Making the Design Workshop an Intentional Part of Your UX Process
What should you do when the UX solution you initially scoped isn’t coming together as expected? You run a design workshop to reset your goals and get everyone on the same page. If you haven’t adopted this practice in your work, I’m here to suggest it is time you did.
In the fall of 2021, the UX and Architecture teams here at Q4 were presented with this exact scenario. We were invited to evolve one of Q4’s most important web products. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but that just added to the excitement. Each team walked out of the initial briefing thinking big thoughts about the solutions we could deliver.
But not long after, two things became apparent:
One, even though project meetings were happening, our UX Design and Architecture teams were not aligned on a unified vision. As the project went along, they heard the same progress updates but interpreted them differently. With all the best intentions, they were working hard, but in silos — and in diverging directions.
Two, we had all set the project scope far too high. In early December, Warren Faleiro, our CTO reviewed our concept diagrams and suggested we scale back. Even though the ideas were solid and the use cases strong (many had already been tested with clients), the concept as we envisioned it would take too long to deliver.
We had to reboot using an agile methodology, and deliver a fast, first iteration of the improved solution that we could evolve over time. We needed an intervention.
What is a design workshop?
UX design workshops are highly collaborative sessions that bring together colleagues across multiple teams to solve problems, or in our case, to get “unstuck” in our thinking so we were free to change direction.
As we can now attest, meetings are great for project status updates, but they tend toward passive absorption of information — and once your update is given, it’s easy to tune out. For true creative collaboration or to achieve deep alignment from diverse teams, workshops are best. Good design workshops require active participation with facilitated discussion, and they culminate in achieving a set goal.
The teams at Q4 are already eager collaborators, so there was no pushback on hitting the pause button for this purpose. They were open to reframing their approach but it was important we deliver this workshop right — or run the risk of losing momentum and draining enthusiasm.
Prep work makes the tech work
In the spirit of cross-team collaboration, before the workshop I met in advance with my colleague, Alex Corotchi, our VP Technology, who runs the architecture team at Q4.
Together we sketched out a plan for our workshop using a shared Google doc. We created an agenda, a goal and agreed on a list of ground rules and the tools we would use (Miro). It may seem process-heavy for a creative event, but we had a lot of ground to cover, so planning was important to keeping us on track. You can learn more about planning a great workshop from Neilsen Norman Group.
Get more information on the tools required for running a remote UX workshop here.
It was also important to us that we set and keep an energetic pace, so we created a draft agile project framework that the team could react to, rather than start from nothing.
By now we were just ahead of the Christmas break, and it asked a lot of our team to de-scope and de-risk a project they were excited about. We didn’t want anyone going into the holidays deflated; we wanted them energized and ready to hit the gas upon return.
Running an engaging UX workshop
On December 15, we brought UX, Architecture and Product Management together for our design workshop.
Although Alex and I had done a good deal of prep, the true value of a workshop comes from engagement of the people in the session. We did our best to create a safe and supportive environment and facilitated the discussion to ensure everyone was able to contribute equally.
Together the team riffed on our draft project framework. As this was a remote workshop, we used the post-it notes feature to populate a Miro board with our ideas and then whittled back to the ones that worked best. (This was our approach, but there are dozens of fun and interactive ways to engage a team during a workshop.)
The framework provided a running start, but still left plenty of room for the team to brainstorm, collaborate, and build off one another’s ideas. The deep thinking that had already been done on the project fueled lively discussion and surfaced several new project requirements that Alex and I had not considered.
Next, we worked through assumptions and risks for each requirement to ensure all teams were working with the same understanding.
From here, the focus became, “How are we going to make this work?”
At this point, I just stepped back and let collaboration happen! The entire group pitched in on building out the user flows, making sure to include everything they had listed in the requirements.
“Learning that my initial vision needed to be downscoped was a bit gut-wrenching. But hearing the perspectives of our technical and business partners really helped me understand how we could move forward in a positive way and still get to that vision over time.”~ Sam Howes, Senior Product Designer at Q4
Finally, we agreed on the next steps, complete with some aggressive timelines. Everyone left with a sense of having contributed to outcomes, and with a clear and shared understanding of what still needed to be done.
In fact, the designers left with such a clear understanding of the end goal, that they completed the wireframes within days. They created a “toy” version of the build and shared it internally for feedback. With just two rounds of revisions, the toy prototype was handed off to Architecture on December 22.
All this work was completed in just one week!
Without investing in this process, we might still be on diverging roads, making great progress but getting further apart from a viable solution. As a result of this experience, Q4 has adopted design workshops as a permanent part of our early process from now on.
“Having both the Design and Architecture teams in the room was very powerful. Even though both teams play a big role in solutioning, they often don’t collaborate directly because they are involved in different phases of the process. The workshop allowed us to understand potential capabilities that encompass both strong user experience and architecture.”
~ Chris Gregg, Architect, Core at Q4
Workshops are the way
On the drive from point A to point B, consider a design workshop as a bend in the road. You will have to slow down as you go into the curve, but you can accelerate hard on the way out. By building in guardrails to keep ideas on track, workshop leaders can help maintain momentum both in the workshop and beyond.
