“If you had six people in a room for three hours, did you generate 18 productive hours of work? Because that's what you just substituted. Can you design your sessions so people feel they contributed, but also generate a significant amount of value for the project?”
NN/G UX Podcast · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Asked for signs that a workshop is performative rather than grounded, Tanya lists no clear outcomes, generic activities and mistaking silence for consensus, then offers this cost test of multiplying attendees by hours.
Transcript
Exactly. Exactly. How old is your data? Is it stale? Yeah.
…there are certain types of workshops that are maybe a little bit more performative than we realize versus some that are genuinely helpful. Are there certain signs that people should be looking for to figure out, like, am I doing something in a truly grounded way or am I not? Like, any tips there?
Yeah, for sure. This is definitely part of my wheelhouse is design and collaboration. And, you know, you can go into these sessions and see there's a lot of conversation, but there's no clear outcomes. You know, people might be walking out of a workshop and thinking, what did we just do? Or what are we going to do with any of that? Right. Like, I don't really, I don't really understand what just happened. And often that's from a lack of preparation. That's from a lack of clear goals and clear outcomes and really understanding what people need to do with the outputs the next day. So maybe even it's a lack of good documentation coming out of a workshop and translating those outputs into something useful. It could also be activities that get generic output. So as I was talking about this workshop, this roadshow that went across the country, you know, that was a poor selection and design of activities because the questions weren't targeted enough to get anything meaningful. And they hadn't really done the legwork ahead of time to figure out what…
Yeah, that's a really helpful framing: the 18 hours of productive work. And I think if you pitched that to people, it would probably stop them in their tracks of like, wait, that's a lot of time, right? And maybe in retrospect, if they were thinking about the actual outcome that they wanted, it's…
It's not a methodology. You know, if you break it down and you look at where it comes from and how the framework was defined, it's not a methodology. It's a concept. It's a mental model. And it's really meant to show how design flows into itself, how the aspects of the design methodology flow, and…
Absolutely. And I mean, and I often joke too, like in the class, like if you, if you Google Google Images or whatever design thinking framework, there's like probably dozens of different versions of the framework, but a lot of them have a similar, like you're saying, a similar structure where it's…
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