However, Design Thinking is perhaps most commonly used when a problem cannot be solved using traditional methods, and needs to be approached from a more creative or innovative angle. When preparing your workshop, insist that the list of participants include representatives of all the teams affected by the issue to be resolved. On average, spend three hours of preparation for each hour of workshop. Ground rules are monitored by the whole group, for the group. Running a successful Design Thinking workshop starts with knowing what you want. 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. User stories are a helpful way to articulate the specific goals of a user persona. For example, a cupcake is designed to be eaten by one person, a low-cost treat that doesnt warrant a special occasion. In fact, there are plenty of free online workshop tools and meeting facilitation software you can, Team building activities can make all the difference when it comes to job satisfaction and organizational success. Together, these steps capture the breadth of content and considerations involved in running an effective workshop. To innovate and win, companies need design thinking., Roger L. Martin,The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009). 1. Most people learn by using the process in relation to a specific problem, you dont have to use the cake baking analogy. This step is all about gathering useful feedback: Are the ideas good? Using empathy maps and role-playing, encourage the group to get into the shoes of their target user. All these benefits aside, Design Thinking workshops are incredibly fun and engaging. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apples iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Within a workshop context, facilitators typically focus on the five stages of Design Thinking to encourage collaboration, creative problem solving, and innovation from each member of the group. What went well? Or connect closer with users? Weve covered. Another common error is to focus too heavily on presentations. Reflection and discussion (10 minutes): As a group, discuss what youve learned so far. This email is also your opportunity to assign any relevant pre-work, such as an ask to bring specific design inspirations. Are you ready to get started? Required fields are marked *, Effective online tools are a necessity for smooth and engaging virtual workshops and meetings. At the moment, this is a rather broad question. The following walkthrough outlines the major milestones you could expect in a 1-day workshop intended to align on the strategic requirements for a user-centered experience. There might be one person sourcing the ingredients, another baking the cake and another delivering it to our Persona. What could have gone better? They bring together a diverse group of people from different departments and provide a rare opportunity to get hands-on with the problem. As a facilitator, you could mention that this form of research could identify with our Empathize stage, as well as our Ideate stage. As creative and exciting as our rapid-fire exercises are, they can leave our group with too many options, feeling swamped with potential solutions. A prototype is a visual, interactive mock-up of an idea and can be two-dimensional, for example, a drawing or a diagram, or they might take a three-dimensional form. Next, youll move onto the define phase. Design Thinking workshops should be dynamic and interactive, so its important that participants have plenty of roomespecially when it comes to the prototyping stage. The level of detail you decide to document your workshop with should be based on the scale of your project short Design Thinking sessions with a core team dont require the same level of scrutiny as larger projects with extended teams who meet infrequently. Understanding your end users needs is the first step towards innovationand thats the first message youll deliver in your Design Thinking workshop. As a designer, incorporating Design Thinking into your process will help you to quickly come up with viable, user-centric solutionsultimately resulting in a quicker time-to-market, improved customer retention, significant cost savings, and a great ROI. Fortunately, there are plenty of online tools to make your life easier when you need to facilitate a meeting and lead workshops. Whether its your first workshop or your fiftieth, this guide will help you and your team overcome ambiguity and create user-centered solutions. 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. If you plan to use this workshop agenda, do you see it as a stand-alone learning, or as a starting point for further exploration? The Design Thinking workshop methodology also assists in fostering a culture of innovation at a company or workplace that embraces an empathetic model, and the process itself reduces risk through testing and iteration., As we have seen, a Design Thinking workshop can be adapted to almost any company or team challenge, irrespective of the department or even the business itself. (These are in no particular order. For this activity, encourage participants to sketch out their solution rather than using words. Before we move into our second exercise, its often useful to discuss and explain who our Stakeholders are. The job's a game!. you might ask yourself. Unlike lectures or presentations, Design Thinking workshops are used when teams want to arrive at a user-centered solution while working together. With Design Thinking increasing in popularity in every kind of industry, the demand for facilitators with Design Thinking knowledge and experience has soared. 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? Many make genuine efforts to be innovativethey spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. 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. The define phase of your Design Thinking workshop might look something like this: The third phase in the Design Thinking process consists of ideationcoming up with ideas and potential solutions to solve the users problem. 3. Then lets go! On the contrary! If you end up having the time to do them, they will be incredible team-building moments amongst the participants. To introduce the process of Design Thinking using a real-world design challenge: How might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers? Follow our actionable guide for best practices, tips, and techniques, as well as easy-to-follow steps to guarantee the success of your first session. In the final stage of the Design Thinking process, we are capturing honest responses and feedback, by inviting our end-user to a glimpse into what the final outcome might look like. 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. A Design Thinking workshop is a collaborative session that is focused on the five phases of Design Thinking. Dedicate the last ten minutes or so to reflection and discussion. Our second exercise is called the Ideas Vault, this exercise is designed to relieve our participants of any decision-overwhelm when it comes to choosing which ideas to take forward in our prototype phase. Activitycoming up with solutions (10 minutes): Having explored the opposite of what would be helpful to the user, it should now be easier to find potential solutions. Allowing the journey to be flexible. Reflection and discussion (10 minutes): As a group, discuss what youve learned so far. 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. In the second part of the ideation phase, youll get your participants to compile a series of user actions into a timeline. Doing this early can help ease tension between group members, increase contributions, and avoid groupthink. Through this process, participants will start to develop their design thinking muscles and learn how to take on bigger projects in future. Participants . Encourage Wild Ideas: Embrace the most out-of-the-box notions. Aside from comfortable seating and good lighting, you can create a relaxed environment by playing some background music. For example: The step browses through potential matches could be propelled by the user goal of wanting to meet new people. Discuss the results of preparatory UX research, technical audits, and other data gathered in preparation. These are the mindsets. For example: How might we provide an easy, safe, online dating experience?. In the introduction, its very useful to frame the Design Thinking process as a. Before you prepare the agenda, consider the high-level objectives. 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. With general preparation out of the way, lets move on to phase two of our guide. As Mary Poppins put it so well. Analogies are a useful tool to empathize with our group and Ive found using this cake-making approach successful with many groups. Its a process that is designed to encourage creative problem solving and innovation from each member of the group in order to address business challenges.. So how do you go about setting up and facilitating a Design Thinking workshop? Design Thinking looks at the customer's perspective from the start to the end of an experience. Treat everyone as a peer. The key is to deliver interesting, relevant content, followed by a practical exercise and then group discussion. Design thinking consists of five key stages which well explore in this workshop: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. These workshops constitute several activities that provide a solid ground for co-creation, collaboration, and team effort. Design Thinking has five steps: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving. Always one to evangelize and advocate open thinking when it comes to 'Digital Experience Design', and having played a gamut of roles from being a 'Multimedia Designer' since 2004, to being a . Safety is also an important factor., Activityreframe the problem as a how might we question (10 minutes): Now, participants will turn the users needs into a how might we question. And we came to the following conclusion: Being a good workshop facilitator is like being made out of bamboo. Create 3D versions of our cake design with card and paper, and layout the ingredients around each prototype. Our graduates are highly skilled, motivated, and prepared for impactful careers in tech. One of the reasons for its popularity is, Join the 100.000 facilitators using SessionLab, 2022 TrainedOn O Voolu tn 20a, Tallinn, 10918 Tallinn, Estonia support@sessionlab.com. 14 Ground Rules for Team Meetings . Duis cursus. In this workshop, well ask the group to approach the problem of baking a cake. If you do not have recent or robust user personas, consider drafting a set in advance it is much faster to challenge and change user personas during the workshop than build them from scratch. Well here are our handpicked tips. Other times they must first be mapped across dimensions like desirability, impact or risk before those decisions can be made. Activitysharing ideas and getting feedback (10 minutes): Ask participants to pair up and share their ideas. The Statement of Opportunity expresses the topline project opportunity from the teams perspective. Lets find out. Prioritize actors and scenarios: Decide whose journey (the actor) and what journey (the scenario) you'll be mapping ahead of time. Select those that are appropriate to your group's needs. Here are some suggestions: Make sure you also get each team member to say their name and what their role will be in the workshop, too!, Although some of the group will be aware of Design Thinking and its principles, its still worth making a brief presentation on what Design Thinking is for those who are unfamiliar with the concept or are unsure of what it looks like in practice. Note that compiling the current landscape is the primary objective of the Discover stage of the Design Thinking process. Activitydefine the activities and steps in the customers experience (15 minutes): Ask participants to write down all the steps they can think of that make up the users journey. If our Persona character was a strong supporter of local business, that may play a part in where the cake ingredients were sourced. Workshops can deliver on one or more of these objectives, depending on how long they run (and how well you prepare). However, the process is applicable to a wide range of obstacles facing individuals and teams. Purpose . What is a meaningful problem statement? As a facilitator, we should ensure that everyone comes away from the workshop feeling empowered, with more clarity on what Design Thinking means, and how they can apply the methods to real-life projects. Designed for a very special occasion, the cake will often be custom-made. These challenges might be related to product development, team collaboration, recruitment or retention, reaching targets, as well as any number of issues that are preventing a company from reaching its goals. Card sorting and mapping activities help teams prioritize the large quantities of competing goals common for human centered design. Do they need to brainstorm new ideas? 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. 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. Using Post-it notes, theyll describe the functionality of each button; for example adds item to basket. By the end, youll be equipped to guide and support any workshop team to find the innovative solutions they need to address their user and business challenges. This can be a brief presentation covering the following points: By now, youve set the scene and put everybody at ease. Use the ground rules to check on and improve the quality of the group's . Why do we need to create one, and what steps are involved? Is it to uncover new opportunities, solve a specific user problem, or improve a product or feature? Deliver a world-class experience to your customers through the application of Design Thinking. Summaries can be shared early in the session to quickly level-set, while raw data can be referenced during activities or decision making. For example: Downloads the app, creates an account, uploads a profile photo, browses through potential matches, receives a match, sends a message. While these sources of insight are highly project specific, consider the following four areas as a starting point. 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