I love the Holidays.
I love the twinkly lights and the wrapped presents. Our Holiday AT-AT is inflated on the lawn. There’s a chill in the air and a cheery tune playing in every store.
In the UX industry, that means one thing: it’s workshop season!
Sadly, we aren’t making toys for the good boys and girls.
No, our workshops are more often focused on…um…work.
Retrospectives on the work we did. Strategizing on the work we need to do. Educating ourselves on how to work more efficiently or collaborate more effectively.
One UX team I work with recently participated in a 2-day workshop that covered a little bit of everything. While the team was setting the goals of their workshop and deciding what various sessions might be needed, I suggested we spend at least an hour focused on the customer. They were open to it, but left the “how” of it up to me.
The team has spent the last 18 months making changes to this page, and the most recent release was only a month before, so there wasn’t really enough analytics data to indicate how the new page was being perceived. So if we wanted to layer in customer insight, it was gonna have to be some smaller-scale user research.
User research can be a solitary activity, especially if it’s not live interview sessions, where everyone’s observing the same session at once.
But with a little preparation, I was able to get 10 people to shift into customer-centric mode in less than an hour, and that focus carried on into day 2 of the workshop. Here’s how it all went down.
In the week leading up to that session, I asked the broader team about their known goals for the next quarter and year, as well as their ambitions for what users should be doing, thinking, and feeling while interacting with their part of the web site.
I turned that into a very basic unmoderated user test. In the very broadest sense, it went like this:
- Task: go do the thing.
- Rate your level of agreement: ‘the page helped me do X,’ ‘the page made me feel Y emotion,’ ‘the page helped me understand Z concept.’ Explain anything that lowers your rating.
Then in our workshop space (we used Figjam, but any whiteboarding tool would work), I made a grid. Session links across the top, tasks and questions down the side.
When it came time to do the session, each person picked a different video (all 10–15 minutes long) and watched the customer interact with the site.
They dropped sticky notes for each task or question, down the column. If we wanted to, we could’ve read right-to-left across the columns and started to capture themes — that was my backup plan if folks were quiet.
But it turns out, we didn’t have to do that.
My colleagues were so excited to share the stories of what users did on the site. They chuckled at the unique perspectives and genuine reactions of the users.
I could hear them geeking out a little bit as they swapped stories, and I tried not to brag to them that this sort of giddiness comes along with every user test I’ve ever conducted.
And across all 10 sessions, we didn’t hear any pain points that the team had set out to solve more than a year ago, which was a super uplifting way to end Day 1!
During concluding comments, our Principal UX Designer admitted that the session had completely exceeded his expectations. The workshops (not just mine, but the collective whole) had energized and united the team, and everyone was looking forward to Day 2, despite being at their desks for 6 hours already.
I was only able to participate in the first 90 minutes of Day 2, but when our first discussion kicked off, I was delighted to hear the team reference back to the users they’d observed the day before.
It was like they were seeing the product from a fresh perspective; it was a truly user-centered conversation.
Day 2 was when they started to look ahead at what’s next for the team and next for the product.
I turned in my two-weeks’ notice the week before that session happened, so I won’t get to see what kind of impact that user-centric session has on the broader team next year. I won’t get to repeat the exercise with their product and development partners in the room, and expand that customer-centric perspective to our broader product team. I’m pretty bummed about that, to be perfectly honest.
However, the exercise is easy to replicate, and I look forward to the next opportunity I get to weave a little user centricity into a common workplace event.
If it’s half as powerful as this session turned out to be, it’ll be the best present I give all year round!
Happy holidays, everyone. And have a happy new year! :P
