Step 2. We therefore synthesized all of the key information on a Research Wall that we built on Miro in the form of a SWOT matrix, as well as in a comprehensive project checklist. Sharing user journey maps, reflection and discussion (10 minutes): At the end of the ideation phase, put ten minutes aside for presenting and reflecting on all the user journey maps created. When introducing design thinking to a group, the best place to start is by answering the question, what is design thinking? As a group, youll now decide on a winning approach. And we came to the following conclusion: Being a good workshop facilitator is like being made out of bamboo. Remind the group to keep coming back to the Empathy part of the Design Thinking process and use empathy maps and user stories as practical ways to keep the user at the center of the session. This might also be balanced with our budget and our time. Our graduates are highly skilled, motivated, and prepared for impactful careers in tech. You can do this remotely or in person. For details about the different steps and activities involved, see the Design Thinking process guide. Design Thinking is a vital framework in the modern business ecosystem. Our career-change programs are designed to take you from beginner to pro in your tech careerwith personalized support every step of the way. We then create two teams, ensuring that the chosen Persona profiles are on opposite teams and are designed for one another. We can then establish a variety of methods in how we might Empathize with our users: For our cake design, these insights could help us discover our users flavor preferences, any hobbies that might relate to the visual design of the cake; and who else might be eating the cake at the party. Who are we designing for? Each tools has its own strengths (flexibility, integrations) and weaknesses (learning curve, limitations), but all provide a shared canvas and simplify data collection. What went well? Ideally, youll have a separate table for all the materials and equipment (more on that in step three!). Its as much about changing processes as getting results, Design Thinking isn't just a one-off fix to a specific problem; its a culture change. Youll also need to incorporate an introduction, an ice-breaker activity to get the group warmed up, and sufficient breaks throughout. Or align on specific requirements? In addition to writing for the CareerFoundry blog, Emily has been a regular contributor to several industry-leading design publications, including the InVision blog, UX Planet, and Adobe XD Ideas. During this time, teams work through various activities that help model their users, define requirements and develop experiences. Well yes, you must: Okay, but then "how can I be all of this at once?" sustainability, carbon footprint), Open a new workshop calendar (ex. In this article, we want to take the fear out of running Design Thinking workshops for those new to the methodology, and give you the knowledge, concrete steps, and tools youll need to run your first Design Thinking workshop, wowing your company or clients in the process. When preparing your workshop, insist that the list of participants include representatives of all the teams affected by the issue to be resolved. Sharing relevant inspiration is an effective way to build a collaborative atmosphere while bringing fresh perspectives into workshops. If there is time, you can create an exercise to develop questions from closed statements and assumptions, into open questions that dont lead the person. Open a new workshop calendar (ex. When the statements been written, take a moment to have a brief reflection and discussion on what everybody has learned so far. So that you don't always find yourself having to be the time police who is tasked with interrupting the teams when time is up, designate a person responsible for keeping time within each team. Design thinking is unique in its focus on user-centric problem-solving: you're not just coming up with ideas that could benefit the business, but rather, taking a rare opportunity to really step into your users' shoes and understand them on a deeper level. This will put everybody at ease before the real work begins! Start by welcoming everybody to the workshop and setting expectations. We might also wish to consider if the idea excites us, as innovative ideas should light a spark within us to have the drive and momentum to carry it through to the next stage of the process. Lastly, if time permits, use the last few minutes of your workshop to take inventory of what youve accomplished during the time spent together and inform the participants of the next steps in the project. For more complex problems, we might revisit previous stages, and create further prototypes using our deeper understanding. How? As Mary Poppins put it so well, In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. We help businesses and brands succeed in the digital age. For example: Getting started, browsing the app, interacting with other users. What are we working with? 1. Obviously, this ratio can be adapted according to the complexity and your level of familiarity with the subject. It serves as a rudder for cross functional teams working on complex projects, and takes 3 5 days to complete. Is it to uncover new opportunities, solve a specific user problem, or improve a product or feature? Design Thinking is also known as Human Centered Design. Ask your Design Thinkers how they enjoyed the workshop and what theyve learned. These five stages of design thinking form an effective process for problem-solving that is useful for any team wanting to create better solutions and products. If you end up having the time to do them, they will be incredible team-building moments amongst the participants. As the facilitator, you then have to ask team members to list why these ideas are so bad. What ideation technique will the group be using today, and how does it work? To build trust, start by creating ground rules for the workshop. What you want are thought starters, not solutions. Provide a few examples to help them get started. If your workshop takes place over several days, take the time necessary at the end of each day to write down the big ideas of the day. Well walk you through the key stages of the template and offer some tips to help you along the way. In this section of the workshop, participants will turn the steps from their user journey maps into digital screens for an app. Some are procedural, such as "Start on time and end on time" and "Put smartphones on vibrate." Procedural ground rules are useful but don't help your. Continuing with the example of LoveFoundry, our imaginary online dating service, lets consider how you might construct the empathise phase. Heres a list of some of our favorites. To give you a helping hand, weve put together a handy list of tools and best practices you can follow to make sure you and your workshop group are well prepared for your remote workshop session.. This workshop has been constructed with the simplest solutions in mind, and for the empathize phase, we team people up as pairs and set them the task of interviewing one another about their birthday plans. The benefits of Design Thinking. Get the group to spend another ten minutes brainstorming as many ideas as possible. Please add your ideas to the comments below! Indeed, Design Thinking can be applied to all areas of business, and a Design Thinking workshop can therefore be useful for everyonefrom marketing, product, and sales, right through to the C-level. The goal of the Document step is to ensure all the insights and alignments generated during the workshop can be easily referenced and implemented by others. In general, workshops open with divergent thinking activities (brainstorming) before switching to convergent ones (prioritizations). Select those that are appropriate to your group's needs. Ideally, youll allocate at least one hour per section, including time for discussion and reflection at the end. By no means just for designers, a Design Thinking workshop is a methodology intended for the whole team and can be applied to numerous areas of business, from sales through to senior management. Given the cross-functional nature of workshops, its often best to bring both executive summaries and raw data to workshops. This is also a good time for questions. The Statement of Opportunity expresses the topline project opportunity from the teams perspective. If time permits, allow 15-20 minutes at the start of every day for icebreaker activities or energizing moments. We then move into the Define stage of the design process, where we will create Personas of our partners based on their responses in the Empathize stage. While putting together your workshop agenda, concentrate on deliverables rather than focusing too heavily on creating a prescription for every moment of the day. Don't forget to take photos of the material produced as you go along, and if your workshop contains pitches, record them so that you can remember them if necessary. Has everybody identified similar user needs, or is there lots of variety? Through the idea vault process, we are narrowing our ideas down by asking a series of questions that relate to the feasibility of the design, and if it truly meets our Personas needs. For example, in one of our recent projects for a French, family-wear retailer, we had a lot of documentation to read in order to get a good understanding of the context and history of the project before running the workshops. There are different types of ground rules. . They bring together a diverse group of people from different departments and provide a rare opportunity to get hands-on with the problem. Design thinking workshop step by step guide | by Taras Bakusevych | UX Collective Write Sign up Sign In 500 Apologies, but something went wrong on our end. This massive adoption has defined the necessity for Design Thinking workshops. First, lets explore the problem at the heart of this workshop design, which is baking a cake! Design Thinking has five steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. In this workshop, well ask the group to approach the problem of baking a cake. In a way, yes! They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apples iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. 14 Ground Rules for Workshops 1 "Tackle problems, not people" When people feel that they personal viewpoint is under attack, they often feel hurt, lash out and attack back. This role can be filled by an in-house facilitator or an external or freelance facilitator who seeks to guide team members towards a common objective via the Design Thinking process., There are pros and cons to both internal and external facilitation., While an internal facilitator benefits from knowledge of the product and company and has established relationships with the team, they might struggle with objectivity, find it hard to build trust with the team, and avoid asking pointed questions., An external facilitator, on the other hand, is likely to remain detached from internal power struggles and find it easier to remain uninfluenced by existing relationships with the team. you might ask yourself. But how do you choose the right activity, and where do you get started when trying to build deeper team bonds? Design thinking is a highly iterative process, where insights from one activity often reframe the original opportunity. The most productive Design Thinking workshops reduce the need for follow-ups by having all the right data on hand for decisions. While you can expect a lot of discussion here, preparing an initial list of key performance indicators is a helpful starting point. Make sure to include lots of activities, be realistic with your time planning, and allow plenty of time for breaks, spontaneity, free-flowing discussion, and creativity., Youll probably want to allow approximately one hour for each section of the workshop, with a generous slot dedicated to reflection and debriefing when the activities are over., To ensure maximum creativity, youll be going back to basics for your Design Thinking workshop. To keep your attendees relaxed, comfortable, and free to be creative, keep the following checklist in mind while selecting and preparing your workshops location:, The importance of writing a good workshop agenda should never be underestimated. As creative and exciting as our rapid-fire exercises are, they can leave our group with too many options, feeling swamped with potential solutions. Starting with these simple examples of different cakes is a great way to achieve this. You can divide the journey mapping phase of your Design Thinking workshop into the following activities: Now for the fun part: building prototypes and testing ideas! Make a note of these answers so that your workshops continue to improve steadily over time., Heres a shortlist of what to keep in mind at all times while running your Design Thinking workshop!. Our rule of thumb is "3:1". Design Thinking has become an extremely popular approach to problem-solvingnot only among designers, but across all areas of business. 1 day, 9:00 AM 5:00 PM), Add time for introductions, lunch and breaks (15 to 60 min), Identify Design Thinking steps for each block (ex. This might be a good time to share some interesting statsfor example: teams that are applying IBMs Design Thinking practices have, A real-world Design Thinking case study, such as, Presentation (10 minutes): What is empathy? ), Reverse brainstormingthis is where you focus on the causes of the problem rather than the solution, Rapid ideationeach person writes down as many ideas as possible within a set timeframe, Worst ideaask everyone to come up with their worst idea to solve the problem. Its worth suggesting to the team to use one piece of paper to represent each screen so that mistakes can be easily rectified and the journey is easy for everyone to follow.. Or connect closer with users? In this guide, well explore how to introduce design thinking to beginners with a workshop that uses the analogy of baking a cake. They have a simple, one-sentence format that can be quickly created and compared. This can be a brief presentation covering the following points: By now, youve set the scene and put everybody at ease. If teaching design thinking online, you may wish to. Activityconduct user research (10 minutes): Normally, the empathise phase consists of conducting research with actual users. For example, a cupcake is designed to be eaten by one person, a low-cost treat that doesnt warrant a special occasion. Now well go through all the necessary steps for running a Design Thinking workshop. Part of the workshop will be dedicated to building low-fidelity prototypes, for which youll need a good selection of materials. user personas). A way in which this cake design process could be elaborated is in the context of creating the workshop alongside a schools Home Economics class, or other groups who regularly have access to kitchens and cooking equipment. With general preparation out of the way, lets move on to phase two of our guide. This means aligning on what is feasible by when, and drawing a line in the sand. Throughout your design career, you might find yourself running Design Thinking workshops for clientsgoing into different organizations and showing them how they can apply Design Thinking to their own business challenges. Youll find a complete workshop template alongside tips to help you engage a group new to design thinking. Theyll provide feedback, support, and advice as you build your new career. For the best outcomes, Design Thinking needs to be incorporated into every step of product development and problem-solving to see long-lasting effects., For those of you running a remote Design Thinking workshop, youll have a slightly different set of challenges to those hosting the in-person variant. Activitysharing ideas and getting feedback (10 minutes): Ask participants to pair up and share their ideas. By learning the design thinking process in parallel with designing a cake, the steps are fun, relatable and easy to digest. Are they realistic? So what next? Time: Complex problem solving takes time. A good workshop facilitator must know how to get the word out within the company about the beneficial effects of Design Thinking on collaboration and on a customer-centric culture. If you are in charge of delivering a summary of the work done, start it immediately after the workshop, while the information is still fresh in your mind. Whatever the challenge is that youre hoping to solve with the workshop, have it defined well in advance so that everyone is on the same page from the start. Maximum: 50 . As such, the workshop agenda is more playbook than prescription the most important thing is knowing what type of deliverables you want to generate (ex. We're here to help with this collection of simple and effective team building activities! To conclude, I wanted to give you one last little tip as a bonus. Our cake design process seeks to provide the answer in an engaging, experiential format. For example: How might we provide an easy, safe, online dating experience?. Stage Two Tools: Unpacking, Sensemaking, and Insights You can even recap these ideas at the start of the next day, so that your participants get started on the right foot. Activitygroup the steps into phases (10 minutes): Participants will now group the steps from the last activity into phases, aiming for 3-7 phases in total. That means all decision makers, technical leads, and even users (or their personas) must be represented. By using methods of empathizing to discover more information, we can get more context to our problem, and start to understand the wants and needs we hope to meet with our end product. Design Thinking activities, such as empathy maps and user stories are a convenient way for organizing detailed user research. Building a highly effective team takes effort, consideration,, Have you heard of Design Thinking? It may involve employees from different departments coming together to tackle a company-wide problem or individuals from the same team focusing on a department-specific challenge., A workshop that promotes cross-collaboration between teams, and which contains individuals with a wide range of specializations, will bring the most innovative and effective results to a Design Thinking workshop. To introduce the process of Design Thinking using a real-world design challenge: How might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers? As well as traditional brainstorming, try out some of these other idea generation techniques:, Check out our ultimate 10-minute brainstorming technique, too.. Using empathy maps and role-playing, encourage the group to get into the shoes of their target user. A great way of gathering feedback is to send a thank you for taking part! email together with a survey link. Why is it so important to design for the user first? Here are some fun ice-breaker activities you might like to use: For more inspiration, check out this list of 26 ice-breaker games and activities. As well as finding a solution to the problem at hand, the process nurtures a working environment that values collaboration and communication and that focuses on creating solutions that meet the customers needs. If your activity requires it, you can also designate a person in each team who will be responsible for formalizing the group's work on a computer. The great thing about these exercises is that you have the freedom to expand them to work with your audience and how best suits their needs. If you only do one thing, be over-prepared! This will allow them to see the benefits of the approach, and maybe it will open up other opportunities for you to use this methodology within the company. Design thinking consists of five key stages which we'll explore in this workshop: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Chances are you have. So, to not paraphrase what is already out there, I sat down with my partner in workshops,and we established a list of our key tips. Selecting the right design thinking steps and activities gets easier with experience. Presentation (10 minutes): What is the define stage and why is it necessary? By the end of this session, you and your team need to have settled on one solution. Now that youve got your solution, the team needs to map out each step the user needs to take for it to work., Its time for the team to create low-fidelity prototypes! Also, don't hesitate to delegate certain tasks to the participants. When designing a workshop, or series of workshops for participants- you might suggest that their empathize stage involves designing a cake for someone outside of the workshop group. Create a crossfunctional team of allies who can help you advertise the process and build buy-in for your recommendations. In the simplest definition, design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving. It is relatively affordable, perhaps a mid-range cost if its for a milestone birthday, or a low-cost supermarket purchase for a low-key, informal celebration. With clarity about the goals and priorities of the team, the final step of the workshop is to put the minimum experience requirements into writing. Unlike virtual workshop ground rules (in which one person is usually the lead), team meetings usually require everyone to operate as a peer. There are many reasons you might hold a Design Thinking workshop; perhaps you need ideas for a new product, or maybe youre looking for ways to improve an existing one. For example: A busy, middle-aged professional needs an easy way of meeting like-minded people in the local area. And she was right. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor) and what journey (the scenario) you'll be mapping ahead of time. That means having a beginners mind and the confidence to share. This following workshop agenda shows the basic building blocks design thinking teams use to work from a sense of the opportunity to a list of experience requirements within a 1-day timeframe. Below, Ive collected a few more tips you might find useful if you are using your own design or trying another approach entirely. How will we measure success? Running a successful Design Thinking workshop means ensuring the team has everything they need to make informed decisions in real-time. 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