Russell Webb Design

Tag: workshop

  • Discovery Workshop to Roadmap in 3 days

    Discovery Workshop to Roadmap in 3 days

    TLDR; Navigating Ambiguity
    Using workshop techniques I validated personas to surface a UI that promoted next steps for a Candidate Portal.
    —
    Solving 3 big problems in 3 days; Aligning the target audiences through journey mapping, defining a Value Proposition and building a draft Product Roadmap.

    Contents

    Hard Skills:

    Journey Mapping

    Research

    Visual Design

    Goal-oriented Roadmap

    Soft Skills:

    Empathy

    Collaboration

    Critical Thinking

    Full List →

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas)
    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation and knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas)

    Help clients solve big problems, fast

    This user-centred and business workshop focussed on;

    • Business Problem Statement – The What
    • Value Proposition Statement – How to excite users / customers
    • Product Roadmap – Action/Next Steps

    What we set out to achieve

    Recently I was leading the Discovery phase for a multinational publishing, education & recruitment company. My prime objective was to facilitate the generation of a Value Proposition within a collaborative workshop environment based around three hypotheses;

    • Understand – ‘Getting the right idea’ and ‘getting the idea right’
    • Ideate – Align the team | Get creative
    • Roadmap – Present, prioritise and theme

    Defining Vision, setting scope

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.
    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas)

    Persona Playback, Value Propositions and Knowledge Sharing

    Validating Personas proved crucial. Early ‘Understand’ sessions proved invaluable in terms of getting to know the client’s ecosystem and getting closer to the overall workshop goals. Goals included personas improvements using a Value Proposition Canvas to expose misunderstandings, define Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) and Pains and Gains – more importantly it identifying key themes and services that would appeal to these personas. This ensured any misalignment did not cascade down to the Journey Maps on Day 2

    What we were trying to achieve using ‘Ask the experts’. Early touch points included attracting educational establishments and employers using baked-in services, plus having the ability to grow the market was paramount for particular personas. The client had the raw building blocks and the workflow for their ‘niche product for a niche market’, communicating that vision was the challenge.

    Customer Journey Mapping – Make the best hiring decision

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.
    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas)

    Gaining alignment across stakeholders on what making the ‘Best hiring decision’ journey looked like. Creating a visual representation of every experience a key persona(s) had with the client helped to tell a story, more importantly this led to a prioritised ideation list (visual solutions).

    Making the Best Hiring Decision

    • Initial stages – Planning and approval
    • Intermittent stage – Profile building, search and selection tools
    • Final stage – Interview, agreement and follow-on activities

    The exercise also highlighted a level of anxiousness, through to excitement and eventual relief. A truly valuable activity that presented opportunities that were eventually clustered and presented to the group as an adaptive Crazy 8 activity.

    Ideation and Roadmap

    Finally, this led on the most challenging section of the workshop, the Ideation Sessions. This resulted in 4 concept areas to prioritise on the road map and populate a timeline.

    Sketching can be scary!

    Demonstrate the steps to avoid a cold start.

    Push back on judgement calls and champion quantity over quality. All participants should take advantage of the knowledge in the room, bounce ideas off each other and improve through collaboration. A process of silent note taking, constrained to a page/large Post-It note, resulted in 4 principal concepts.

    4 Principle Concepts

    1. Data Driven Profile & Test Builder

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.

    Value: shorter tests, improve the UX

    • Add key indicators to job profile definition
    • Guided self-service model for selection, surfacing details for expert personas
    • Fit candidate suggestion tool from an employee pool
    • Connect to other API portals for greater value

    2. Right Insights for the Right User

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.

    Value: Personalisation. Summary driven.. 

    • AI best fit suggestions based on profile.
    • Rate candidates with a media rich likelihood indicator.
    • Deliver <MORE> understandable expert insight

    3. Candidate Experience & Value

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.

    Value: candidate self-improvement.

    • Shorter assessments, setting target thresholds
    • Candidate Reward with feedback, tips to improve or learn, job suggestions
    • Be fair & honest to the candidate on possible mismatch on values and culture 
    • Store profiles, experiences, and test results 

    4. From Hiring to Performance, and Back

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.

     Value: better decision = better employees.

    • 360˚ view – track new hires, top performers inform future hiring. 
    • Performance data and employee self-ratings to inform future profile building and hiring decisions and guide personal development
    • Compare performance & career progress to your peers

    Boosting Engagement

    Shortcuts to Success

    Shortcuts to Success

    • * Faster, more reliable tests: Reduce testing time and increase reliability
    • Personalised engagement: Tailor tests to individual needs, leading to higher engagement and lower churn.
    • Business-focused UX: Align testing with business goals by leveraging KPIs; Targeted feature development.
    Supercharge Testing

    Impactful Tests

    • Reduced client churn: Shorter, feedback-driven tests foster client satisfaction and retention.
    • Diversity in hiring: Objective, efficient testing helps attract diverse talent and improve hiring decisions.
    • * Shared Data; All backed up by a global database
    Boost diversity & retention

    Innovation for Early Adopters

    • * Modernise testing: Introduce innovative concepts too early adopters only.
    • Candidate quality and validity: Prioritise attracting the best candidates. Ensure test results are accurate and reliable.
    • Goal-oriented roadmap: Leverage learnings to craft a clear roadmap for continuous improvement.
    Better candidates | More valid results

    Goal-oriented roadmap

    How to facilitate an ideation workshop around solving problems, understanding through ideation, knowledge sharing (based on agreed on personas) and then attributing those personas, via SMEs validation, to surfacing UI to promote next steps plotted on a goal-oriented roadmap.

    Setting standards with a development Roadmap

    Solving big problems and setting milestones through a draft roadmap contributed to accelerating development across the current period and the next. Raise their internal products up to today’s standards was a priority. This roadmap was a significant step closer to this.

    3 big problems in 3 days

    Align the target audiences 

    We did this across the group early on through a deep-dive personas playback session. This proved essential both to enable the journey map but also assigning value in the KPI session.

    Define the Pains and Gains

    This was accomplished with a Value Proposition Canvas. A useful business tool to surface Pains and Gains and Jobs-To-Be-Done

    Build a draft Product Roadmap 

    This acted as a our North Star and as a high-level visual summary of the workshop outcomes; Two development streams; Two principal personas.

    As a value-add, a UX / UI Report consolidating all data was generated, highlighting the groups new findings and areas for improvements to inform future Timelines and Roadmaps.

    IN BRIEF; Problem Statement > Knowledge sharing and defining scope > Ideation (4 principal concepts) > Future Roadmap > In 3 days

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    Portfolio case studies describing design, my UX process, and business impact.

    From boosting user adoption in fintech, to improving trust with responsible gambling through to retaining Millennials in the world of ‘digital lotteries UX’ to leveraging key USPs for mobile healthcare.

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  • What I learned from facilitating a UX remote workshop – COVID-19 SPECIAL

    What I learned from facilitating a UX remote workshop – COVID-19 SPECIAL

    TLDR; Modern ux-ers need to skill-up, keep pushing best practice and do their homework when preparing for remote workshops. Adapt with more structured activities, beef-up the tech and deliver digitally with feedback and collaborative tools.

    From the T-shaped designer to a online creative technologist

    business

    Technoligy

    MArketing

    Developemnt

    As worldwide events are changing everyday life, so are the expectations of today’s experience designer. This designer is becoming more of a conduit between business and tech, between marketing and development. Linking these disciplines together is the UX expert, whether that be instituting Design Thinking or facilitating workshops, the bar is getting set higher and higher and today modern UX’er needs to be ready, and needs to be T-shaped.

    For the past few years User-Centered Design (UCD) and Lean UX has been top of my agenda and prioritising the very best elements of those ideologies is a skill I’m fine-tuning everyday. UX Workshops, in their many different guises are designed to empathise, to understand and then lead on towards a POC or some flavour of a prototype. This has many benefits from collaborative thinking through to group alignment and collective contribution. Like ideation and journey mapping all in a face-to-face collaborative style.

    Empathise to get a better understanding of the problem to be conquered. Use activities like ‘Ask the experts’ to gain insight into user needs – set aside personal assumptions and focus on defined problems. Ideate and generate logical ideas that lead to creating an inexpensive test product (prototyping). Fail early, iterate and make your product inherently better.

    In these more challenging times, how do we design professionals help to facilitate that collaborative nature from behind a computer screen and without having that face-to-face connection? Build relationships with teams distributed across the country or globe and communicate the value of journey mapping while engaging people in the process is even more challenging, especially when those people can’t witness the actual activity. Ideation and mapping exercises over-the-wire is a challenge so here is my perspective following a recent remote workshop I chaired with a real estate client.

    Pre workshop – Be like a boy scout

    PREPARE

    Agenda

    Links

    I’ve said in previous articles, you roughly need twice the presentation time for preparation and this is equally true when you’re delivering the remote flavour of a UX workshop. Leading from the front as a facilitator and as a creative technologist ultimately the success of a remote workshop does revolve around the technology you have to hand. Make no assumptions, if your connection is not strong enough or your cameras are not clear enough the success of your remote workshop is that risk. 

    Ensure you have a quiet, comfortable and illuminated room

    Think about a headset with the microphone and also about the best video conferencing solution.

    Ensure your default check boxes are all ticked here.

    Setting the Stage

    Include an agenda to manage expectations

    Following intros, the ‘Product / Feature Vision’ is first up. ‘The Challenge’ preceeds a best practice master-class on the product or feature area. Another short intro into my UCD process I then asked ‘My five big questions’ followed by a personas session. Features leading to a genuine ‘Nice to have’ discussion also helps manage expectations. This leads perfectly into a Mapping and Ideation. Keep to your agenda, its important.

    Unfortunately, you won’t have those two minutes pre-KO to ask about the weather and to build bridges, so make sure introductions are timetabled.

    Keep the conversations flowing by including the Product Vision and The Challenge Definition as early pieces on your agenda. The remote nature of these first interactions are crucial, it’s important to allow all to contribute and keep the conversation flowing by re-iterating;

    • What has been done
    • What we are doing
    • What we will do.

    Elevate the Baseline

    Asking the right questions early helps set the stage. What problem are we trying to solve and can I have the big picture? Who are the User types and the Persona and what are their pains and gains. What are the project aims and how do we measure success? A good question to ask is why use this feature and not an alternative? 

    It’s important to gauge the creative intelligence on the people in the virtual room. This should come both from your research of the attendees pre workshop, and by calling out by name to promote engagement, asking people for their introduction at the top of the hour. My experience says go with the lowest denominator and bring everyone up to speed on process, on base level concepts behind Design Thinking and on how collaborative session usually work and ask the big questions.

    • What problem are we trying to solve and can I have the big picture?
    • Who are the User types and the Persona and what are their pains and gains.
    • What are the project aims and how do we measure success?
    • Why use this feature and not an alternative? 
    • What is you question to the group?

    Don’t forget to share pre-prepared documentation or links to aid further reading across your comms channel of preference.

    Keep your process, but adapt

    Personas

    Journey Mapping

    FEature list

    Charting the steps through this journey begins with search and select, then the user can choose the time, with options for the users showing available spots in the next week. Booking information should all the information that the contractor needs and finally the journey ends with the confirmation email and/or a text message.

    Activities like early hypotheses session, through to personas building, demo’s and deep dives into feature lists discussion all still have their place in the remote workshop scenario – they just tweaking to ease them through. Everyone must understand the purpose and the outcomes of your activities. For instance customer journey mapping; recognised as one of the more challenging workshop activities especially amongst debutante participants I recognised I had to most of the heavy-lifting myself.

    My goal for this instance was to quickly understand the current journey within a limited time, involve as many internal stakeholders from bus dev, legal, CS to engineering.

    Have at hand your collaboration doc, detailing activities with timings and outlining techniques. This acts a guide through all your calls and should be shared on screen and as a single point of truth when concluding the workshop. My take out here is keep it simple, use bullet points and subtle branding.  

    Google Docs is your friend here. It’s also a good idea to later move your visual findings to Mural and Miro (formerly RealTimeBoard)

    Ideation, in a low fidelity way

    SHARE BOARDS

    CHAT & messenger apps

    Initial first stage ideas from modal windows to small reveal to large reveal concepts. All helped lay the foundations in a low fidelity, if less collaborative, way.

    When mostly everyone is remote, take advantage of Real-time board or Muraly or Sketchboard. Even splitting participants into columns on Google Sheets and allowing real-time contribution is a workable solution.

    For instance, a spontaneously pencil sketch can be captured on your mobile and shared relativity instantly across Slack, great for what I call remote ideations. These can then be cataloged in your collaboration doc and / or uploaded to your Miro board.

    Digital Prototyping from the Digital Experts

    Taking the very best of concept #2 enabling the user to both see availability but also to drill-down and add must-have functionality. Also cherry picking elements from #4 and solving the visibility of contractor availability.
    Taking the very best of concept #2 enabling the user to both see availability but also to drill-down and add must-have functionality. Also cherry picking elements from #4 and solving the visibility of contractor availability.

    There is a benefit to being digital designers thinkers in a digital world. So take advantage of this when building and eventually sharing what is in most cases, a digital prototype. Use industry standard tools your clients should be familiar with that can aid both sharing and collaborating within a remote environment.

    You should still be starting with low fidelity sketches from you Ideation Sessions (see earlier) but eventually this will lead to the big reveal. InVision is my weapon of choice here, it’s quick, it’s collaborative and it’s becoming the industry standard.

    Post workshop wrap-up 

    Personal details

    Pre-registration

    Feedback and comments will help shape and strengthen future workshops.

    In true 360 fashion and in the spirit of UCD from my remote perspective it is good practice to reach out to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop. Ask for assistance in completing an evaluation and eave the door open to respond say within a limited time period to keep the data fresh.

    There will always be pitfalls to this type of distance collaboration, my key take-outs are;

    • Reduce friction by introducing activities more appropriate
    • Tell your team what you are about to do
    • Tell them what has been done
    • Follow your script, set out in your collaborative doc

    Finally, inform the team that there is a central repository (Dropbox or Miro or other cloud share is ideal for this) and ensure all have access; this becomes a great place to dump visuals, photos, text files or movies. This is also a great place for the collaboration doc which eventually evolves into your UX report.

    So, have fun by keeping the dynamics high, reducing distractions don’t forget to learn yourself and document religiously. Ramp up your note-taking skills, you’re going to need them!

    Appendix

    Your remote toolbox*

    • Google Docs, Sheets and Slides – the go-to applications for collaboration.
    • Real Time Board — A remote whiteboard tool for stickies and comment
    • Go To Meeting / Zoom — Video conferencing that allows you to show slides and record screens.
    • Slack – Document your chats, and share group or personal videos.
    • uxpressia.com – Online journey maps and personas

    * Please note this toolbox is by no exhaustive. This industry is was booming and pivoting every day.

  • How to run on-site UX Workshops and make them both valuable and fun

    How to run on-site UX Workshops and make them both valuable and fun

    TLDR: Recently, I had the privilege of leading a Design Thinking on-site 3-Day UX workshop for a global financial news organisation, a pioneering force in the industry. These workshops marked the launch of the discovery phase for a groundbreaking new product, and I was thrilled to guide the team through an immersive and productive experience.

    Contents

    Let’s set some ground rules

    Before I begin, let’s be clear, planning and preparation are you best friends. Be aware, planning creative sessions like these take time. Allow double the preparation time to the actual workshop time, so this three-day think tank translates to six days of dedicated planning. Having this knowledge is golden, don’t set yourself up to fail because you haven’t done your homework. Avoid the pitfalls of a hastily assembled workshop and set the stage for a truly groundbreaking experience.

    (more…)