Tanya Snook Returns to Teach the Workshop Workshop in 2025

Get immersed in the UX of workshopping at CanUX 2025.

 Workshop T2: The Workshop Workshop
} Thu, Oct 2, 2025   1:00PM – 4:30PM

Workshops are fun. Successful workshops are carefully designed, intentional and purposeful fun. Think about the last time you were in a workshop – or even a meeting – that felt unstructured and haphazard. Maybe you couldn’t quite grasp why all these people were in the room together. Or how the presentation remotely qualified as a workshop. Or why you were invited in the first place. Booking a long meeting and calling it a workshop without properly designing the session is wishful thinking at best. And an expensive waste of time at its worst. It might even be UX Theatre.

If your workshop design process consists of throwing people together for unstructured discussions, there are steps you can take to infuse user-centered design in your workshop prep and get the most out of any collaborative session (or meeting!). In this half-day workshop, Tanya will lead you through a series of activities to design any workshop or collaborative session for any topic in any circumstance with any group of stakeholders.

Note: Some familiarity with Star Wars is helpful – but not required – for this workshop 😉

 Instructor Bio: Tanya Snook

Tanya is a user experience designer who focuses on citizen and employee experiences for the Government of Canada, best known for popularizing the phrase “UX Theatre” to describe the superficial posturing that some organizations do in the place of proper user experience design.

Tanya is a founder and former co-chair of CanUX (2010-2022). She is also a UX champion within the government, co-hosting the Government of Canada UX Network, and previously having co-chaired the national User Experience Working Group (UXWG).

Tanya writes about user experience and design leadership at spydergrrl.com.
For more info, you can follow Tanya on Twitter @spydergrrl

Prior Presentations:

THE WORKSHOP WORKSHOP (CanUX 2022)
Nov 3, 2022 8:30am / 3.5 hrs
THE STATE OF CANADIAN UX REPORT (CanUX 2018 with Cornelius Rachieru)
Nov 4, 2018 9:50am / 20 min
ONE IA, TEN WEBSITES (UXcamp 2011)
Nov 4, 2011 1:20pm / 10 min

*Image credit: Tanya Snook