Benefits and Goals
UX Workshops are oftentimes an overlooked User Research tool. The purpose of running a UX workshop is to align all of your stakeholders in your organization on business goals that can be solved through design. It can also aim to align your stakeholders on possible high-level solutions that tackle these prioritized problems, specifically, solutions that will be explored through UX design. UX Workshops are especially useful for larger organizations with more of a bureaucratic culture where stakeholder buy-in is a bottleneck for innovation.
Who to Involve in a UX Workshop
The key decision-makers and stakeholders from your business should be involved, this could include stakeholders from different business divisions within your organization, or a group of influential individuals with somewhat conflicting or unique perspectives. Within a startup environment, this could be the head of various teams, such as the head of Product, the head of Engineering, and the head of Marketing. Each individual could have different domain expertise, different insights, and sometimes different goals which may be conflicting.
How it’s Done Remotely
Various remote whiteboard tools can be used to conduct a Remote UX Workshop. These tools allow the stakeholders, in real-time, to generate ideas, vote on solutions, and prioritize problems, as the UX Designer moderates and guides the session. Several frameworks and templates might be introduced to create constraints and focus, in order to make the session more effective and efficient. These frameworks might include empathy maps, affinity clustering, and difficulty/importance matrices. At Cakewalk Labs we’re very cautious about using textbook tools just because a textbook says so; we instead prefer to modify such tools based on what we’ve found to be more effective and efficient in the real world.
Deliverables and Outcomes of a UX Workshop
The deliverables and outcomes of the UX Workshop will be prioritized business problems that should be explored separately through design solutions by the UX Designer. Additionally, it could include high-level ideas for solutions generated by the group, that the UX Designer will consider and further investigate in the design solution phase.
If you want to find out if a Remote UX Workshop is appropriate for your organization’s needs, feel free to reach out to us! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with our series on UX Research Roadmaps.