The past cou­ple of weeks I’ve been involved in some con­tex­tual enquiry, user research and problem-​​solving work­shops for a project I’m work­ing on with a large client. It’s been a lot of fun, not least because this is the sort of stuff I really like get­ting my teeth into. Hope­fully this will lead to some sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence over the out­comes for this project and some major usabil­ity wins for the end users.

The other major fac­tor in the enjoy­ment I’ve had in the work­shops par­tic­u­larly is the par­tic­i­pa­tory approach we took to the whole thing. Ret­i­cence on the part of par­tic­i­pants in work­shops can be a major influ­enc­ing fac­tor in the suc­cess or oth­er­wise of the work­shops. In an effort to tackle that hur­dle early, I posted the rules right at the start.

The Rules

In case you can’t read them, here they are:

  1. There are no rules (except these ones).
  2. Everything/​anything is possible.
  3. There are no wrong answers or stu­pid sug­ges­tions — everyone’s ideas are valuable.
  4. You get out of today what you put in.
  5. Have fun!

I think they are self-​​explanatory. They cer­tainly seemed to make a dif­fer­ence and we have had some excel­lent ses­sions with very open and active discussion.

Feel free to steal the rules and make use of them in your work.