Case Study: UX Workshop — Kicking off a Redesign Project by Focusing on Users’ Needs First
“How can we rally team members across the globe to align on user needs for a large redesign of our product support website?”
The VP of the support organization at a large enterprise software company reached out to me to help her kickoff a huge website project — the redesign of the support website on their million page .com presence that serviced 500+ products and millions of users. Her team covered many functions from help desk to customer engineers and many locations across the world.
She wanted to bring 30+ leaders in her organization together for two days to collaborate and agree on their target user groups and a list of prioritized requirements.
I collaborated closely with the VP and created a workshop agenda that accomplished two goals:
- Surface what each team knew about the target users groups
- Bring teams together in a common definition of success for both the user and the business
Over two days at headquarters in New York City, I led the team of 30+ through five phases of group activities.
Actions
Here’s what I did:
- Alignment: Shared workshop goals and co-created a list of questions the team needed answered at the end of the workshop.
- Persona Prioritization: Prioritized five primary personas in a ranking exercise to focus the workshop on key audiences for the redesign. Randomly assigned team members to five groups — one for each persona — so they could mix across functional areas and share their knowledge about the users.
- User Value: Led participants through exercises to commonly define success for each user group and ideate on the content and functionality they needed to achieve success.
- Visualization: Led participants through visualization and sketching exercises of how they would design the new support website to meet their user group’s needs.
- Minimum Viable Product and Follow Up: Asked participants to rank and prioritize the identified features through voting exercises and listed out their next steps to get to their MVP.
Results
- As a result, the participants had a clear, collaborative vision forward for the redesign and specific next steps to take on the user experience.
“The project is a new portal, replacing a 10+ year old system, and the audience was 30+ people. I was concerned that the size of the team would be an impediment in getting anything accomplished, but Kristin is so good at what she does, the workshop was a resounding success. Kristin did a wonderful job and all participants were just gushing with praise for her, the content and the exercises she ran.”
- Laurie T, VP of IT at enterprise software company
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