User games: how to work with your users to innovate
At AB Tasty, we’ve been organizing group research workshops in the form of innovation games since 2017. What started originally as “VIP days” naturally evolved into “user games” as we began using the form of games as a matrix. In this article, I’ll share our reasoning behind these user games and walk you through how you can do the same.
User Games can be described as focus groups based on innovation games. We believe that games are can be a powerful way to resolve complex problems. Additionally, they are enjoyable for the participants and easy to set up for the organizers at the same time.
Indeed, games foster collaboration and engage the stakeholders, thanks to their framework, progression rules, and objectives. They will motivate the participants and give them a clear direction, which isn’t always the case with the standard meeting.
On our design team, we rely on User Games when we need to explore a topic, the usage of a new profile of users, or a new market for which we don’t have enough insights. We organize one approximately every quarter, with a group of 5 to 8 people, for 21/2 to 3 hours.
The benefits for our users:
- They have a good time thanks to the playfulness of the workshop;
- They meet peers and share their experiences and best practices;
- And they discover innovative techniques they can apply internally in their teams, as we do too at AB Tasty.
Here are examples of topics tackled in User Games in the past:
- Personalization, what are our customers expecting from us in order to be able to carry out their strategy?
- The CRO manager, a new position that was hired in the last years/months: what are his/her scope of work, objectives, and difficulties?
- What are the expectations of users in the United States?
2 categories of workshops
- If the product doesn’t exist (yet), the topic is new, or if the target users have not yet been addressed by your product: you are aiming for exploratory objectives. You can choose games based on the empathy of the users, the collection of their needs, and the understanding of their context of use.
- If the product (or a prototype) already exists, confirmatory objectives are targeted. You already have ideas of solutions for some problems you have identified beforehand, and the workshop helps you validate or invalidate these hypotheses and prioritize the solutions.
It’s up to you to decide which type of workshop you want to conduct. On our side, about ⅔ of our games are exploratory, and ⅓ are confirmatory.
To validate or invalidate a solution, I believe that the ideal is to run user tests on a prototype or to launch the feature in production, to collect feedback, and to iterate as recommended by Jason Fried, Basecamp’s founder.
How to choose your workshops
I recommend that you read either this website or the book Gamestorming, which presents a range of games you can select based on your context and objective.
For example, here are some of the games we used during previous User Games:
The Speed boat — exploratory
This game is often used to run retrospectives in Agile methodologies.
How to play
On a board, draw a boat (representing the team). This boat is heading for an island (the targeted objective). The wind blows in the sail (symbolizing what helps to reach the goal), anchors hold back the boat (symbolizing what slows down the achievement of the goal), and rocks face the boat, potentially preventing it from moving forward (obstacles). Each person puts sticky notes on the board to describe the objective, the hindrances, the boosters, and the obstacles.
Benefits
The speed boat helps you get the big picture of all the factors that help or prevent you from reaching a set goal.
The Campfire — exploratory
How to play
Write down some thematics on sticky notes. Each participant comes and tells a story concerning one of these subjects or a subject mentioned by one of the participants.
Benefits
This game provides a flexible framework fostering the sharing of experience and makes the participants tackle the topics you are interested in.
The $100 test — confirmatory
How to play
Write down all the functionalities you are considering adding to your roadmap. The participants have €100 to allocate to the functionalities they like best, knowing that the maximum bet is €20 — and they have to explain why.
Benefits
This game helps you prioritize your roadmap thanks to a tangible element: money. You must be well underway in your research to run this game.
Card sorting — Exploratory & confirmatory
How to play
A person takes a set of concepts or topics and divides them up into groups. It’s a great way to know how users might expect content to be organized into the website. There are two variants:
- Open: each participant gets the same cards but makes up their own categories.
- Closed: each participant gets a list of concepts and list of categories and distributes cards into these categories.
Benefits
Card sorting is a UX research technique in which users organize topics into groups. You can use it to create an information architecture that suits your users’ expectations.
The behavior of the facilitator:
- Smile — be friendly, but remain professional.
- Speak to the entire group, and make sure everyone takes the floor. There are always some shy and some talkative ones in the group that you will have to manage.
- Ask questions to make sure you truly understand the “why” behind an assertion.
- Foster conversations between the participants.
- Don’t give your personal opinion, there are no wrong answers and every participant’s opinion counts.
- Before starting the first workshop, begin with an “ice breaker”: 5 minutes to break the ice and help the participants get to know each other.
- Conclusion and debriefing: end the session by thanking the participants, asking them if they have other topics they’d like to tackle and ask them what they thought of the experience. As a thank you, you can also make an announcement or present a preview of a new product.10 steps for well-organized User Games
10 steps for well-organized User Games
1 - What are you searching for? Define the subject of your User Game and check whether you are starting with a clean sheet of paper or if possible solutions have already been thought of.
2 - Identify and select target users according to your subject. In a B2C context, you can recruit users by capitalizing on your community or use solutions to externalize the recruitment (Testapic, UserTesting, EasyPanel…). For B2B, I recommend that you choose only one person by company, in order to avoid biases and mutual influences. AB Tasty’s case, a SaaS B2B piece of software, we work in close collaboration with the CSM team in order to identify the best profiles among our clients.
3 - Book a place where people will feel at ease. Generally, we book a loft or a co-working space outside of our office through Privateaser or Bird Office.
4 - Select and prepare the workshops, and clarify the timing. Make sure you plan breaks between the workshops and you select games that don’t always require the same level of concentration.
5 - Prepare your team.
Allocate the roles
- 2 people alternate leading
- 2 people observe and take notes
Explain the workshops to everyone beforehand: feel free to involve non-designers who will work on the projects too for taking notes, it will be very valuable for them: Product Managers, Developers, Marketing team… depending on your theme
6 - Send out reminders 3 days before. Don’t forget that your users have busy schedules and that they are allocating time for you.
7 - Organize the logistics: legal documents, preparation of the place, material (sticky notes, sharpies, whiteboard, etc.), coffee, breakfast, thank you goodies, etc.
8 - Analyze the notes and results of the workshops. Take pictures of the results and make sure one person on the team writes down everything, including non-verbal behavior, such as pauses and hesitations. Regarding the analysis, I recommend that you do it immediately after the User Game, while everything is fresh in your mind.
9 - Thank the participants again and send them a post-session survey (through Google form or Typeform) to gather feedback on how to improve the next ones.
10 - Unpack the workshops and share the report internally, including all of your learnings and the UX deliverables created thanks to the user games.
How to leverage the results of your User Games
- Analyzing the results of confirmatory games is quite straightforward. You can also cross-reference the results with user tests run in parallel.
- For exploratory workshops, you can identify verbal patterns and recurring subjects — just like for interviews. Then, opinions or issues raised have to be converted into ideas of conception. For that, you can use the technique of the “How might we” to turn problems into challenges.
🛎️ If the users can help you formulate the problem, you have to imagine the appropriate solution. That’s the reason why️ you shouldn’t run ideation workshops with your users, but only inside your company with your colleagues. 🛎️
The data collected thanks to the User Games will be very useful to elaborate on the UX deliverables that you need: persona, empathy map, experience map, etc. You can choose based on your research objective.
Feel free to contact some of the participants again after the User Games in order to conduct individual interviews and get some clarification on some of the points raised. Being in a group and having a set time for each workshop doesn’t always allow you to dig deeper into the needs.
Thank you for reading this article!
Have you ever organized workshops in the form of games with your users? Are you considering doing it? I’d be more than happy to discuss this with you if you have questions or suggestions!
