All Workshops Are Not Created Equal: The Benefits of Holding UX Workshops to Review Research
Merriam Webster defines “workshop” as:
- a small establishment where manufacturing or handicrafts are carried on.
- workroom.
- a usually brief intensive educational program for a relatively small group of people that focuses especially on techniques and skills in a particular field.
That might explain why there is such a misunderstanding about what a UX workshop is, when and why to hold a workshop and what a workshop can do for a team. And there is often a bigger misunderstanding when it comes to whether a workshop is a vehicle for improving the user experience or merely a way to gather discovery data when kicking off a project. Many teams I have worked on over the years have balked at the idea of a workshop at all, preferring UX research to be done by a dedicated person on the team who then reports the findings back for the stakeholders to review. No wonder the voice of the user often gets muffled.
Nielsen Norman Group has a great article on the key differences between UX workshops: 5 UX Workshops and When to Use Them: A Cheat Sheet. They call out these 5 different types of workshops in this nifty chart:
The NN/g article is a great resource for an overview of what can be accomplished with a UX workshop. I have found that combining these types of workshops works well, especially after we have conducted UX research.
How do you infuse the Voice of the User into Workshops?
I have been a part of many workshops over the years for product design and innovation. They all offered product and design teams an opportunity to get together and take a deep dive into activities to create a new experience or improve a current one. One of the biggest challenges I have seen is whether or not the voice of the user (primary user persona or personas) is infused into the workshop as the primary focus. It is easy to get distracted and focus on other data or goals. Some people will say “I have KPIs and metrics and we have heard from our customer support team what the biggest issues are.” This is a good start, but without primary research front and center it is easy to stray from the user's goals. Keeping the user’s needs and goals front and center is critical to success when looking to shift and improve the end user’s experience. So once we have a workshop on the calendar, how do we ensure the voice of the user is heard?
The obvious answer is you could actually have users come to the workshop. We have started a workshop day with live user testing, where we schedule people to come in for 30-minute sessions and use a product or prototype. These are really exciting sessions because the stakeholders get to see people experience the products right then and there.
If the group cannot be together in person and the workshop has remote participation, we have had success with either scheduling users to attend a remote usability session during the workshop or showing videos of users who we have met with before the workshop. Both fully emerge the team into the world of the user and let them experience the user’s experience.
Our workshops then immediately take these fresh and robust insights into affinity mapping and prioritization exercises that allow the team to sort insights into themes and prioritize them. This is a big step forward and the reason we recommend a workshop over delivering a report to a team. The subject matter experts come together and prioritize the issues based on the severity and also against the business and technical goals. It is a way of synthesizing what a team mighty do in separate EMPATHY and PRIORITIZATION workshops into one.
Most often, if we have a full-day workshop, we move right into solutions ideation where we facilitate brainstorming and sketching activities to rapidly generate ideas much like you would do in a dedicated DESIGN workshop. So this one-day workshop can take the place of 3 separate workshops and give the team actionable next steps to move into prototyping and design.
But back to the teams who resist a workshop all together — please try it out. And don’t just settle for a discovery workshop or a session without actual UX research involved. Whether it is a few hours, a day, or several days, take this time to understand the problems from the user’s perspective, get alignment, brainstorm solutions and agree on next steps. I have seen this one activity save groups time, money, and their sanity.
