Design
studio,
baby!
Our UX team was asked to create a modern looking dashboard for a start-up called Phantasia, based in France. They are a next level, multi-sector art marketplace and its mission is to merge social networks, financial support and collaborative features.
Why are we
doing this?
The Design Workshop is one of the most successful methods in agile UX and as part of my role, I was super excited to facilitate a Design Workshop with stakeholders (CEO of Phantasia and the Chief Data Office) and the product team to generate ideas and agree on a goal.
While meetings are the most common way to check-in, share or exchange information, they are often passive in nature. We had a very complex problem to solve, so I knew a Design Workshop would be practical as it encourages stakeholders and wider team in active participation.
It’s effective, promotes sharing ideas and brings different perspectives together, time and money efficient and helps visualise complex problems and brings out unspoken requirements and preferences.
Prep &
planning
🚀 Set the objective(s)
Which -in a nutshell- is to discover options for a new dashboard while keeping the recent research in mind.
🚀 Activities
There are plenty of commonly used design studio activities out there. I promoted a Bad Idea Party (as a fun icebreaker) followed by two rounds of Crazy 8-s and critic sessions. The team agreed.
🚀 Organise a space
Nowadays workshops tend to happen online - not ideal, but at least you can keep your pyjama trousers on. As far as organisation goes in this new remote world, I just informed the participants beforehand about making sure there is good lighting, comfortable chair, calm environment, water and snacks.
🚀 Agenda
Scheduling the activities and providing the time frame, including breaks. I went for a shorter Design Studio, so our time frame was quite simple. Pro tip: always schedule it sooner than later in the day because of energy levels and decision fatigue, yup, we’ve all been there 🤤
🚀 Materials
✅ Slides with brief info of insights and agenda! (Count as a material, a digital one)
✅ Pen and paper (a sharpie and blank A4 paper, if possible)
✅ A watch or timer: something that everyone can see during the session
✅ A phone to take photos of the sketches
✅ Figma board: where we can upload the sketches and see them all in one place
Running
the studio
I scheduled the call for 10 am and presented the agenda with the planned activities. Ready? Steady? Go! (and hit the record button!)
First, we walked the stakeholders through the research and explaining the findings that we had so far. This is practical not only for a check-in but also for the activities later. So what are these key findings in a nutshell?
💡 User interviews insights after affinity mapping them
💡 Competitor and Comparative analysis
💡 Personas, for two users groups, the ‘professionals’ and ‘part-time artist or hobbyists’
💡 Problem statement: Users need an effective and manageable way to utilise data of their sales and promotions and, so that they can educate themselves and tailor their business strategy accordingly.
Next, the team agreed on the main goal and framed it as the desired outcome. We also agreed on what deliverables are to be sketched, which should be a single screen with certain features that caters to the users’ needs.
Once we are all aligned, we can start with the first activity!
Introduction
Activities (the best part!)
Activity #1 The Bad Idea Party
First, we started with a little folding exercise. I asked everyone to fold an A4 paper with me get 8 sections.
Then I explained the rules and details of this Bad Idea Party. It’s a rapid ideation activity to get the bad ideas (yes, the ones you would normally avoid) out of the way, there is always someone who finds this a bit confusing or ridiculous (well, it is, really!) – but don’t worry it’s absolutely normal. It is for breaking the ice and it I guarantee, it will… also it’s actually very useful too.
Rules
📌 Don’t overthink or get into too much detail
📌 Sketch 8 bad ideas on a portion of a single sheet of paper
📌 The activity is 5 minutes long and
📌 Important! Ideas must be relevant to the findings from UX research!
Timer set? Gooooo! I kept the research (problem statement, persona, insights, etc) on the screen to be available during the activity, in case we need more inspiration or just a reminder. Showing the timer is very practical too!
One of my fav parts is definitely this one. There are always smiles and laughs during the activity, you can’t wish for a better kick-start for a workshop, right?
When the time was up, I asked everyone to upload their sketches onto the Design Studio Figma deck that we shared before the session. Then everyone would present their own (very bad, hah) ideas. Obviously, some of the sketches were hilarious and made us laugh, it also helped us to remember what is a bad idea that we must avoid
Activity #2 Crazy 8s - Round 1
This is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people’s creativity, drawing or any type of artistic skills are not important here, as you only have 1 minute to draw in each section, 8 minutes all together. This is about the craziest, greatest, coolest, bravest ideas (the opposite of the Bad Idea Party 😎)
The challenge is to sketch 8 rough, crazy but great ideas in 8 minutes on another piece of paper. Must be as creative (crazy) as possible and keep in mind that the sketches don’t need to be perfect or beautiful.
Again, same as the Bad Idea Party, ideas must be relevant to the findings from our research that we presented earlier. I left the summary screen on display again, just in case.
When the alarm went off, it was time to upload the sketches onto the deck. Then, we would then present our ideas and vote for the best ones using stickers in Figma.
Activity #3 Crazy 8s - Round 2
After presenting and discussing the ideas of the first round, we certainly had a few good ideas! The next step is for each person to merge several ideas into one mash-up, one big idea!
I let everyone know that since we are all working towards the same goal, stealing each other’s ideas is highly encouraged! (in fact, this is the best way to come up with a winning idea)
This activity is 8 minutes long and as before, the ideas must be relevant to the findings.
When we ran out of time, the plan was the same. Everyone uploaded their precious sketches and we spent a good amount of time talking about them, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of these ideas, and of course, we voted again in order to highlight our favourites.
Final critic and
wrap-up
The benefit of critiquing is that it helps us to get to a collaborative stage, where we, as a team can make modifications or combine the strength of several ideas. We also be able to identify common themes and determine what directions are the most valuable.
Each participant had a set amount of time to both present and receive critique, and there was opportunity to suggest improvement the designs as well.
Some examples of common themes and ideas that got the most votes were:
🥁 Some sort of gamification, so users can engage and interact with their data.
🥁 Drag and drop function that would support free customization.
🥁 Resizable widgets supporting personalisation.
🥁 User profile section with profile picture of user to make the dashboard less techy and more personal, so it promotes social media aspects
🥁 Youthful and clean user interface
My job as a
facilitator
As a facilitator what I always keep in mind is 1) communication is key. Your job is to constantly communicate. Introduce, explain, manage the time, ask open questions while observing and checking on the mood and energy level. And 2) Always, ALWAYS keeping an eye on the end goal and the user needs. There will be plenty of great ideas during these sessions and navigating between them can be extremely challenging.
Next steps
After exploring the best ideas, we were able to agree on the design direction easy and jump into creating low- fi wireframes.
Last words
I have to say, especially with a brand designer background (we did a lot of these back then), I’m a big fan of design studios! It brings a group together (more diverse the better) and balances skill sets, such as UX, design, product management and development. Design Studio offers a productive iterative process (explanation, feedback, discussion and voting) that is only possible in a group work. It’s time, money efficient and fun.
