Liberating Structures: Making meetings more productive
Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
Client: Liberating Structures Mobile App
Key Performance Indicator: Significantly increase mobile app adoption from professional facilitators and gain positive feedback after iterations based on usability testing.
Introduction:
How might we make meetings more inclusive, fun, and productive? This is one of the main questions that the Liberating Structures methodology aims to answer. Liberating Structures is widely recognized as a very useful set of facilitation tools that:
Provides interactive frameworks to generate ideas and stimulate productivity.
Engages & includes everyone, emphasizing collaboration in an equitable, creative setting.
Makes meetings “suck less”.
The “Structures”- which were originally developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless - are commonly used by professional facilitators. Yet the mobile app is, for the most part, is merely a digital version of the Liberating Structures book and has limited interactivity. As a result, most facilitators use the app mostly as a reference, if at all.
For this project, my team and I set out to explore whether the Liberating Structures app could be redesigned, perhaps with added features, to make the facilitation of Liberating Structures even more effective.
User Research: Toward an understanding of LS and facilitation
We began by conducting interviews with facilitators who use Liberating Structures. We started with this approach because we wanted to understand what are the pain points of facilitators for their sessions in general and also specifically associated with the LS app/website.
To synthesize our findings from the user interviews, we started with an affinity map. Some of the main takeaways included:
When using the app, facilitators need to be able to browse, understand, and select the structures more easily.
Users need help with building and customizing their agendas with LS in mind as well as timeboxing during facilitation sessions.
Facilitators need help with post-session administration in terms of recording data and leaving feedback for themselves.
The LS app needs to have integration with other tools
Users need the app to be optionally interactive, but the learning curve for useful features needs to be negligible. Facilitators want to focus on facilitating, not managing another tool.
We then developed a persona, who we named Lisa, to help us narrow our action plan and understand our users’ problem in a succinct way.
Liberating Structures does not have direct competitors per se, as it is primarily a methodology, but many digital products exist that attempt to make facilitation easier and more effective. So in addition to the interviews, we conducted a Competitive and Comparative analysis in order to get an idea of what other products provide useful facilitation features that could be incorporated into an LS app.
We found that platforms such as Session Lab and Klaxoon provide customizable meeting/workshop templates and agenda builders with timeboxing features. Both products also include the potential for substantial participant interactivity without much of a learning curve. A platform called Voltage Control also has many resources for facilitation and even incorporates Liberating Structures into some of its templates, but their mobile app lacks seamlessness and doesn’t solve many of the issues that came up in our user interviews.
Boiling Down the Data
At this point it felt like we were making maple syrup, which involves boiling down 40 gallons of sap over many hours just to make one gallon of syrup. We had a lot of data that we needed to boil down to get to our synthesis.
Through the process of the interview synthesis and C & C analysis, our team ideated on many different possible solutions to solve our target users’ problems with the LS app/platform.
How could we prioritize and boil down all the data, or “sap”, that we gathered in a way that would help our target users?
The problem: Lisa needs an easy way to select the right structures build agendas for her varying needs, facilitate the structures efficiently, and record their data in a useful way, because she currently has to juggle too many facilitation tools and only uses the LS app as a reference.
How might we create an LS app that doesn’t just act like a book?
How might we make the language and information in the app more accessible?
How might we make interactivity within the app a useful option?
My team and I grabbed pens and pencils and began sketching and ideating on possible app features and how they might function.
We considered our user interviews and research and landed on several features to prioritize:
A meeting/agenda builder, with scheduling functionality.
Ways to easily discover and understand particular structures and add them to meeting agendas.
A realtime meeting manager, with timeboxing tools, that would not only help facilitators conduct structures within meetings, but would help make the structures easy to understand.
Flows that would allow one to record data about a meeting and leave self-feedback within the app.
We found that creating a user flow and app map helped us to further visualize the functionality of the new features.
Usability tests: Round one
We sourced volunteers in the Liberating Structures community to test our grayscale prototype.
100% of users completed the tasks of: Find out how to facilitate a 1-2-4 All structure; build a meeting with a 1-2-4 All structure; and run the meeting that you created.
83% user success rate of navigating screens
Most issues came from the structure detail screen
On the 1-2-4-All detail screen
75% of users took <10 seconds to find out “how” to facilitate a structure
75% did not realize the “how” steps were collapsable. However, we placed identical collapsable step elements on the “Run meeting” screen, and 86% of users intuitively clicked the steps to proceed and expand.
Here’s a more detailed look at the changes that we made as a result of our first round of usability tests:
We switched the order of the “How” and “What” tabs in the structure detail pages so the “How” was the first carousel shown. All of our testers were able to find the “How” tab eventually on the original prototype, but after some time. So we switched around the order of these sections in order to streamline it for Lisa, our busy persona. We also altered the screen so that when one arrives on the screen, the first facilitation step is expanded, to help users realize the instruction steps are expandable/collapsable.
Several of our testers commented that it would be useful to be able to easily reuse agendas previously run. So we added a “reuse” icon next to the “Edit” CTA for users to be able to quickly reuse old meetings and agendas that they created.
More than one user commented that the fixed scrolling header section on the meeting in progress screen was frustrating in that it prevented easy scrolling and took up a lot of space on the screen. Se we removed the fixed scrolling for this screen. We originally thought that it would be a nice feature to orient the user to the structure they are facilitating, but user ultimately found it distracting form the content of the meeting.
When we spoke to LS users during our interviews and usability tests, some expressed that they liked the visual design of the existing LS app. So when we created our full color mockups, we decided to retain much of the existing app’s style, including a lot of off-white space between elements and text, large calls to action, well-illustrated iconography, subtle drop shadows, and an easily legible sans-serif typeface. We added some color embellishments, such as the bright red CTAs, to add emphasis and hopefully an element of delight, to certain features.
Usability tests: Round two
Once the comp prototype was complete, we conducted a second round of usability testing with Liberating Structures users. We also recruited several volunteers who were completely new to Liberating Structures to provide supplementary perspective. In addition, we conducted a casual focus group with a panel of professional facilitators to gain further feedback and insight.
66% of users were
Able to find “how to facilitate” section faster
Able to realize that the steps in this section were expandable/clickable
100% of users validated the ease and addition of the “reuse” meeting feature added. In addition, all users validated the usefulness of the “How’d it go?” overlay that we created for when a meeting ends. Users found that being able to making notes about the meeting and being able to go back and review that data later would be highly useful.
Conclusion and next steps:
We gained a range of excellent feedback from our users that made us realize the potential impact of our features facilitation tools that could be added to the Liberating Structures app. Through our user testing we realized that there are many different additional useful features that could be added to a rendition of the LS app and that a great deal more “maple syrup” could be made. Some of the main next steps that could be taken for the project could include:
Including concise onboarding screens for new user accessibility.
Bringing in a UX writer to help clarify and make the language throughout the app more approachable.
Exploring possible ways to build out the export feature and seamlessly integrate the app with other tools such as zoom, miro, trello, google docs and slides.
Dive deeper into way of maximizing the usefulness of
The in-meeting timer feature
The Information Architecture & Organization of the app
Researching the possibility of developing a desktop app version for virtual LS meeting facilitation.