Recipes for better work
You’re in a meeting that isn’t going very well. The minutes are ticking by and the group hasn’t accomplished very much in the last hour.
People are checking their watches, dosing off, and starting to get anxious about ‘action items’. Sound familiar? Based on feedback received in LUMA’s workshops, user research, (and from our own experiences in meetings), we knew that situations like this one happen all too often, even in organizations that are trying to adopt more collaborative approaches.
To address this meeting madness, we wondered: How might we help people facilitate engaging sessions? How might learning Human-Centered Design methods be fun, fast, and effective? How might we make it easy for people to prepare for and participate in meetings? Inspired by challenges like these, our design & development team set out to help people achieve their meeting goals on LUMA Workplace.
With many early ideas, assumptions, and opinions floating around, our team thought long and hard about which avenues to pursue. After several rounds of ideation, testing, and feedback, we landed on exploring a flexible process for linking the 36 methods together, presented as unique situations and contexts in which they could be used. Recipes. With these recipes, we aimed to make using Human-Centered Design methods more usable, approachable, and relevant than they are as standalone activities.
To do this, rather than leading with terms like ‘Creative Matrix’ or ‘Visualize the Vote’, we presented the methods in plain language, linking them to real objectives that resonated with people, such as: Bring stakeholders together to explore and assess future ideas. This approach stemmed from work the LUMA team had been doing for years in our in-person workshops. With recipes, we were now able to formalize these “method combinations” and share them with a larger audience.
Here’s the story of how our team created recipes:
From CARDS TO COMBINATIONS
For many years, LUMA has helped people bring Human-Centered Design from public and private workshops back to their workplace. To do this, the team designed a planning activity with cards to represent the 36 methods in the LUMA system.
methods as ingredients
Inspired by the workshop planning activity and combinations in the Innovating for People handbook, our team re-framed the 36 Human-Centered Design methods as ‘ingredients’, ready to be learned, mixed together, and shared on LUMA Workplace.
PROTOTYPING & TESTING
As the concept of ‘recipes’ began to emerge, our team set out to prototype and test the idea with our customers. Over nearly two years of iterating on recipes, we interviewed and tested prototypes with over 50 people within organizations all over the world.
“Excellent material, recipes are great, very
clear indications on how to perform activities.”
Following several iterations (as shown on of the pages above), we contextualized exactly how to do each method in a recipe—with detailed step-by-step guidance to help people learn how to transition gracefully from one activity to the next. As we drafted recipes, we considered the amount of time that might be needed for the session overall and to do each step in the agenda.
As we continued to test the recipes after launching them, two clear gaps surfaced: people were struggling to find the right recipe to use and once they found one that seemed promising, they weren’t very confident that the selected recipe would get them to their desired result. We also saw people struggling with navigation and heard them express interest in more relevant examples and better ways to contextualize the recipes to their industry, team, projects, or daily work. In response to this feedback, we worked on designs we believed would deliver a clearer site structure, improvements to recipe filtering, and innovative ways to group the content.
How do people plan meetings?
HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU HAVE?
In our research, we learned that people have serious time constraints. It can be difficult to get even two hours with colleagues or clients. This inspired the addition of a ‘Suggested time’ filter, or how long activities might take.
FILTERING & FINDING
Throughout the project, we experimented with many ways to help people find the right recipe. We used filters, process phases, level of difficulty, alphabetizing, date published, & even modified recipe names to make them easier to understand & compare.
WHAT’S YOUR GROUP SIZE?
Another major factor in planning a session is group size. With recipes, we encouraged people to consider the meeting spaces, materials, and agenda based on how many people would be attending. Having a ‘group size’ allowed us to be specific for each recipe.
“The resources and recipes are fantastic. I use
them in a number of meetings and workshops.”
As we continued to launch recipes, we heard from our users that it was still difficult for them to feel like they had found the right recipe for their situation using filters alone. To address this problem, we created and tested the concept of ‘Collections’ to make recipes easier to browse. We created collections with common job roles (based on those held by our users), industry topics (such as Agile, Business Model Canvas, and Double Diamond), and common challenges (like ’coming up with better ideas’). Based on customer feedback, we also started to experimented with partnerships, launching a ‘Google Design Sprints’ collection with recipe recommendations for situations a team might face during a sprint.
How did research influence our work?
REMOTE COLLABORATION
As we worked on recipes that provided advice for how to facilitate in-person sessions, people often asked us how to do so with a remote team. Partnering with MURAL, we created recipe templates that could be launched in virtual workspaces for distributed sessions.
RECIPES FOR EACH METHOD
In addition to searching, filtering, or browsing recipes by collection, we also highlighted them on the 36 method pages. For example, for someone who is interested in trying Stakeholder Mapping, they can look at recipes for inspiration or a starting point.
PLANNING YOUR OWN SESSION
While recipes provide a good starting point for a session agenda, we learned that people wanted to customize them to meet their needs. Following several rounds of prototype testing, we launched a session planner tool that can be launched from any recipe.
“Using the recipes gets us to action, that has a good
chance to be successful, in a short time. Expediency.”
To date, there are nearly 100 recipes on LUMA Workplace covering a wide range of common topics and work-related challenges. People all over the world have used them thousands of times to plan meetings, workshops, and sessions in organizations such as Autodesk, Accenture, and Google.
You can learn more about recipes by starting a free, 30-day trial of LUMA Workplace.