UX Upskill | Hyper Island
Creating and facilitating a remote design thinking workshop
There has never been a better time to get to grips with remote working methods than now. The world is changing at a rapid pace due to many reasons, the latest being the pandemic, forcing millions to work remotely. So the timing of this challenge was perfect.
Our lives are becoming ever more complex with lots of useless products increasingly dominating our lives. In this context it’s important that we don’t add more crap, but instead make sure we create useful and needed products. To help us do that we use design thinking. Understanding how to run a problem solving workshop is a key part of this process. Knowing how to do this remotely is now more important than ever.
Challenge
→ Create and facilitate a 30 minute remote workshop.
Ideally, I would start by talking with users and defining problems based on findings from qualitative and quantitative research. However, since we did fieldwork in our last challenge and this was about learning workshop creation, facilitation and getting a deeper understanding of design thinking, I used assumptions instead of insights and jumped straight to the define stage of the design thinking process.
Finding and defining a problem 🔍
To get the most out of any workshop it’s important to have a defined problem and a clear idea about what you want to achieve.
I chose something concrete and relatable , Oslo City Bike (OCB), a rental service I no longer use because I could never find a bike when I needed one.
Despite not having any research, I still had to formulate the problem in a way that took into account the user, their needs and my insights (in this case assumptions). It was also important to consider that the problem should neither be too broad (could make people feel lost) or too narrow (could hinder the flow of ideas).
To help formulate the problem I used the Point of view template and then re-framed it into a How might we…
POV Statement Users of OCB need to find bikes and parking wherever and whenever they go from A to B. Oslo is hilly, so most users bike downhill. This creates an imbalance of bikes and there are rarely any bikes uphill or parking downhill. Users are getting fed up and leave the service because they feel it’s not fulfilling their needs.
HMW How might we ensure that users of Oslo City Bike find bikes wherever and whenever they need one?
Reflection. Framing the problem was difficult. First attempt was “How might we find a way to improve bike distribution so users of OCB have a better experience?” Then I learned I shouldn’t include solutions and “better bike distribution” was a solution. New attempt was: “How might we improve the experience users of OCB have?” This was too open and didn’t give any hint about the problem. My final HMW was the one marked above.
Creating the workshop ✍️
Deciding what to include in any workshop will depend on the goal, the time available, the problem at hand and the participants. There are lot of design thinking activities to choose from, since this was a short workshop it was important to be selective, but even in longer workshops, you still want to choose the right activity depending on what you want to achieve.
I started with explaining the intention and desired outcome of the workshop and included a warm up exercise to help people relax. Then I presented the problem statement.
To get the participants into the mind of the user I used empathy mapping. To inspire them I included comments from OCBs FB page.
Reflection. I debated whether to prefill the empathy map, but ended with not prefilling as I didn’t want my bias to influence the participants.
For the ideation activity I chose silent brainstorming because it’s an effective way to get many ideas fast, both from introverts and extroverts as no one can dominate the conversation or influence each other.
To prioritize ideas I added voting and a matrix of effort/impact and told participants to explain why they would place an idea in a certain place.
To run the workshop remotely I used Mural, a digital, whiteboard for visual collaboration. In addition I used Zoom to communicate with and see the participants.
When the first draft was ready I did a test with my brother to check time and scope. I learned I had to adjust the times as some areas needed less time and others more. I also removed the empathy map to save time, but added it back in as it was too useful to not include. Instead I cut time for brainstorming, as it’s good to have pressure here so people don’t spend too much time thinking.
After revising I ran it again with two participants. This time I learned my warm up was not clear, so I changed it to relate better with the workshop. Again I adjusted the times and rearranged the layout for better flow. I added private rooms for silent brainstorming so people can’t see each others ideas until a bit later in the process. There was also no need for separate voting, as this is built into Mural. I removed the “30 minute” title, because it stressed people when they knew the exact time frame. Finally I added “Next steps” so the workshop would end with a tangible and actionable plan.
Overall structure:
Final reflections 🤔
With a longer workshop I would (do research obviously) but also include more idea triggering activities and a customer journey map to identify users touch-points that could help identify places for innovation and improvements.
Great to learn how to construct and facilitate a workshop and understand how it fits in with design thinking. Joining fellow students workshops was also insightful. Looking forward to develop my workshop and facilitation skills further. 🚀
