times article, “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work,” explains that the demand for soft skills is growing:

Learning math and science is not enough. Jobs that involve those skills but not social skills, like those held by bookkeepers, bank tellers and certain types of engineers, have performed worst in employment growth in recent years for all but the highest-paying jobs. In the tech industry, for instance, it’s the jobs that combine technical and interpersonal skills that are booming, like being a computer scientist working on a group project.

The book and the article fascinated me. I didn’t realize that soft skills are in demand partly because machines can’t perform those skills. I wasn’t surprised to read that soft skills are in demand now more than ever. In our research with UX hiring managers, every hiring manager told Center Centre that what separates good designers from the best designers are soft skills. That’s why there is a focus on soft skills at Center Centre. Our students will graduate with a holistic skill set—including the soft skills—that hiring managers desperately need.

By the time Center Centre students graduate, they’ll be well ahead of where I was as a junior UX designer. Our students will have two years of experience applying their collaboration skills before they graduate. They will know how to collaborate effectively with others—to make sure that other voices and ideas are heard, while wrangling the team to reach the outcome that everyone desires and needs.

Students will move their design skills from good to great by applying effective collaboration techniques. The soft skills students learn will help them throughout their careers. Graduates will be indispensable members of their organizations.

Apply to be a student

Would you like to improve your collaboration skills while learning other UX design skills at Center Centre? View our full program or apply today.

In Figure out how you learn best, we explain how to learn more effectively by focusing on your process of learning. Then, you’ll figure out what learning approaches work well for you.

Paying attention to how you learn is part of becoming a better learner. You can also reflect on what you learn to help your learning stick.

Use a journal to reflect on your learning

Another trick for making learning stick is to reflect on your learning. You can do this by writing about what you learn in a journal. The journal can take any format you’d like, though I suggest keeping all journal entries in one place. The journal can be anything from a Google Document or a small, Field Notes memo book. Use whatever tool that feels most comfortable. Journal reflection is for you and you alone. So there’s no need to make a beautiful artifact, unless that’s what makes you most comfortable.

In your journal, jot down what you learned, how you learned it, and what was effective or ineffective in your learning process. As you journal, you’ll begin to see patterns in your learning. You’ll begin to know what learning approach works well for the type of thing you need to learn.

Share what you learn with someone else

Another way to reflect on your learning is to share what you learn with someone else. Sharing what you learn is a powerful way of making learning stick. During our daily stand-up meetings at Center Centre, each of us shares the most important thing we learned and how it will change our approach in the future. Sharing what I learn often helps me remember it later. When I’m trying to do something I haven’t done in a while, I usually remember a conversation I had about what I learned in a stand-up meeting. Because I shared what I learned with my peers, I remember it more easily.

You’ll be amazed by how much you remember if you share it with someone else. Also, sharing with someone else also helps that person learn something new. And when they share something they’ve learned with you, you have the opportunity to learn something as well.

You can share what you learn in a number of ways. Ask if your team members would like to share what they learned at your weekly staff meeting. You can each take five minutes or less to talk about what you learned and how it will help you approach learning differently in the future.

Find a learning buddy

You can also find another lifelong learner—someone who’s willing to geek out on learning with you. If you can find a co-worker, meet with this person for five to ten minutes a day and share the most important thing you learned. Explain how it will change what you do in the future. If you can’t find a co-worker, you can do this with someone outside of work, like a former colleague or a friend. Reflecting on what you learn every day will infuse the pattern of learning. You’ll both get better at learning how to learn.

Reflective learning at Center Centre

We have a learner-centered culture at Center Centre. Each day, we we learn on our own, and we learn something new from each other. By sharing and reflecting on what we learn, we make learning stick.

If you’d like to learn more about how Center Centre infuses learning into our daily process, check out the 24 Ways article, Meet for Learning, by Center Centre’s co-founder, Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman.

Apply to be a student

Would you like to improve your ability to learn new things? Would you like to become a UX designer? View our full program or apply today.

At Center Centre, we use an iterative design process for just about everything we do. Iterating allows us to measure our progress and learn from our mistakes. We test big ideas using iteration. We also fine tune details like wording, size, and even color through iteration.

Working with color through iteration

As Center Centre’s in-house designer, I led the design of our first outdoor banner. Throughout this project, I collaborated with Scenic City Signs, a sign and graphics company in Chattanooga. We went through many design iterations before finding the right colors and the right design for our banner.

I find it extremely beneficial to work through the iteration process with experts and mentors. For the banner project, I choose to collaborate with Scenic City Signs in Chattanooga. I knew their domain knowledge of the printing processes would help me to make better design decisions. Having a proper sounding board can help you as the designer feel more confident about your final design.

Together, Scenic City Signs and I used this iterative process to choose the right colors:

• Plan a color.
• Implement the color outdoors as a test. (We place it temporarily on the wall and view it from different distances.)
• Measure how closely the color matches our brand colors.
• Learn from the process to determine the next step.

I used these strips to choose the correct PANTONE blue and purple.

Throughout this process, I learned more by working with an expert than I would have learned by myself. I made more confident decisions. I also learned a few tricks about creating outdoor signage:

• As colors vary from print to screen, they also vary on textures of print materials. The textured material on our sign makes Center Centre’s Pantone purple look lighter than it should. We used a darker shade of purple to adjust for the color difference.
• Center Centre’s Pantone blue looks great indoors under our LED lights. However, when you view it outdoors in sunlight, our blue looks warmer than it looks inside. Through iteration, we found a Pantone blue that looks cooler and great in the sun.

Using an iterative process with our students

After we printed, completed, and installed the banner, Eddie, a print professional at Scenic City signs, said to me, “Please tell me you’ll teach students the difference between screen colors and print colors.”

I smiled.

Our curriculum doesn’t include print design, but our students will learn about the use of color when designing for screens. Our students will also learn to develop their designs using an iterative process.

Students will learn when to work with experts. At some point during their time at Center Centre or during their careers, they’ll encounter projects that require mentorship from someone with more experience. Knowing when to consult an expert and when to try something on your own is an invaluable skill.

Apply to be a student

Do you want to learn from leading industry experts? Would you like to learn more about working through problems using an iteration process? Become a Center Centre student. View our full program or apply today.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably set a few goals for the new year. Maybe you want to add more healthful foods to your diet. Maybe you want to get better at speaking a second language. Maybe you want to learn a new skill to help you grow professionally. As UX designers, we often need to learn new skills. Even if we don’t realize it, we’re constantly learning. We often learn things when we need to. Remember the last time you were in a crunch to learn something so you could solve a new problem, or solve a familiar problem with a better solution? You might have learned something quickly, applied it right away, and moved on with your day. You might not have paid attention to your process of learning. Over the next year, take a few moments to pause and think about how you learn best. Then, consider how to apply your successful learning approaches the next time you need to learn something new.

Think: About a recent successful learning experience

Think about the last time you learned something successfully. How did you learn it? Did you learn by reading a book? Did you learn from someone else on your team? Did you learn by watching a presentation, then diving into the problem?

Ask: Why was this learning experience successful?

Once you think of a successful learning experience, ask yourself, why was this learning approach successful? Could I use this approach again in the future and achieve the results I want? For example, maybe you had to learn a new prototyping tool, like Sketch. Because your colleague uses Sketch often, you asked her for a quick tutorial. She sat down with you for 10 minutes, got you up and running, and voila! You were familiar enough with Sketch to continue learning the tool on your own. All you needed was some assistance to get up and running. You needed a mentor who could get you over the initial hump, and then you were on your way.

Ask: When would I use this approach again in the future?

Ask yourself, when would I use this learning approach again in the future? If I had to learn another design tool or prototyping tool, would I seek a mentor for help? Or would I use another approach? Would a mentor work well for a learning something other than a new tool? What if I had to learn a tool, but no one was available to help me? What if I had to learn the basics of content strategy, which is very different from learning a new tool? Would a mentor be effective for that, too? The more you focus on your process of learning, the more you understand how you learn. This knowledge leads to better and longer-lasting learning.

One of my favorite podcast episodes of 2015 is “Sorting Out this Mess,” a UX Podcast interview with Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton. It’s an impromptu, unplanned interview, but I was glued to the episode the entire time.

I walked away from the interview with a fresh perspectives on information architecture and UX design. Below are two concepts that resonated with me the most.

Sudden change happens in the virtual world, not the physical world

Andrew explains how human brains are wired to cope with the physical world and not the virtual world. In the interview, Andrew “nerds out” about why we struggle with sudden change in a design, such as a drastic website redesign:

On an evolutionary scale, we did not evolve to learn how a certain kind of thing behaves in the world, and then have to learn how that same thing suddenly is a different thing. It just doesn’t exist in nature. A tree’s going to act like a tree. All the branches go this way and that’s how they are. You’re not going to turn around the next day and it’s Tree 2.0. Suddenly the branches are internal, and you have to peel the bark and the branch comes out, or to get to the fruit you have to dig. That’s not going to suddenly happen.

Andrew says that sudden change in our designs creates a cognitive problem for our users. Things in the natural world rarely change suddenly. But because we can suddenly change things and move things around in the virtual world, we do. It’s important that we learn how to make changes that help our users while minimizing frustration. To learn more about making design changes that don’t disrupt your users, read Jared Spool’s article, “Extraordinarily Radical Redesign Strategies.”

Using the same language, but without shared meaning

As the conversation flows, Abby and Andrew talk about establishing a shared understanding of our business challenges. Abby explains how sometimes organizations think that they don’t need or have information architecture for their designs. But that’s not true:

Businesses do not consider information architecture to be a thing they have already. They think about it as something they might buy if they had more money to get fancy consultants like Andrew and I. But that’s not what it is. It turns out that they’re sitting on an information architecture already and it’s not doing what they need it to do because no one thought about it.

Throughout the interview, Abby and Andrew discuss challenges that information architects and UX designers face in the design process. They provide examples of challenges they’ve encountered throughout their careers. To learn more about how Abby and Andrew sort out the messes they encounter, listen to the entire interview.

Apply to be a student

Do you want to learn more about information architecture? Would you like to get better at tackling the messes you encounter on the job? Become a Center Centre student. View our full program or apply today.

At Center Centre, our students get to choose their own learning adventures. We don’t require students to learn from one specific resource like a book or an online tutorial. Instead, they choose resources and experiences that meet their learning styles and learning needs.

As we’ve developed the User Research Practices course, we’ve found a lot of resources to help our students learn the basics of usability testing. Below are some of our favorites. If you’d like to learn more about usability testing, use these resources to develop your own learning adventure.

Books

• Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a fast and easy read. It demystifies usability testing. It explains how to run usability tests at your organization, even if you have a small budget or are short on time. After you read this book, you’ll know how to get started with usability testing.

• For a deeper dive into usability testing, read the Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeffrey Rubin and Dana Chisnell. This book walks you through each step of the usability testing process, from planning a test to analyzing the results, then sharing the results with your team. Because this book dives deeply into the process of usability testing, I suggest reading a few of the articles below, watching one of the videos below, or reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy before you read this book.

• Just Enough Research by Erika Hall explains why we need to conduct user research (usability testing is a form of user research). Read Erika’s book if you want an introduction to user research that explores usability testing, user interviews, field visits, and surveys.

Videos

• Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research video presentation explains why we conduct user research. Her presentation covers many of the concepts in her book, listed above. Use this video as an alternative to reading the book.

• Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy video demo supplements Steve’s book by the same name, listed above. In the video, he walks you through a real usability test. He even suggests what to take notes on before the video begins. At the end of the video, he prompts you to evaluate the findings in your notes.

• The All You Can Learn (AYCL) seminar, Effectively Moderating Usability Tests, explains things like how to interact with participants, how to make participants feel comfortable, and how to get accurate data from participants. To watch this seminar, you’ll need a monthly subscription to the AYCL library, or you can purchase this specific seminar.

Articles

• “Usability Testing Demystified” by Dana Chisnell walks you through the process of conducting a usability study. Dana also explains how to involve your team in the usability study. If you’re brand new to usability testing, start with this article.

• “Talking with Participants During a Usability Test“ by Nielsen Norman Group shows you how to ask effective questions and elicit important findings from participants in a usability test.

• “Six Steps to Ensure a Successful Usability Test” by Ginny Redish provides six essential guidelines for running an effective usability test, such as selecting user tasks that uncover the biggest problems.

• “Testing Content” by Angela Colter explains how to usability test your content. It’s usually not enough to make sure that our users can find the content they need. Usability tests also need tell us if users understand the content in our designs.

Apply to be a student

Do you want to learn how to conduct usability tests or how to use other methods of user research? Become a student. View our full program or apply today.

When you hear the words “leader” and “leadership,” what do you think of?

You might think of personality traits like extroversion or charisma. You might think of colleagues who are assertive or proactive. Or you might think of activities like leadership retreats or team-building exercises like the dreaded trust fall.

You may also think of a leader as a person in a position of power and influence—people like Sheryl Sandberg, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. People often refer to an organization’s CEO, CTO, and CFO as “the leadership,” so maybe you think of the senior managers in your organization.

The terms “leader” and “leadership” are muddy. These terms hold different meanings for different people.

Two of our courses, Leadership and Facilitated Leadership, focus on leadership skills. When students graduate from Center Centre, they’ll be industry-ready, junior UX designers who understand what it means to effectively lead.

As we build our curriculum, we ask ourselves questions like,

• What will our students need to learn to be effective leaders?
• After graduation, how will they exhibit leadership on a design team when their title is junior designer?

To answer these questions, we have to get to the core of leadership. Dr. Jim Tucker, an expert in learning and leadership, provided us with this definition of leadership:

Leadership is a relationship in which one or more individuals influences one or more other individuals to change.

This is Center Centre’s definition of leadership. Notice that we define leadership as a relationship, not as a position.

We believe that anyone can lead, regardless of their title. A title like Director or Manager doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to influence others to change. It just means that you have a title and a position higher up in the org chart.

Center Centre students will know how to influence others. Graduates will know when it’s appropriate to step up and steer the design team toward shared goals, even when they’re surrounded by senior people. They will also know how to step up.

One way to steer a team is by applying the concept of micro leadership. In an interview with Leah Buley, our co-founder, Jared Spool, describes micro leadership:

[Micro leadership is] this idea that you’re not the CEO of the company or the head of the organization, but in fact, at that moment in that meeting, you’re the one who leans forward and says, “Hey guys, I have a way we can work through this.”

Then you bring out the Post-its and you bring out the technique and you say, “Let’s write some ideas down and put them on the wall, and then we’re going to organize them in this interesting way and see what happens.” For that brief moment, you’ve become the leader of the group.

That skill, being able to know when to do that, how to do that, how to be effective at it, and then how to sit back and say, “OK, group, someone else has to take over at this point, because I’ve done my little piece,” is a core UX skill that we hardly ever talk about.

By applying concepts like micro leadership in a team setting, our students will learn how to influence others to change when change is needed. They’ll know when to step up, and when to step back down so the team can continue to move forward.

Learn to lead: Become a Center Centre student

Would you like to learn and practice leadership skills at Center Centre? View our full program or apply today.

Meet Jim, a fast learner who struggles with reading

A few years ago, I joined a team as the first dedicated UX designer. On the team was a front-end developer/designer who I’ll call Jim. Jim wanted to learn UX design. So I taught him about interaction design, prototyping, user research, and other areas of UX. We tackled many problems together. Jim learned quickly, and he immediately applied what he learned to our organization’s projects.

Jim wanted to learn how to run usability tests on his own. I enjoy learning from reading books, so I recommended he read The Handbook of Usability Testing. He skimmed through the book, then set it down. He barely read any of it. He told me he struggled with reading. I knew he was a quick learner. However, when we first started working together, I didn’t know he had difficulty with reading.

Required learning goals, not required learning experiences

Through working with Jim, I learned a very important lesson: Each of us learns differently. We learn at different speeds, and in different ways. I keep this in mind as I develop curriculum.

At Center Centre, we don’t require students to learn from one, specific source (or type of source). Students choose their own learning adventures. For each course, students create a personalized learning plan (PLP)—by choosing from an array of learning exercises and projects.

Students choose their own learning experiences for their PLPs. We don’t require PLPs to include specific activities or projects. But we do require students to meet the learning goals for each course.

Each course has a unique set of learning goals. For example, one of the learning goals in the Copywriting and Content Strategy course is “Explain why content strategy is important to the success of an organization.” Throughout the course, students must demonstrate they’ve met this learning goal. They must be able to explain why content strategy is important in the design process.

Suggested core resources

That’s where suggested core resources come in. In each course, we suggest core learning resources for our students. We don’t require every student to use every resource. Instead, we encourage each student to choose resources that support their current knowledge and move them closer to their personal learning goals.

To meet the learning goal, “Explain why content strategy is important to the success of an organization,” students can choose from a handful of suggested core resources. Core resources include materials like Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson, “A Checklist for Content Work” by Erin Kissane, and the online seminar Content Strategy: Maximizing a Business Asset. Students may also suggest their own resources.

To demonstrate they have met a learning goal, students can write a written reflection, make a short presentation, complete a project, or suggest a different assessment exercise.

We’ll work closely with each student to help them create their Personalized Learning Plan. We’ll make sure students are on track to meet the required learning goals for each course and for the entire program. We’ll help them find resources that are relevant and up-to-date. And we’ll show them how to evaluate the quality of resources.

Our students will learn the way they learn best

By the time Center Centre students graduate, they won’t just know how to apply content strategy methods to their work. They’ll know how to find reliable learning resources, which is a necessary skill for lifelong learning.

My former coworker Jim was a great developer/designer. He was a quick learner, but he wasn’t was a quick reader. He was dedicated to creating productive and meaningful experiences for the people who used our designs. He just needed resources that supported the way he learned best.

At Center Centre, we’ll have students like Jim. By giving our students a chance to create their own learning pathways, we’ll create a learning environment that helps each student reach their personal learning goals.

Become a Center Centre student

Would you like to learn UX design by creating your own learning path? View our full program or apply today.

When I was a junior UX designer/front-end developer, I worked at a client services consultancy. My team and I spent most of our time building a grant management web app for our largest client.

The grant management project wasn’t going well. We were designing a complex system with many moving parts. Stakeholders on the client’s side disagreed on how the system should work. We missed deadlines because team members didn’t agree on design approaches.

It didn’t take long for everyone to become frustrated. I remember sitting in a long, uncomfortable meeting with five other people. We were designing a specific section of the system, but we weren’t making progress. In a bout of frustration, two members of the client team grabbed whiteboard markers and sketched the solutions they wanted. “Just build it this way,” they told us.

My heart sank. These clients weren’t designers. The solutions they proposed wouldn’t be effective. But my team did what they asked us to do. We were tired of arguing. We were willing to settle for mediocre work so we could just move on and get the work done.

I knew we needed someone who could facilitate agreement among everyone, but at the time, I didn’t know how to facilitate a discussion that would move things forward.

That was about eight years ago. Since then, I’ve learned how to prevent frustration among team members. I’ve learned how to get buy-in and input from stakeholders. I’ve learned how to ask the right questions to surface design challenges. I’ve learned how to steer teams toward shared design goals.

Facilitation is a skill you can learn

Like anything else in our industry, facilitation is a learned skill. Just like writing code or conducting a usability test, facilitation is something you learn. It’s a skill that’s improved and finessed through practice, over time.

Facilitation is such a critical UX skill that we dedicate an entire course, Facilitated Leadership, to teaching students how to facilitate design teams. Our students will learn how to steer a team toward consensus. They’ll learn when to involve stakeholders in a project so that they can contribute and feel heard. Students will learn how to move a team toward shared design goals, despite constraints like politics, deadlines, and budgets.

An introductory resource to facilitating

While building the Facilitated Leadership course, I found many learning resources for our students. One of my favorite introductory resources is Kevin Hoffman’s article on A List Apart, “Facilitating Great Design.” In the article, Kevin explains how to facilitate meetings and activities that generate results with a team.

One technique for keeping a meeting on track that Kevin shares: record what people say publicly. Simply capture the essence of their ideas on a whiteboard or flip chart, in a way that everyone in the room can see. Public recording engages people visually and helps the group create a shared memory of what was said. Read Kevin’s article to learn how to implement the public recording technique and other techniques.

Center Centre students will learn many techniques for facilitation. They’ll learn simple techniques like public recording. They’ll learn how to generate ideas among a group, and they’ll learn how to reach consensus with a group. They’ll also learn about specific activities like The KJ-Technique (also known as affinity diagramming) and design studio.

I think back to my time at the consultancy. The challenges I had there were not unique. Our students will likely face similar challenges while they are students and even after they graduate. Our students will not only learn about facilitation techniques, they’ll actually use these techniques in real-world settings with real stakeholders. Students will consistently have the opportunity to hone their facilitation skills.

Learn how to facilitate as a Center Centre student

Would you like to learn how to facilitate a design team? Would you like to learn how to make design happen, even if you’re dealing with politics, tight budgets, and little time? Apply to be a student or view our program to learn more.