Collective UX Design in a big corporation

In-company Meetings Turning into Interactive Workshops

UX team of the company expected to reflect user experience on screens and formulate the flow via usability tests, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that it is all employee’s responsibility to make the product better. Here, UX team takes leadership to listen everyone’s ideas.

Most of us are familiar with in-company trainings. At the same time, formulating cluster of ideas together in a big company where every department facing with different issues on the same product is another type of meeting but can not be called training.

As otel.com we prefer those trainings turn into interactive workshops when the topic is considerable for every department in the company. To create many ideas cooperatively as a team and to observe which ideas are most common within the group is a way to keep assumptions down in the brainstorming process which leads the actual designing phase.

To Come Up with Insightful Data..

As the UXers of the firm, leaning on an insightful data is our fundamental concern in design process. If a feature is going to be decided, it should be understood what is the common picture framed by everyone taking a part in the collective group work.

So that, we aimed to bring different departments together to get rid of bias and collect various ideas to gather meaning from with a workshop. Even if you think the outcome is not a clean data to benefit from, we identify different perspectives and designate repetitive patterns of the feature. Before developing process, which needs lots of effort and physical materials, specifying characteristics of the project pointed out the motivational insights of people and put the assumptions out in the first place. From this point, we conduct an in-company workshop and aimed to evaluate outcomes as design team and to create the most potential solution for everyone.

The exercise we did starts individually and continues with going deep cooperatively as a group. Breaking large structures into little parts with imposing empathy is how we create new ideas in this workshop. If anyone wonder, the structure that we proceed could be followed below.

NUMBER OF PLAYERS

16 players (4 groups)

DURATION OF PLAY

1.5 hours

HOW TO PLAY

1. When the players settled, we gave each of them a sticky paper and pen. Asked each player to write or draw something that represents their actual mood on papers. Just 1 minute was enough for this process. It ended up fun more than we imagined because it gave players the feeling of this workshop is not one of the ordinary company meetings.
2. We collect sticky papers and place them on a board that is visible to everyone.
3. Now, we, as conductors of the workshop, sorted 16 papers as 4 accordingly to the similarities in drawings. The owners of the sorted cards together meant to be in the same group.
4. We asked group members to find each other and settle together, then we let them to decide on a group name. They all decided on funny names. For the people who don’t know each other, deciding something enjoyable as partners helped them to act comfortable together in the next step. Those four steps all took only 5 minutes.
5. After organizing 4 groups, we aimed employees to get more familiar with our product’s target groups. To do that, our method was to apply empathy mapping. In the design research field, empathy mapping is a well-known method to get insights of user’s needs. Before workshop we identify four different customer segment that could have different expectations from our product and gave each groups one segment.

The purpose was to make people collaboratively sense what could others can feeling and thinking, hearing, seeing, saying and doing while they are planning a travel.

1. After explaining what empathy mapping is, we gave groups 10 minutes to work collaboratively to create a map that represents their group of users.
2. Then the turn was to explain the design feature planning to be added on the existing product. We want people to keep thinking about their user segment and also think for our product. Where should we add the planning feature, what should we say to the customer to meet their expectations in the correct place were the main questions. Thinking them all together, their task was to generate new feature added pages personally for 10 minutes on a4 paper.
3. Once the ideas are created, the task was to share them with their group members quickly. To decide on one or combine them together on a sheet of 3 paper, the time given was 15 minutes.
4. Based on guidance from players, their group pages prepared to present. Each group had their 5 minutes time to perform their outputs with the empathy maps. For all four groups, this part was 20 minutes in total.
5. We stick all outcomes on a flat working place visible to players and want everyone to vote presented papers with a dot sticker to see the common thought of everyone.

To Conclude

Sometimes a feature is decided and the content could be blurry. Asking others to clarify what could it be or what is the common-thought nuanced help designers to find a spot. It’s possible to not to benefit from this workshop for our UX team, but this shouldn’t be forgot that in-company workshops are generally mutually pragmatic. The value of deciding together increases the bond of the company to each other and also to the product. The more importance given to everyone’s ideas, the better the excited interest and eagerness of people will become. Thanks everyone participating, our workshop will bring wider social value in order to draw a solution that nobody could come up alone.