SofaConf 2020: Facilitating Remote Research

This year I had the opportunity to talk at SofaConf 2020 about a topic near and dear to my heart: becoming a better user research facilitator. Now that we are all running remote research, those facilitation skills are even more crucial. If you are running remote research methods for the first time, it can feel like a real constraint. What if you can't get a good rapport with your participant because you're not in the same room? How are you going to get them to open up if they can't sense your non-verbal cues? What if there's a time lag? Will this even work?

Constraints breed creativity. Rather than mourning the loss of our in-person research days, this is an opportunity to quickly improve your facilitation techniques. Our job as facilitators is to create a safe and comfortable space for a stranger to share their thoughts and ideas with us, through the use of voice, questions, prompts, and activities. We're going to borrow some methods from jazz improvisers because they also have to quickly create safe spaces with total strangers. Like improvising, there is an art to good research facilitation, but its components are learnable and you can get better pretty quickly if you know what to practice. This talk breaks down the qualities of great user research facilitation into bite-sized methods and techniques that you can actually practice and put to use immediately.

Watch the full talk here - You’re on the air, I’m listening: Facilitating remote research