Should designers know how to run workshops?
Contents
My experience with workshops
The 2 workshops I use often
Tips for running a successful workshop
The process for planning a workshop
Do you need to be able to run workshops as a designer?
Yes.
I strongly believe that running workshops is a very important skills that designers need to have. Workshops are great tools for coming up with ideas, enabling collaborating with other team members and solving problems as a group.
I was pretty lucky as during my first job as a UX designer, I did a workshop pretty much almost every week! This had a really big impact on my career. Firstly it pushed me to develop my soft skills such as communication and presenting skills, as running a workshop as a junior designer in front of some of the most senior people in the company is VERY daunting. This really helped me overcome this fear of presenting. The types of workshops I do has evolved over time - I’ll talk about a few of them and then I’ll provide some tips to help you when running workshops!
Here are 2 examples of workshops I do in almost every project I work on:
Workshop 1: Knowledge gathering and alignment
At the start of most projects I will invite relevant stakeholders (subject matter experts) to this workshop. These are the people who have more knowledge than me in the specific topic and I want to extract that knowledge from them. This is an important part of the discovery process.
Who do I invite to these sessions?
I’ll invite the managing directors/CEO or another member of the commercial team, the Product managers, some engineers, a representative from marketing, team members from the customer support team. It’s pretty much all the people who have strong domain knowledge. I’ll also invite other designers working on this project so they can hear the information first hand.
Why is this session important?
This will help me understand all the context on the domain/topic and also helps me to identify if there are any gaps in the teams knowledge - We can then decide if we need to fill those knowledge gaps with data or research. The aim here is to get a shared understanding of the topic and what we are trying to achieve as everyone will have their own perspective.
How long is this session?
This session will need at least 2 hours minimum. The reason for this is I want to encourage conversation during these sessions to extract peoples opinions to ensure we’re all aligned. Typically there is a lot of misalignment especially on bigger projects amongst different stakeholders.
Workshop 2: Idea generation
Coming up with ideas! I don’t believe as a designer it is our sole responsibility to come up with solutions and design concepts.. I think it’s our responsibility to influence the way a group of people think in order to help them come up with ideas. What does that mean? I mean we should be able to structure a workshop or an activity that helps team members think about a problem in an easy to digest way where they are able to suggest ideas.
What does this look like in a workshop?
This is often an Ideation workshop. Where I will run the team through the problem we are trying to solve and I will design and select activities which are relevant to help extract ideas in the best way. For example one ideation technique which you may be familiar with is Crazy 8s. However Crazy 8s isn’t the most appropriate ideation method to use early on in the design process to come up with ideas, especially for a group of people who aren’t designers.
What will the outcome of this workshop be?
By the end of this workshop I will end up with different perspectives on how to look at the problem and potential solutions. The goal isn’t to identify that one fantastic idea which is going to solve everything - the goal is to get inspiration and help spark ideas in the team members minds to help suggest things which can help me come up with the final concept.
Tips to run a successful workshop
Here are a few things I’ve learn over the past few years on how to run a successful workshop:
It will take longer than you think, so always add an extra half an hour to what you initially planned.
Ice breakers are great for when people have come from working on something else to get them to focus and be present.
Tell people to close slack, emails etc. Especially if you’re running a remote session, it’s easy for people to check emails etc and get distracted.
Do a run through of the workshop activities yourself before hand. This way you can make sure everything makes sense but also get your ideas down and then see how they change after the workshop!
Go through the agenda of the workshop with the attendees before beginning. Workshop attendees are less likely to lose focus and become impatient as they know what to expect. Especially in longer workshops.
Include breaks. If your workshop is longer than 1 hour, then add a break, even if it’s just 5 minutes. You will get better outputs from doing this.
Don’t take part in the workshop activities when facilitating. It makes it really difficult to facilitate effectively. If you want to also get your ideas down, do this before and feel free to feed in your interesting ideas during the workshop if you feel it will help inspire people to think of additional ideas.
End the workshop by thanking people for their time and letting them know what your next steps are on how you will use the workshops outcomes. This allows them to understand the value their involvement has added to the process and they will be willing to attend in the future.
Planning your workshop
The success of a workshop is determined by the planning, not by the workshop itself. If the workshop is well planned, everything will go smoothly and you will get great outcomes.
Here’s some steps to effectively plan a design workshop:
Identify what outcome you need from the workshop.
This will help you set the goals and objectives for the workshop. For example I want to identify what existing knowledge we have as a team on a specific topic.
Identify who are the most relevant people to invite to take part
If you are running the workshop above, it wouldn’t make sense to invite all designers. You want to invite people who have domain knowledge on the selected topic. However if you are doing an Ideation workshop to develop an idea further, in this scenario it may be more appropriate to only invite designers.
Use your goals to identify the activities and the times they will take
Break down what you’re trying to achieve into shorter activities. Plan what these activities will be. It effective to start with an ice-breaker which can help participants to switch off from their previous meetings and give them context to the workshop. There’s lots of examples online on different ice breakers to use.
Test the workshops activities on yourself and another team mate
This is an important step if you don’t have a huge amount of experience. Test your workshop activities on someone else to see if they understand the different tasks. I always do workshop activities myself beforehand to see what I come out with if I am running tasks for the first time which I haven’t tested out before.
Invite the relevant participants with enough notice
Add the agenda into the invite and let them know if they do or don’t need to prepare anything in advance. You want them to feel comfortable attending the workshop so you can get the best out of them so if necessary send them some reading material before to provide context.
Conclusion
In conclusion, workshops are a really effective way to identify ideas, solve problems and collaborate with the team. And design is ultimately about collaboration. I personally think this is a fantastic skill for designers to add to the toolbox and it isn’t one which designers prioritise when developing their skills. The added benefit of running workshops is it allows you be seen as an expert in the area of design which is fantastic for your career.
Additional resources
Here are some additional resources to help you if you’re interested in learning more.
📚 Book - Sprint
I recommend reading the book to see the different workshop activities that are suggested (ignore the fact that this is structured to be completed in a week). You can pick the ones which are relevant to you. The book covers different workshops for different stages in the design process.
📱YouTube - AJ&Smart
This channel goes into a lot of detail about facilitating and running workshops. They talk through fantastic tips and techniques you can apply and also give you examples of different design workshops.
📄 Article - CareerFoundry
This is a comprehensive blog post on design thinking workshops. It breaks down the different tasks and provides a lot of information
