10 Tips for Hosting a Collaborative Remote UX Workshop

Photo by Fachy Marín on Unsplash

Zoom is having a moment now, to put it mildly. But as a fully remote consultancy, we were hosting collaborative UX workshops over Zoom long before it became the cool/necessary default tool for conferences as well as digital happy hours. (Not to sound too hipster about it or anything…)

For our Zoom (or GoToMeeting) workshops, we typically run a remote variation of Jiro Kawakita’s KJ-Method as distilled by Jared Spool. So, instead of real post-it notes to document findings, we use a virtual whiteboard. Instead of presenting posters in a conference room, we have participants photograph their sketches, then we pull them up on a shared screen.

We host remote UX workshops that bring our client’s team — executives, PMs, writers, UX-ers, administrators, and others — into the process of analysis and and brainstorming. Could we go off on our own, digest our research, and churn out solutions? Sure, and sometimes we do. But the end result will always be stronger, more realistic, and more nuanced if we involve our client. Quite simply, we don’t presume to understand our client’s business or customers better than they do. And we know that reports aren’t as effective as experiences. When we all work together in a workshop, we can produce more actionable, valuable ideas that are more likely to come to fruition.

While we keep our workshop template flexible, I’d like to share a few real-world-tested guidelines that enable our team to do “research as a team sport” remotely and successfully.

1. Come ready to show and tell. Present research that everyone can draw on for the rest of the workshop.

A remote workshop is an ideal opportunity to bring together team members who rarely get the chance to connect. Maybe they work at distant locations. Maybe the company’s organizational structure keeps them in silos. The point is, they’re all bringing different experiences, knowledge levels, and skill sets to the discussion. And they’re working from different assumptions.

We suggest starting a UX workshop with a reel of highlights from moderated interviews (or even a small number of full sessions). Presenting this research gives everyone a knowledge base that they can cite. Everyone will see different aspects of it, but they have a shared reference point grounded in observation. Because everyone watched the research, the session is less likely to descend into a my-opinion-versus-yours situation.

Using Zoom, you can share the video and audio from an interview recording directly through your computer, so that everyone can hear it clearly.

We consider a workshop as part of the deliverable in a UX research project. Our team does the interviews and test sessions with the goal of hosting a workshop at the end. While we’d argue that moderated UX research is typically the best way to understand usability problems and more, we often supplement that qualitative data with other background information.

Here are some other forms of research and review that we’ve presented give participants some context:

• Analytics on a website, application, or campaign’s performance.
• Survey data related to your project.
• Quotes or clips from interviews with the client’s sales or service team.
• Competitor research and/or examples review: what are other websites, applications, etc. are doing in similar situations?

2. Make sure you’re aligned with key stakeholders before the workshop.

For us, planning a successful workshop involves making sure that our agenda lines up with what the client hopes to get out of it. Without their buy-in, we’re not going to make much progress.

We work closely with the client all along to set clear expectations on the following:

• Goals and outcomes: We make sure we’re on the same page about what our client wants to get out of the workshop. What would a successful workshop outcome look like to them? What would disappoint them?
• Attendance: What if you threw a workshop and nobody came? Confirm that the most important participants will be at the meeting. Ideally, your stakeholders can use their authority to make sure that everybody knows to show up and stay for the workshop.
• Problem avoidance: Ask your stakeholders about what they could see as potential problems among this team. Probe specifically for tensions among the group, ideas that failed in the past, and limitations of scope and resources that you need to be sensitive to. Any political minefields you need to sidestep as the host of this workshop? Does Janice from Marketing worry that Joanne from Sales is secretly trying to steal her thunder? Are there any projects already in progress that you should know about, in case you try to reinvent the wheel?
• Decider Role: We ask our client to appoint a Decider among the workshop participants. During the workshop, we can turn to the Decider when we need a tie-breaker or guidance on how to proceed.

We usually host a Day Zero call: a meeting the day before the workshop to check in with the key stakeholders. It doesn’t have to be a long check-in. Your workshop will run more smoothly on the big day if you go over your schedule and clear up any last-minute questions or concerns in advance.

3. Give your workshop participants the instructions they need to contribute efficiently.

Make sure that everybody knows what they need to bring and what’s expected of them. Here are some guidelines we send out the day before the meeting, along with the link to the conference line:

• Connect to the meeting a few minutes early. If you have any technical difficulties, let us know.
• Join from your own computer. We’ll be doing an exercise that requires everyone to work from their own laptop or desktop computer.
• Bring a pen and scratch paper. You’ll be taking notes while we show some research clips. We find that it’s easier to pay attention to the clips on your screen if you take notes on paper.
• Plan to stay through the whole workshop. If you don’t come for the first part, you won’t hear some important background. If you leave before the second half, we’ll miss your input on the problems and solutions.

I usually start off a workshop with a quick agenda and summary of what we’ll do in the workshop. That way, the participants have a mental blueprint and don’t feel like I’m leading them into uncharted territory.

If you want users to take notes during the meeting, give them input on how they should take notes before you dive into the research. We recommend that they jot down the problems they notice. “Don’t worry about solutions,” I tell them. “We’ll tackle those later!”

4. Start with the problems before you brainstorm solutions.

We recently hosted a workshop with a team that told us that they totally understood the problems with their website. “Could we skip straight to the solutions?” they asked. “We already know what’s wrong!” After some discussion, we compromised by promising them that we would devote plenty of time to brainstorming a strategic plan and sketching solutions.

Why didn’t we want to cut out the problems altogether? First, even if you think you know all your UX problems, the collaborative analysis may uncover issues that you didn’t suspect beforehand. If two heads are better than one, a dozen heads can turn up more than even experienced UX researchers can anticipate. At the very least, the grouping exercises and participants’ different descriptions of the same issue may refine our client’s understanding of a problem.

Second, the emotional impact of beginning with problems can be profound. Especially if you can get some powerful people in the room — which we highly recommend, if possible. Think about how tricky it can be to convince an executive to green-light a complex or costly solution, no matter how persuasive your PowerPoint presentation is. That executive may suddenly change her mind when she watches her customers struggle — and everybody else in the virtual room sees the same barrier she does. The problem shrieks out for a solution. The galvanizing effect of collaborative analysis not only fuels ideation, but also gains buy-in and helps ensure that solutions are implemented.

5. Make sure every participant gets to speak up. Build that time into the workshop structure.

Not everybody feels comfortable jumping into a conversation unprompted with their ideas and opinions. That’s why it’s crucial to give everyone a slot, even if it’s literally only one minute, to present a sketch or idea — with plenty of notice to prepare.

We recently hosted a workshop with 11 participants in various locations. We initially planned to split the participants into small groups to flesh out solutions. One person from each group could present their shared solution. It would save time! But, at the last minute, we decided to have each participant do a sketch and briefly present it.

Not only did all 11 participants present great ideas, they did so with pride and gusto. Each person stretched their skill set. Many participants discovered that they had so much to say about their sketch that they overflowed their time limit (a good problem to have!) like actors at the Academy Awards. The energy in the conference call was tremendously upbeat, triumphant, and liberating, because everyone had a voice and everyone felt heard.

6. Give users space and structure to express wild ideas.

We love exercises that encourage our participants to get creative in different ways. Our team is always looking for new ways to incorporate rapid ideation techniques.

One simple activity that proved a big hit at a recent remote UX workshop was asking the group to go around the virtual room with “I wish” and “I wonder” statements. In other words, we asked everyone to give us one possibly outlandish dream for the website/company and one question about concerns and limitations. This exercise gave participants permission to take an expansive view of what they could brainstorm in the next section. Meanwhile, it allowed them to check in with the Decider about what would be feasible. (We basically combined Wishing in this list of 15 creative exercises with the “I like, I wish, I wonder” exercise.)

At Marketade, we’re also big fans of “Crazy Eights,” an exercise that pushes participants to release their inhibitions about design through rapid sketching. Depending on our time frame or the level of comfort with sketching among our audience, we may reduce the number of variations to 6 or even down to 4.

For more group exercise ideas, browse the excellent book Gamestorming. It’s a treasury of activities that you can choose from, depending on what you’d like to accomplish. Many — maybe even most — of the activities can be easily adapted to a remote workshop.

7. Prepare tools that capture ideas in a visual, easily digestible way.

We generally use Groupmap, a virtual whiteboard tool, for remote workshops. This resource takes the place of the wall of sticky notes in traditional KJ sessions; Groupmap lets remote groups capture and organize findings in tandem. Participants add their findings as little notes on the whiteboard, then drag them into groups based on similar problem themes.

One great feature of Groupmap is that you can upload images into sticky notes. In a recent workshop, we asked participants to sketch solutions, then text them to our Google Voice number. During a workshop break, we downloaded the sketches and uploaded them to sticky notes on a Groupmap board. Then we then could drag the sketches around on a bang-for-the-buck chart in order to prioritize the brainstormed solutions based on value and effort.

Keep all the Groupmap links you need neatly waiting in a document that you keep open in a separate tab, so that you can copy and paste them as needed. We usually send the links to our participants through the chat feature of Zoom when they need to access the boards.

8. Focus on 1 to 3 big problems when brainstorming solutions.

You can’t solve all the problems in a 3 to 4 hour session. To maximize the value of discussions, we sometimes work with our Decider on the client side to select the top 3 solutions that we should concentrate on for the rest of the session.

Another option is to have the group vote on the meatiest, most important problems. Groupmap makes it easy to allot a certain amount of votes to the participants. We often give them 6 vote tokens and ask them to give 3 to their top finding, 2 to their second most important finding, and 1 to their third finding.

9. Leave plenty of time for discussing solutions.

No matter how much time we set aside for a remote workshop, it seems like we always have to cut off discussions about solutions. Once participants have stopped and examined the problems, they can become quite passionate about next steps. They want to dig into the details, map out an implementation plan, and turn the idea into reality. Which is terrific! But not necessarily what the workshop is for. And that enthusiasm can lead to disappointment if participants really need to take a breather and check the feasibility of solutions before going too far.

If you’re working with a tight time block — say, just 2 hours — you may want to schedule a separate follow-up meeting in advance to refine solutions with the key stakeholders. In fact, they may want to check some details on their side before they can develop solutions to a significant extent.

10. Keep the energy level up throughout and praise your participants generously.

If you’re hosting a remote workshop right, you will probably be exhausted once it’s over. Real talk: my face hurts afterwards. Because you cannot communicate enthusiasm with your physical presence, you have to do all the work with your voice and what you show on a webcam.

After every section of the workshop, I praise the participants and tell them what a good job they’ve done. Not in a vague way, but in a specific, “Look at all you’ve accomplished…” kind of way. Collaborative UX workshops allow teams to identify problems, prioritize them, then brainstorm solutions with astonishing speed. I’ve seen teams that are usually log-jammed by corporate bureaucracy completely surprise themselves by reaching consensus and developing plans for the future so quickly. They go into the workshop uncertain, cynical, and maybe even cranky, but they come out genuinely excited.

Point out to your participants that what they’ve done in a few hours might typically take weeks or even months. Make them feel good about what they achieve at every step of the workshop.

Corny as it sounds, I usually tell my participants that these workshops are fun from the first — and I keep on telling them. While we’re doing the exercises, I’ll say, “Aren’t we having fun?” And when each part is over, I might say, “Woo hoo! Wasn’t that fun?” I’m by no means a “woo girl.” However, I’ve learned that if you persistently sell the fun-ness of the workshop (and channel Tyrion Lannister here), you will have fun — and so will your participants.

Remember: you are having the time of your life. This is your birthday party, your kid’s college graduation, your Mardi Gras, your fireworks over Disney World’s castle. Without crossing the line of professionalism (and that line depends on the team), I try to convey that I am so gosh-darn excited to bring these people together in the name of research. I am over the moon when I see their findings and recommendations. Do my participants think I’m oddly keen or kind of far-out? Probably. But I’ll take that over yawn-inducing taskmaster any day of the week.

That’s how I make a remote workshop seem not so remote.