97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 52. Design Thinking Workshops Will Change Your Process

Theo Johnson

Implementing design workshops in your UX process is an effective way to gain team alignment about users and help create a better product. Design thinking workshops not only help you conduct a thematic analysis of user research but also help focus the team on the user. Instead of the team jumping into detailed design with little to no insight, design workshops bring the team together to ideate on how to solve problems first. Design workshops are also a great platform for conveying summarized qualitative user research data, insights, and themes to your UX team early in the design and development of a project.

The first step in having a successful workshop is to plan ahead (approximately two to three weeks) and schedule the workshop with your team via calendar invite. You’ll want to have designers, user researchers, engineers, data scientists, and other members of the stakeholder team in these workshops. It is imperative to have different perspectives of cross-functional team members for the design workshops since they are the platform to raise awareness about how your users think and react to the product you are building.

Prior to the workshop, make sure your team has access to all the research data, findings, and associated recommendations. It’s also important to create instructions for your team, including ...