Why You Should be Facilitating Human-Centered Design (HCD) Workshops
Human-centered design (HCD) problems are inherently multidimensional. In order to successfully solve a human-centered design problem, you must consider not just who your users are and what they need, but what you are capable of building in order to meet their needs — and whether or not this solution is something you can sell (or whether or not this is something your organization has the resources to develop).
The best way to solve a multi-dimensional problem is through multidimensional problem-solving.
Bringing together people with different realms of expertise and getting them to collaborate on a single problem is one of the most effective ways to enable the kind of multidimensional problem-solving most human-centered design problems require.
At FiscalNote, we run human-centered design workshops that may include designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, account managers, and client success managers. These collective perspectives empower the group to consider the problem from multiple angles and ultimately arrive at an optimal solution in a short period of time.
You can facilitate a human-centered design workshop as a way to quickly run through the entire design process (this is known as a design sprint and spans an entire week), or you can facilitate more targeted workshops depending on where you are in your design process. Key indicators that you should consider running a workshop include:
1. You’re trying to solve a hard problem and you’re stuck.
2. The stakes are high and you need fast decisions that will lead to the most optimal solution.
3. You need buy-in from multiple stakeholders in order to be successful.
If you’re kicking off a project and find yourself stuck or in need of buy-in, consider running an empathy workshop to understand who your users are and what they need. If you’ve already gathered this data, consider running a research synthesis workshop to align on the specific problem your team aims to solve. If you’re in need of generating diverse ideas, an ideation workshop is a great way to take advantage of multiple perspectives that you may not have considered otherwise. If you’ve gone through the design process and need to refine your ideas into a single solution, you can run a critique or prioritization workshop. If you’re in need of quickly running through the design process in its entirety, consider facilitating a design sprint.
Of course, you can mix and match the kind of workshop you facilitate depending on your goals. At FiscalNote, we’ve orchestrated design sprints, empathy workshops, and research synthesis workshops that dovetail into ideation and prioritization workshops. It all depends on the problem you’re trying to solve — and which workshop tool will best solve it. To learn more about different kinds of design workshops you can facilitate, see: Nielsen Norman Group’s 5 UX Workshops and When to Use Them.
Empathy Workshops
If you are looking to align with regard to user needs, an empathy workshop is the way to go. One of the best ways to kick off an empathy workshop is to review user research videos and ask participants to take notes using the How Might We method.
Activity 1: How Might We
The How Might We method is a classic design thinking technique that is purposefully non-dictatorial. By leaving room for multiple interpretations, How Might We statements increase the possibility of finding new and better solutions. Good How Might We statements challenge assumptions and inspire problem-solving by:
• Focusing on results/impact (e.g. How Might We… create a game-changing experience?)
• Evoking emotion (e.g. How Might We… inspire users to love our product?)
• Leveraging absolutes (e.g. How Might We… eliminate onboarding pain points?)
Consider using the How Might We method anytime you need to reduce bias when identifying opportunities. FiscalNote uses this method all the time, in almost every workshop we run.
Activity 2: Ask the Experts
If you don’t have user research videos to review, you can recruit users to interview for the workshop itself or use the Ask the Experts method to interview people in your organization that know your users and the challenges they have. Within FiscalNote, we might interview an Account Manager or Client Success Manager, for instance, as they interface with our users day-in and day-out.
Research Synthesis Workshops
If you’ve already gathered data on your users and what they need, consider running a research synthesis workshop to tease out how others interpret the data. Affinity mapping, bull’s eye diagramming, and experience diagramming are all great methods we have used at FiscalNote to surface differing interpretations of user research amongst designers, researchers, engineers, product managers, and data scientists.
Activity 3: Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping, like the How Might We method, is another classic design thinking method. Affinity mapping helps collaboratively identify thematic patterns and, in doing so, build a shared understanding of data. While you can use this method anytime you need to align on themes resulting from a dataset, for a research synthesis workshop, consider using this method to identify themes resulting from user quotes or ideas. Simply record each user quote or idea on sticky notes — one quote or idea per sticky note. Have one person begin the mapping activity by sharing their quote or idea. Invite others to share and place similar notes in proximity. Repeat until all sticky notes have been discussed and placed. Label the clusters that take shape — these are your themes.
Activity 4: Bull’s Eye Diagramming
While affinity mapping challenges participants to group data by theme, bull’s eye diagramming challenges participants to group data by importance. Using the simple visual of a bull’s eye, participants must work together to interpret what each ring should represent. This results in a shared understanding not just of what data is most important, but what the criteria for “important” is.
Activity 5: Experience Diagramming
Experience diagramming is another valuable method for simplifying complex data about user interactions, decisions, and emotions into an easy-to-understand sequence of events. By challenging participants to arrange user quotes about how they currently monitor social media, for example, we arrived at a simplified three-step process that fit the experience of most users we talked to. This in turn helped us align on which parts of this process we could improve upon and provide innovative solutions to.
Ideation Workshops
If you are at a point in your design process where you need to generate ideas, it’s always a good idea to facilitate a workshop in order to increase the number of perspectives and therefore kinds of ideas to consider. Activities that help generate ideas include: crazy 8s, storyboarding, creative matrix, and round-robin.
Activity 6: Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a method for generating ideas, although you can also use it as a method to refine ideas. At FiscalNote, we’ve implemented the storyboarding method in the context of a design sprint in order to individually ideate on what a concept might look like in action. We each individually drew out what the user would see in terms of the experience. When storyboarding, words are important but ugly drawings are ok! Through this method, we all gained a shared understanding of what each of our concepts was and what overlap existed across the concepts we developed.
Activity 7: Creative Matrix
The creative matrix method also helps generate ideas, especially if you are looking to generate new or unusual ideas. To facilitate the creative matrix method, create a grid (with a maximum of 5 rows and 5 columns). Label each column with a persona, user role, employee, or another kind of person you want to design for. Label each row with categories of enabling solutions. Ask participants to generate ideas in each cell of the grid.
Activity 8: Crazy 8s
We’re quite fond of Crazy 8s at FiscalNote. We use it often to quickly explore a variety of ideas and force ourselves to think divergently. To facilitate a Crazy 8s activity, ask participants to fold a sheet of paper four times and unfold it to make a grid with 8 boxes. Challenge participants to sketch an idea in each box, one minute per box. While you can try rapid variations of similar ideas, the exercise forces you to broaden your thinking rather than focus on the first solution that came to mind (a common challenge most people face when generating ideas).
Activity 9: Round Robin
If you are concerned about one person’s ideas dominating an ideation session, the round-robin method can be a valuable alternative to crazy 8s or other ideation exercises. To facilitate the round-robin exercise, have each person write down an unconventional solution. Everyone passes their solution to the left. That person writes a reason why it will fail. Everyone passes again to the left. That person rights down a way to resolve the critique. By building on others’ ideas, this method helps evolve ideas while diminishing overbearing opinions.
Critique/Prioritization Workshop
If you’ve already gathered divergent information on who your users are and what they need, converged as a team to synthesize that information in order to align on a specific problem you want to solve, and generated divergent ideas on how to solve that problem, you are ready for a critique/prioritization workshop. Critique/prioritization workshops help a group align on which ideas are the best ideas to move forward with. At FiscalNote, we have used the rose, bud, thorn, note-n-vote, and importance/difficulty matrix methods to help align on, for instance, what elements of a prototype we should prioritize for development.
Activity 10: Rose, Thorn, Bud
Rose, thorn, bud, is a valuable method for revealing areas a group agrees they are doing well in or want to improve in. At FiscalNote, we use this method in almost every workshop we run as it’s a great way to fit in some individual reflection while identifying group trends. In the context of a critique workshop, we’ve used this method to critique prototypes. We challenged participants to write what they liked on pink sticky notes (“roses”) and place the stickies on the parts of the prototype the note corresponded to. Participants used blue sticky notes (“thorns”) for parts of the prototype they didn’t like and green sticky notes (“buds”) for parts of the prototype they had questions or ideas about.
Activity 11: Note-N-Vote
The note-n-vote method is a method we learned from the Google Ventures Design Sprint guide. Using the note-n-vote method helps diminish overbearing opinions while aligning on a way forward in a short period of time. This is the kind of method that is useful anytime you need to quickly gain group input and make a decision. To facilitate the note-n-vote method, ask everyone to write down as many ideas as they can in 10 minutes. Everyone has two minutes to self-edit and pick their top two favorite ideas. After each person shares their top ideas, everyone votes on what they think is the top idea. From start to finish, this method should only take fifteen minutes!
Activity 12: Importance/Difficulty Matrix
Another popular method we use to quickly and collaboratively prioritize ideas is the importance/difficulty matrix method. To facilitate this method, take ideas you want to prioritize and start by force ranking them by user impact, with lower user impact on the left and high user impact on the right. Simply start with two ideas and ask, which one has the higher user impact? Take the third idea and ask, does it have a higher or lower user impact than the currently highest rated idea? If lower, is it higher or lower impact than the next highest idea? Continue in this fashion until the group has ranked all ideas.
The key here is to force rank each idea. That means no idea can fall in the same space on the x-axis. Even if your lowest-ranked idea isn’t that different in terms of user impact compared to your highest-ranked idea, challenging participants to make these difficult decisions is the only way you’ll be able to successfully arrive at prioritization conclusions.
After ranking each item by user impact, move on to force ranking each of these ideas by technical feasibility, with high technical difficulty at the top of the y-axis and low technical difficulty at the bottom of the y-axis. At FiscalNote, we find it helpful to think of the technical difficulty in terms of the extent to which an idea requires capabilities beyond the functionality we currently provide in our products.
Just like you did for user impact, challenge participants to force rank each idea, starting with the idea with the highest user impact. Move it up or down the y-axis based on how technically difficult it is. Take the next idea and determine if it is more or less difficult than the prior idea and continue until the group has ranked all ideas. Again, the key here is to force rank all these ideas. No two ideas should have the same position on the y-axis.
Once you’ve ranked all of the ideas, reveal the quadrants of the matrix. Ideas that fall in the top right quadrant are “strategic” ideas. These are ideas that may be good long-term development targets. They will take more effort, but they will have a more relative impact on the user than other ideas. Ideas in the bottom right corner are “high-value” ideas. These ideas are easier to implement while still having a high user impact. These ideas represent good short-term development targets.
Ideas in the bottom left corner are “targeted” ideas. They don’t have as much user impact as other ideas, but they are easy to develop, so your team should have a compelling reason for why one of these ideas should be prioritized over “strategic” or “high-value” ideas.
Finally, ideas in the top left quadrant are “luxurious” ideas. “Luxurious” ideas are difficult to implement and won’t have as much impact to the user as other ideas. It probably doesn’t make much sense to prioritize these ideas compared to “strategic” or “high-value” ideas.
Design Sprints
If you are in need of quickly going through the full design process, consider facilitating a design sprint. Design sprints help you move from a problem that doesn’t have buy-in to work on for more than a week to a tested rapid prototype that can inform if the idea warrants devoting more time or resources. A typical FiscalNote design sprint spans five days and covers the following exercises:
- Monday: Define the goal for the week, enumerate questions the team has, Ask the Experts, and map the ideal user experience.
- Tuesday: Lightning demos of relevant products, decide our target for the rest of the week, and individually ideate solutions.
- Wednesday: Decide what to prototype, storyboard what the prototype experience will be, and begin prototyping.
- Thursday: Complete the prototype.
- Friday: Test the prototype, synthesize feedback, and decide on the next steps.
General Facilitation Tips
No matter what kind of workshop you are running, whether it’s a single empathy workshop, a combination research synthesis and ideation workshop, or a full-on design sprint, keep in mind the following.
When planning a workshop:
- Start from the desired outcome of the workshop and use that to dictate what activities you do.
- Balance individual activities (generally better for divergent exercises) with group activities (generally better for convergent exercises).
- You’ll need less time for divergent activities/workshops, and more time for convergent activities/workshops. Plan accordingly.
- Create a detailed plan, but hold it loosely.
When executing a workshop:
- Create a facilitator guide for yourself. Notes won’t detract from the experience, so use them!
- Provide the level of instructions you think a four year old would need. Always demo what “good” looks like and always provide examples.
- Use silent prompts (like timers) to keep the time.
- Focus on the outcome of the activity (why we are doing this), not the activity itself (how we are getting there).
- Always keep the activity and overall workshop goal visually present.
- As the facilitator, you are responsible for the human needs of your participants. Always plan for breaks every 90 minutes (at a minimum) and provide snacks, refreshments, and/or lunch if you can. If you can’t, remind your participants to take grab food, water, and coffee at break times.
Resources
There are free, online resources for almost all of the activities covered above. One of the best free resources I have found is Google’s Design Sprint Kit. Even though the activities are described in the context of a design sprint, at FiscalNote we frequently adapt them for smaller, more focused workshops. Below are links to more information on each activity in the Google Design Sprint Kit.
- How Might We
- Affinity Mapping
- Experience Diagramming
- Crazy 8s
- Storyboarding
- Round Robin
- Rose, Thorn, Bud
- Importance/Difficulty Matrix
Below are additional resources for activities not covered by Google’s Design Sprint Kit:
If you are running a design sprint, in addition to the Google Design Sprint Kit, we recommend:
- The Sprint Book
- Stop Brainstorming and Start Sprinting
- GV’s Sprint Process in 90 Seconds
- The Voltage Control Design Sprint Scorecard
- Design Sprint 2.0 | Storyboarding Hack | Aj&Smart
- The Design Sprint Note-n-Map
- The Remote Design Sprint Guide
Happy facilitating!
