Double Dose: Brainstorming Content Improvements with 2 Remote UX Workshops

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash.

The current pandemic has pushed many teams to host workshops over Zoom, GoToMeeting, and similar meeting software. When negative circumstances catalyze a change like this, some teams may come to view remote workshops as stop-gap measures or temporary inconveniences.

However, after almost 6 years of working at a fully remote UX agency, I want to praise the unique advantages of virtual UX workshops. A digital approach is not a second-best option, reserved only for times of crisis. Remote workshops are a legitimate approach to have in your arsenal as a consultant or to request as a client. When properly conducted, virtual workshops bring a set of strengths that go beyond the obvious benefit of unifying physically dispersed teams.

Some advantages of a remote workshop:

• More privacy for thinking: It can feel awkward to scribble down notes and brainstorm findings when you’re elbow-to-elbow with your colleagues in SAT-like silence. But if everybody joins from their own space, participants have more peace and privacy to cogitate. Just turn cameras off when it’s time for the silent thinking. That way participants have the option to stretch, fidget, pace, squeeze a stress ball, do whatever they need to without worrying about distracting others.
• Digital tools can be clearer and more efficient: Which is faster: writing something on a down or typing it onto a digital note? Usually the latter. While it can be fun to slap sticky notes onto a tangible whiteboard then rearrange them, we find that the digital equivalent saves time. Plus, you don’t have to decipher anybody’s loopy cursive (like mine, for instance).
• Fewer signifiers of power and alliance: Where people sit, whom they sit with, and how they take up space may all serve as reminders of rank and team divisions. Joining a digital meeting doesn’t exactly level the playing field, but it may neutralize some of the dynamics that are harder to break down in a shared physical space. For example, all the folks from Marketing can’t sit together to maintain their polite but glaring deadlock with the in-house UX Team.
• Easier to record the session: No need to set up a tripod or strategically place a cell phone set to Voice Memo so that it captures most of what’s said. Just remember to hit Record on your meeting software and you’ll end up with a clear reference that will prove valuable when you write up the report and/or take next steps on the project.

All of those advantages shined in the case of a large insurance company that loved our remote workshop so much they asked for a second helping — for the same project.

Challenge: Uncertainty about the needs and motivations of prospective commercial auto insurance customers

Our client, a Fortune 500 insurance company, is widely recognized for their personal auto and homeowners policies. Their commercial auto insurance offerings are less well known. These policies protect owners of vehicles used for business purposes — whether we’re talking about a self-employed contractor who transports materials to jobs or a small business CEO who employs multiple drivers with company cars. This insurance client also recently began to sell rideshare policies, tailored to the needs of Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand drivers.

The client’s commercial insurance team wanted to increase quotes and purchases. In order to do that, they suspected that they needed to improve their web content. But how? And where to start? They asked my colleague Kristy Knabe and me to investigate consumer experiences and update the online content accordingly.

Action: Remote UX Workshops to Analyze Research and Ideate Solutions

To prepare for the workshop, Kristy and I conducted interviews with 7 consumers:

• 5 rideshare drivers,
• 2 drivers with vehicles they use for other business purposes.

We asked these consumers about their insurance shopping process. Did they know they needed special insurance for their circumstances? What websites had they consulted? What motivated them? What concerns kept them up at night? And we had them pull up the existing content on our client’s website and browse it as they usually would.

For this client, we usually conduct on-site workshops. However, in this instance we decided that a remote workshop would be more convenient for all participants. On the appointed day, our client participants, including UX-ers, business, and product experts, joined the Zoom call from their individual computers.

To share ideas and document barriers during the brainstorming phase, we used a customizable digital whiteboard platform called Groupmap. This has become one of our go-to resources for collaborative UX workshops. My colleague Karishma Patel recently shared some wonderful tips on how to use Groupmap.

For the workshop’s structure, we used a modified version of the K-J Method. As Jared Spool notes, “One of the most amazing things about the KJ-Method is how well it objectively gets groups to the top priorities.”

Here are the major phases of our first workshop:

• Review the research reel and take notes — Over the meeting software, we played about an hour’s worth of interview highlights while workshop participants watched. They individually took notes according to some tips and guidelines we presented beforehand.
• Capture findings in Groupmap — Combing through their notes, participants added their most important findings as digital notes — the equivalent of Post-Its on a wall or a whiteboard in an on-site workshop. We asked our participants to focus on barriers or obstacles to consumers buying the right insurance.
• Group and prioritize findings — Participants looked for similarities between the findings and moved digital notes into clusters. Once the barriers had been grouped and labeled, we asked participants to vote on which barriers were the most important to address.
• Discuss solutions — Instead of brainstorming solutions in Groupmap, Kristy and I led a discussion of strategies to overcome the top barriers we’d identified as a team.

Kristy and I had intended to use the solutions discussion as a starting point for our own action plan. But here’s where the magic happened. Our participants found the workshop so valuable that they asked for a follow-up brainstorming session to delve more deeply into solutions.

Overjoyed with our stakeholders’ level of engagement, we set up a meeting for around a week later. This shorter, solutions-focused workshop incorporated a Groupmap board approach to gather many ideas in a fairly tight time frame.

We divided the board into 3 main sections, each focusing on a top pain point from our collective findings:

• Consumers find it hard to understand the differences between commercial auto products.
• Consumers find it challenging to identify their business type during the quote process.
• Web content doesn’t anticipate and address customer concerns and questions.

We gave the client team a set amount of time to brainstorm solutions for each. Then we discussed the merits of the different ideas, how feasible they were, and next steps for our action plan. In under an hour, we took the barriers we had named and converted them into exciting updates that would help educate, motivate, and win over our consumers.

Result: Strong Ideas and Buy-In for More Credible Content

The double workshop, particularly the second one, gave our project team a wealth of strong, practical suggestions. Here are just a few of the content recommendations that emerged from our workshops:

• Provide specific examples of how coverage works on consumer-facing landing pages.
• Create an easily scannable graphic or visual to compare different coverages.
• Expand FAQ content for commercial auto and rideshare insurance.
• Add testimonials from commercial insurance customers.
• Add help text to clarify problematic questions on the first page of the commercial insurance quote flow.
• Anticipate the fact that some rideshare and commercial drivers will try to get a basic personal policy. Redirect them into the right quote application depending on their answers to form questions.

Because they had participated in two workshops, our stakeholders were “bought in” and supportive of what the team wanted to do. For example, they gave us the contacts and blessing we needed to interview the commercial insurance phone agents. Those interviews provided the basis of the FAQ content that Kristy and I developed.

While in-person workshops might have yielded similar results, the flexibility and efficiency of the remote UX workshops enabled us to quickly arrange a lightweight follow-up workshop with the right people “in the room.”

Silent brainstorming on individual computers allowed participant to reflect and share their ideas on a more equal playing field, rather than letting rank or comfort with speaking off the cuff to dominate. We received clever suggestions from multiple client departments. Even comparatively timid members of the project crew felt empowered to speak up and share their ideas. In short, our remote KJ-Method variations yielded creative and actionable solutions, drawing on a variety of perspectives — with the consensus and momentum to move forward.