Designing serendipity

I had the good fortune to be able to attend a couple of conferences this year. The first was Design At Scale and the other was the Design Operations Summit, both by Rosenfeld Media. I was excited for the presentations as I’d attended a previous live version of the Design At Scale conference (Enterprise Experience) a couple of years ago. I was eager to see progress on the topic. Additionally, I knew several of the speakers but both were held virtually so I was sad not to be able to attend in person. I enjoy seeing old friends and making new ones, but circumstances (COVID) wouldn’t allow it.

Or would they?

Lou’s team including Andrew Heber, Angelos Arnis, Kristen Ramirez, and Melissa Burnett, had been busy. In addition to switching to fully virtual versions of their conferences and all that that entails as described by Lou in conversation with Jorge Arango, they had designed an experience called ‘Attendee Cohorts.’

The goals of the attendee cohorts was: 1) offer social/networking opportunities and 2) enhance learning in ways that aren’t typically experienced at virtual conferences.

“Attending together means learning together.”

Here’s how it worked for Design at Scale.

As an attendee, I would be assigned to a group of other attendees — essentially based on our time zone to facilitate an ease of meetups. About a dozen of us got invited to a video chat prior to the conference. In this chat, we were introduced to each other, two facilitators for the group, and to a shared virtual space for us to use to exchange ideas and notes.

The group would meet throughout the conference. This turned out to be a lovely addition to the experience that I wasn’t expecting — a kind of designed serendipity. In order to approximate meeting new people at the lunch table or seated next to you in a live event, Lou and his team had leveraged the virtual to engage attendees in a way I’d never experienced before.

“I’ve participated in cohorts since they’ve been offered and have found them invaluable. It’s nice having a smaller tribe to discuss what’s going on at a conference. We also get to talk about what our experiences are like and get feedback on how we might approach current challenges we’re facing. Because it’s more intentional than randomly meeting people in between breaks, it’s helped me make long-term connections. Hearing everyone’s roles and journeys was also helpful for me — it helped confirm my decision to pursue a career in DesignOps.” — Michelle Chin

I was so enamored with the experience that I volunteered to help facilitate a cohort at the Design Operations Summit. For this, there was a training session and some preparatory calls prior to the conference, some set up on the virtual shared boards, and then the simple and enjoyable interactions of the attendee cohort chats themselves.

I left feeling lucky to have participated having met some awesome new people and I enjoyed the cohorts so much, that I reached out to Lou and interviewed him about the attendee cohorts. I had a separate conversation with Melissa Burnett that was invaluable to informing this article. So a very special thanks to her for helping and for her work on the cohorts.

Me: Lou, what led you to create these cohorts? Whose idea was it, and how was it originally conceived?

Lou: My whole team contributed to the idea. Our thinking was that nobody in their right mind really wants to sit in front of Zoom for two to four days and just see presenter after presenter. We’re all familiar with things like breakout rooms, and it just seemed obvious to experiment with the attendee cohort idea as an extension to the conference that we could experiment with, without risking too much.

Our hypothesis was cohorts would have two goals: one would be to facilitate networking and socializing and the other would be learning. We thought we could do as well for the cohort experience in a virtual conference as the in-person experience. For some more introverted or junior people, we could even do better for them. Some people don’t naturally feel comfortable rubbing elbows with strangers and some can be intimidated by the speakers. We thought, “Let’s try this and see if we can’t approximate running into someone at the buffet line waiting for a croissant.”

Further, we felt it would be BETTER than meeting someone in the buffet line, because you’d actually get to know a bunch of them over time, whereas, in a live event, there’s a good chance that you’ll never see that person you met at breakfast again.

Me: The cohorts seem more compelling than the light interaction you might have at the buffet line. Those short interactions aren’t conducive to substantial engagement. You’re not building a relationship over a brief exchange like that. It’s not deep or meaningful as you said.

Lou: I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that in-person conferences you’re usually sitting in a session learning in a very solitary way. For the most part you’re facing the stage and absorbing information. In an attendee cohort, you are actually having a conversation with your peers, maybe doing a little bit of socializing, but you’re also following along, real time.

You have a common conversation piece in the presentation. Previously, we’d tried various things at in-person conferences to help introverts. We put our books on tables around the social space with little signs that said “Discuss me!”

Me: Like a simple prompt?

Lou: Right! But that didn’t really work. We had more success at our conferences and others with a UX Bookmobile…where as long as someone had the book in their hand, they had a conversation starter. Even in the cohorts, the participants don’t have to look at each other.

Me: Well I’m looking at myself most of the time just to make sure I don’t look have coffee on my chin. :) You mentioned measurement. On that topic can you tell you me what the response has been from people who’ve participated?

Lou: :) Well it’s purely anecdotal but just last week, someone reached out to me on LinkedIn and said they’d gone to the Design Operations summit and loved it. I asked them why, and they said that for them, the cohorts made the virtual version better than an in-person event and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that. Kristine had this to say:

“Being part of a cohort enhanced my DesignOps Summit experience ten-fold. As a “team of one”, meeting people who do what I do in other companies, learning more about how they approach the same problems I have, and sharing our experiences was incredibly valuable.” — Kristine Berry

And what we think makes the experience great are the facilitators. Several of the facilitators have done more than one conference and they’re so dedicated and invested that they make the experience better.

Me: I’ve already volunteered to facilitate again it was a lot of fun. When you get back to in-person you might even have live facilitators. Could you speak a little about some of the other mechanics of how cohorts work?

Lou: Well one of the things we tried in June of 2020 was were to try and set up the cohorts by shared interest…like putting all the user researchers into one, new managers into another but it was difficult to get that right and we felt that it was over-engineered.

Me: It seems that you’re literally designing cohorts by prototyping and iterating them?

Lou: Yea that’s fair to say. So after that, we just kept it to mostly the same time zone of folks to make it logistically easier to schedule, but kept the groups random otherwise. Because like you said, it’s about the people you run into at an in-person conference and besides, the conference itself pre-qualifies attendees.

But there are also logistical challenges like when each cohort would meet and how you slot in those times in addition to the conference presentations and sponsored events themselves. This is something we’re still tuning. We feel like we’re 95% of the way there after having cohorts 5–6 times now.

Me: The other thing that struck me was the two tools you used in tandem with the cohort. One was the shared board, and the other was the shared chat channels. Could you talk about that?

Lou: We knew from the get go that we needed to have some sort of shared space, in fact, the first time we we did cohorts, we tried to have an automatically generated cohort roster that was either linked to, or shown on, a cohort page web page.

So if you’re registered for the conference you were added to a cohort and had access. We also created G-Docs for each cohort which were like a homepage basically for each cohort. I think we suggested agendas and it was just too much stuff in too many places. It was overkill.

We saw that people got comfortable in Slack and used pinning to highlight important information. Earlier on, people were less familiar with Mural or Miro and only a few facilitators bothered to create them. But now we’re standardizing templates for both those platforms. So the two tools that seem to be working for us are Slack and either Mural or Miro.

The boards are a solid social space to take mutual notes, upload info, etc. Ultimately it’s almost like a group sketch notes…and we have professionally done sketch notes. So the boards are almost — but not quite as good — as the amazing sketch notes that MJ Broadbent creates for each of our conferences.

Me: The shared spaces are lovely and a great way to collaborate. What else have you done to enhance cohorts?

Lou: We started adding speakers to cohorts. Attendees love this and feel like they have “a celebrity among them” — and then root for “their speaker” when it’s the speaker’s turn to present. We also originally tried to pre-schedule every meeting for the cohorts with preset agendas but this didn’t work. We abandoned that because we left it to the facilitators to figure out for each cohort. We are coming back to a pre-scheduled kickoff and we might arrive at a middle ground.

Me: This was the first cohort I facilitated and it was terrific because y’all paired me up with Nepunnee Birondo, an experienced facilitator. Is doubling up on facilitators by design?

Lou: That was a really important aspect of facilitation. We wanted to pair new facilitators with experienced ones that we’d had at prior events.

Me: You clearly have course corrected the virtual event genre based on circumstances?

Lou: I was just on the phone with some folks and the person I was talking to said, “Listen, the name of our Director of Strategy is Mr. Covid.” :) So we had to evolve our efforts in response to the situation, as all of us have, if we were to survive.

Me: Indeed. The last question I have is what are your future plans for cohorts and other innovations for your company?

Lou: Our company has workshops, conferences, and books, and we’ve already developed a community. These small gatherings (cohorts) are the key feature of all those. We say that our way of creating anything we do is, by definition, iterative and collaborative and so we’d developed cohorts independent of these specific attendee versions for conferences.

For years our authors work on their books and we create small groups of advisors for them to make them more successful. So our authors have cohorts, our conferences and communities are run by professional curation teams of people with different helpers — and this is a cohort. We have our speakers for each day of each conference set up in cohorts.

“Cohorts are baked into our DNA.”

We want to build our platform to really support more cohorts that are independent of conferences, and that are more broadly oriented — community oriented, and that are ongoing. Why not have a cohort of first time managers and expand into different areas of expertise in different communities of practice?

We have our upcoming Civic Design conference, but we have other groups that we’ve been working with informally, that are like big cohorts, we kind of want to see some of them evolve into what we would formally define as a Rosenfeld Media hosted community that could include a conference.

Covid forced us to reframe and in hindsight it appears obvious, but not without an effort to design something that would work.

“When you combine great content and collaboration, it’s explosive.”

Me: It certainly is. Thanks so much for your time. I very much appreciate you sitting down with me.

Lou: Likewise. It’s awesome to convene people and cohorts are exactly that.

Me: Agreed. :)