Workshop Design: UX Maturity for Designers at Ladies That UX

12 min readSep 11, 2023

I recently facilitated a workshop titled “UX Maturity for Designers” at Ladies-That-UX Utrecht (LTUX). My mentees Rachel and Akila assisted me in preparing and facilitating the session. It was hosted at the offices of the principal Dutch Railway Company (NS). In this article, I will break down our journey from starting with a rough vision to creating a new 2 hour workshop that helped UX Designers reflect on their hard skills and discuss AI trends. Furthermore, I will introduce an uncommon way for facilitators to test new workshop formats online for free. Most importantly, I will reflect on what this experience taught me and my team about facilitation and leadership — as I guided us through this process.

A close-knit team brainstorming a week prior to the workshop — Akila (left), Jim (middle), Rachel (right)

Firstly, I’d like to paint a picture of my experience with facilitating workshops and public speaking. During my time at Zurich Insurance Germany, I have facilitated multiple instances of the Design Thinking workshop template called Design Dash. I began by assisting my UX mentors at the time, Tim Schulte and Julia Thyssen. Later I progressed towards facilitating workshops that saw up to 20 participants myself. During that time, I learned the ropes of guiding groups of experts through creative processes in a formal, corporate environment. Since then, my subsequent facilitation experiences have been less formal but more extensive in terms of owning the creative process. When I moved to Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2020, I started organizing weekly group fitness classes with up to 20 participants. In those dynamic sessions, that I hosted outdoors in parks, I learned to improvise, communicate effectively, and most importantly read the room and adapt my tone and pace accordingly. There’s probably more implicit knowledge and behavior I learned, however, it is difficult to pinpoint it at this point in time.

Despite being used to public speaking, the task of co-designing and facilitating a workshop from scratch for 40 participants was something new, and a great opportunity to test my facilitation and leadership skills.

Since 2020, I facilitated outdoor bootcamps in Utrecht and organised additional wellbeing events. In April 2023 I rebranded my Meetup Group to ‘FlowingFitnessNL’.

Learnings

I’d like to remove the element of surprise from this article, and preface my account of the workshop’s design process with a summary of my learnings, and the learnings that Akila and Rachel like to share with you:

My learnings

When creating a new workshop format with a large attendance, you need a team. In co-creative leadership it is crucial to trust your team and give up control, to make space for their creativity, personality, and unique ideas.
In workshop planning, be generous with the time you allocate for ice breakers. The success of these activities sets the baseline for the group dynamics and thus, the artifacts produced in the workshop.
Give clear indications of the amount of time groups have left for each activity to prevent agitation and to prevent a perception of inconsistent governance.
Purposely allocating less time for an activity than it requires participants to complete it comfortably can be a double-edged sword. It could stimulate the collective workflow positively, or make participants feel stressed. This is difficult to find out, so if you have insights from your facilitation experience on how to strike a balance for optimal results, please share your learnings.

Akila’s learnings

Akila Amala is a UX Designer based in Den Haag focusing on Accessibility with an interest in visual art (LinkedIn):

I encourage everyone to share their personal experience and expertise when helping others solving a problem. Something that might seem obvious and not worth mentioning to you, might be insightful to someone else with a different background, regardless of your skill level or experience on paper.

Rachel’s learnings

Rachel Prasetya is a UX Designer based in Den Haag focusing on user research with an interest in visual design (LinkedIn):

- It’s important to have a clear outcome when making and conducting a workshop because there are a lot of topics to explore and it’s easy for us as facilitators and participants during the workshop to divert and during a co-creative event.
- Be open minded when it comes to exchanging ideas within a workshop because some people or participants might have different perspectives. As a workshop facilitator it always nice to be more open, so you could connect and emphatize wth more people to gain a certain understanding.
- Clear communication is really essential to have especially when it comes to collaborating with multiple people to do a workshop. Since there is a lot to arrange such as place, number or participants, topics to discuss, activities to do, and so on. It’s important to establish clear task division and concerns that comes up during or before the workshop.

Important insight: As a facilitator, you should stay in motion. Stroll by the groups when they are busy working and discussing. This makes you more accessible to answer questions. Furthermore, it gives you the opportunity to notice when a group or a participant is stuck. This way you can interject and inspire people on the fly with fresh ideas and thought-provoking questions.

Preparation

The workshop preparation involves each step from the moment the idea is born until the workshop begins.

Team and Communication

Working as a team is great because creativity as a service becomes incredibly difficult to sustain as a one-man army. Ivory Towers may give you the impression that your planning efforts are on track and you’re produce is great, however, bouncing off ideas with mentors, mentees, and peers will improve your chances of success greatly. Since success is often described as moving forward despite repeated failure, I’d like to make a distinction between failure that occurs when going solo and failure in the midst of collaboration. I’d argue that through discussions and peer feedback, you will avoid failure that is detrimental to your business (or worst-case detrimental to your life) but still uncomfortable enough to inspire growth and help you learn from your mistakes. Long story short: I needed a team. Luckily my mentees Akila and Rachel were eager to co-create the workshop with me when I presented them with the opportunity in one of our bi-weekly meetings.

With the team established, it was my task to lead the planning activities. We had 10 days to draft the workshop concept, test it, create materials, and finally perform… like a band that just released their first album. I started out by creating a digital whiteboard on Canva to assemble the facts and bring us all on the same page. On Canva, I documented the workshop topic’s problem statements, my vision of the workshop, and the organizational requirements from LTUX, the organizing meetup group I collaborated with. Throughout the preparation phase, it was my responsibility to keep my team up to date with e-mail and WhatsApp updates from the organizers about the material and the venue we would be provided with. Me and my team's first meeting was an online kick-off call that simultaneously took place on the Canva board. I collected ideas & suggestions as well as questions my team had, and we discussed the topic of how to grasp what UX Maturity for Designers actually is. After the initial kick-off session that took place online, we decided it would be best to collaborate on planning the workshop in person instead of online in our next meeting.

This Canva whiteboard was used to plan the workshop. Subsections were: Background, Organization, Workshop setup, Ideas & Questions, Introduction Slides, and Todo’s. There’s also a Feedback area where we still collect the reviews and ideas we received from participants and stakeholders after the workshop.

Proof of Concept & Feedback

As I previously mentioned I have given design thinking workshops based on the Design Dash template quite often already. Since the participants and scheduled time are similar we used the Design Dash’s session design as a starting point. However, in contrast to the Design Dash, this workshop’s concept would be new and quite different. The design dash teaches participants about design thinking in a 1-hour design sprint. UX Maturity for Designers is about helping people reflect on their hard skills and define actionable steps to advance their careers through brainstorming with other UX Designers. This is why it was crucial to test the idea before coming up with the workshop’s agenda.

But how do you quickly test a workshop idea as a solo freelancer with only 7 days left until the actual workshop? The answer is not obvious but simple: AdpList

AdpList is a free online platform to find mentors in various professional domains. I’ve been registered on adpList, and have used it to receive a mentorship session before, and I also hosted individual sessions here and there. I always noticed that plenty of mentees were quick to sign up for my sessions and even willing to get waitlisted due to limited spots. So sitting at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, with a week left until the actual workshop, I scheduled a session on adpList for the next day titled “Your UX Skillset — S.W.O.T Analysis Workshop”. The title is catchy and close enough to our workshop vision while still being applicable to Junior UX Designers registered on adpList. To save time, I let chatGPT generate the agenda based on the following prompt:

ChatGPT prompt:
I will organise a workshop on adplist called “Your UX Skillset — S.W.O.T analysis workshop”. The purpose is to help ux designers (that are starting out) determine their strengths weaknesses, and what else they should work on. Also for participants to identify together what is important as they specialise and build their portfolio.

This is the agenda ChatGPT generated for me:

Introduction and icebreaker
Explanation of S.W.O.T analysis
Individual self-assessment
Group discussions
Skill development strategies
Portfolio building tips
Q&A and wrap-up

Despite 10 people signing up in an instant, only 2 people showed up to the session. It is important to lower expectations for the expected attendance of free group events on platforms such as AdpList and Meetup.

The adpList Workshop’s whiteboard that particpants worked on

The test workshop went well, despite there only being 2 participants. Having a lower attendance enabled me to pay more attention to detail and to notice things that should be improved easier. Firstly, it was evident that the engagement increased as the topics of discussion became more relevant to the participants' personal career trajectories. Secondly, the participants on AdpList were Junior Designers, whereas in the final workshop, we’d have to expect seniors to be there as well. Thus, to provide everyone with value we had to adapt the workshop’s concept.

Conceptualization and Ideation

Our in-person team meeting after I tested the workshop idea online was our most productive session. Noteworthy sidequest achievement: We shot our first stock photo ever ;)

In our next team meeting, we regrouped in person to co-create the final workshop. Knowing that we would only be able to meet online the remaining days before the workshop, we planned to get a lot of work done that day. It was our goal to determine the workshop outline, specify activities, and draft engaging templates to minimize the workload for participants. Even though the topic of the workshop was UX Maturity for Designers, we decided to include a segment to discuss the use of AI in the field of UX. This is because of the recent hype and speculation about the role emerging tools play or will play in our line of work. The results will be shared in my next blog post. After determining the workshop schedule, we would then go on to divide individual tasks for the upcoming days, for example: Coming up with an ice breaker, creating the slide designs, or drawing poster templates that participants would fill in during the workshop.

Below is the structure we designed (ix = group interaction). Link to the complete slide deck

Introduction Slides — 10 min
Group Division — 5 min
Ice Breaker (ix) — 10 min
AI in UX (ix) — 15 min
(break) — 5 min
UX hard skill introduction — 5 min
Individual proficiency rating (ix)— 10 min
Speed dating (ix) — 10 min
Q&A & Buffer — 10 min

What blindsided me positively during this meeting was how much Akila’s and Rachel’s knowledge and ideas upgraded the workshop. It became way more engaging than my initial idea would afford. For instance, we would go on to include a speed dating format at the end, where participants would introduce themselves to each other using custom ID cards. How cool is that!!? We had asked participants to fill in the ID cards you see below during earlier workshop activities. None of this I could’ve thought of alone and it is always striking how much we can be confined in our own thought bubble during creative endeavors. This is why as a freelancer, I actively seek out collaboration opportunities and value the relationships with my mentors and mentees.

UX Identification cards. Top: During the Speed Dating participants introduced themselves and their career ambitions to each other. Bottom: In the beginning, participants filled in their role, 3 hastags to describe their personality & hobbies, as well as create a drawing of themselves. This would help them break the ice with the others in their group.

Final preparations

This is a rather dull checklist, so I’ll list some of the critical steps we took:

Design and/or print the workshop material. We were planning with 30 participants but prepped material for 40 participants just in case, and that turned out to be just enough… phew.
Design and fill all slides with coherent content
Print out the agenda with a precise schedule. This way we could peek at it during the workshop and not lose track of time.
Inquire about the venue and materials provided by our host NS: Many tables and chairs in an open space, post-its, a projector, and a whiteboard. What more do you need, right?

The Workshop Experience

It is great when participants are very engaged. I always appreciate their willingness to present results in front of others, who until recently were strangers to them. If the paper is too heavy for the board, step up and hold it in place for the participant’s benefit.

The feedback we received from participants and the organizers was overwhelmingly positive. It resonated with the impression we got witnessing the engaging group discussions. We invited participants to approach us for feedback after the session, which they did and gave us a better idea of how they experienced the evening. Some of the feedback was actionable and provided us with clear knowledge on what to do differently next time. For instance, it was not always clear to participants what the bell, that we used as an alerting signal, would indicate during the speed dating session, due to my inconsistent signaling. It could either indicate that a speed dating round is over, or that it is now the other person's turn to talk. I was not disciplined enough in adhering to this rule set which led to over or undersharing as well as confusion at times. In another instance, participants reported struggling with the amount of time that was given for reflecting on which skills they wanted to improve in their career and coming up with ideas on how they would do so. This went unnoticed by us which could be due to the fact that we did not pay enough attention during our stroll by the tables but it could also be seen as the participants’ responsibility to ask for more time — given they feel safe to express themselves in the workshop environment. Next to this actionable feedback, there were impressions shared that were difficult to interpret. Several participants reported that they found the speed dating rounds to be too short and being rushed seemed to leave some things unsaid in what could’ve been a great connection between two strangers. Contrastingly, it was also reported that this provided an incentive to catch up after the workshop during the networking part of the evening. Therefore, I conclude that if there is no opportunity for workshop participants to catch up afterward, it is beneficial to be lenient with the time allocated for the various activities.

Summary

In designing a workshop for a large audience, I’ve learned the significance of collaborative leadership and trust within a team. Allowing your colleagues space for their creativity and ideas is vital. It is essential to be generous with the time devoted to icebreakers, as they set the stage for group dynamics and workshop success. Clarity regarding time allocated for activities is crucial in general to maintain order and avoid confusion. Striking a balance with activity durations can be tricky, as it can either enhance the workflow or induce stress in participants. Encouraging open sharing of experiences during discussions is valuable, as what seems obvious to one can be enlightening to another. To stay on track, it is important to establish a clear workshop outcome that participants can take ownership of. Embracing diverse perspectives in idea exchange influences the depth of connections participants make during the workshop. The success of this can only be influenced so much by the facilitators, as the participants' personalities and moods play a key role. At this point, I’d like to mention that the people who joined Ladies That UX events, and especially our participants, were great and very motivated. Apart from that, effective communication is important when coordinating with multiple collaborators.

All in all, the workshop was a success! Me and my team had a fun and creative time together, we met many interesting UX Designers and learned a lot on the way.

Thanks to my team Rachel and Akila! Thanks to Ladies That UX Utrecht, and their leaders who made this possible, and thanks to our host NS who provided us with an excellent space. Links below!