Ideally there should be range of people from the client: developers, operations and people from the business. Most important is someone to represent the users experiencing the problem that has been identified. Ideally this would be the person who has the problem directly but if that’s not possible a proxy can be used. This is someone who has enough experience of the problem to represent the user.
Emerging Technology bring in people depending on the number of attendees. We’d normally break down the sessions in to groups of around four and we would have one ETS person in each group. If the client has a particular focus on a technology or an industry that someone from Emerging Technology also has it would be ideal to have them included.
It's important that everyone who is attending is fully involved in the sessions. People who participate in some sessions, but not all of them disrupt the group and the activities. This applies to both the host and client teams. If someone cannot commit to giving their full attention to the whole workshop, it is better that they don't take part in the working part, but are invited to the playbacks at the end of the workshop.
- A1 Post-it notes
- Normal Post-it notes
- Sharpies
- Materials for paper prototypes (paper, coloured pens, scissors)
We’d capture and writeup the sessions to give to the customer. These can be useful on their own as a reminder of problems and solutions that we didn’t have time to fully explore in the two days.
Prototype(s) - this could be paper based, mockup on screens or a working system depending on the people involved. There might be multiple prototypes depending on the numbers involved and the scope of the problem.
Outline plan for how we’d take the idea forward (what needs to be done next).
- Run through with the client how the day(s) will be organised.
- Make sure there is at least one user (or proxy user) who will attend. Ideally, each team should have one user.
- Work out how the teams, skills, background and experience should be spread amongst different groups as far as possible. Ideal team size is three or four, each team should include one Emerging Technology developer.
- Book a room with plenty of wall space for charts and make sure there's plenty of post-its, sharpies.
The main task of the facilitator is to introduce and explain the different activities, run playbacks and keep everything to time. Running a Design workshop in one or two days can be difficult in terms of time. People often get into the activities and want to keep going, the facilitator needs to be firm with the timings.
People who have no experience of Design Thinking tend to find the first activity difficult, but then warm up to what to do and how to contribute by the second. The facilitator should not spend too much time explaining things, it makes more sense once you're actually doing it. Any introductions or explanations at the beginning should be kept to a minimum.
At the start of each activity the facilitator just needs to spend 30 seconds explaining what to do in the activity and what the purpose is. It's useful to put an example of the activity on a screen. A suggested agenda with the activities listed can be seen below.
The last few minutes of each activity should be spent doing playbacks. Each group nominate someone to talk about the key points that came up in that activity. Each playback should be limited to 60 seconds and another 60 seconds for questions.
- A participant comes to the session with the answer already fixed in their mind. A key part of the Design Thinking process is not to come in with preset ideas and be open to new or different thoughts, or those by people who don't always get a voice. The moderator should try and stop this person dominating, but it can be difficult.
- The participants have less understanding of the user than they thought. It is difficult to accurately get at the real problem in this case, but can be useful alone in showing the lack of understanding.
Today is gong to be a hands-on, practical workshop. We'll use Design Thinking, a technique we use to produce things that actually solve real user problems. It originally came from Stanford University and IDEO. IBM adopted it and its the way we develop all our products and services today. The real key is that it everything we do is from the user’s perspective. So not from marketing, sales, buyers or management’s point of view - this was something we often got wrong in product development in the past. We use it to solve user's real problems, not the problems we imagine they have.
Design Thinking is not about how things look. It's not necessarily about technology, the best solution to a problem is not always a new app. The right solution is the one that best meets the user's needs.
It's a technique that's easiest to understand by actually using, so we're going to get right into it as quickly as possible. We’re going to attempt to get though four/five/six/seven Design Thinking activities today, which will take us from understanding the user, through their problem, some solutions and how things would be with the solution implemented.
We’re going to split in to smaller groups. All these activities are done on flipcharts with post it notes. Each of the activities will take about 20 minutes and then we’ll do 60 second reviews of what each group has come up with. The Design Thinking activities all take the same approach, we start by writing notes on post-its, initially just getting everything recorded, you don’t need to discuss things initially, then we go round a loop of trying to refine what you’ve come up with as a group and try and identify the key things. It makes more sense once you do it.
- Photos of all A1 Post-it notes from each exercise.
- Try and make brief notes about key points from each playback.
- Collate all the photos of each activity into a single document. Add any notes that you took from the playback against the photos.
- Share the document with the client and ask them to add in any notes that had been missed.
Design Thinking Intro and Activities With Notes (Keynote)
Design Thinking Intro and Activities With Notes (PDF)
Design Thinking Intro and Activities (PDF)
- Individual introductions.
- What ETS is.
- What Design Thinking is.
- What we’re going to do over the day, examples of what we’ve done with it before.
- Customer Introduction / Problem Explanation
This is the first step to understanding the problem we’re working on. This is where we focus on the person or people who experience the problem we’re working on. This is largely to give the people not familiar with the problem as full an understanding as possible.
In this we map out the problems in terms of what the user needs to do. Essentially it is a flow of the task they’re trying to complete with the problems. We often find this useful as it shows the problem in the task isn’t always what we intuitively think it is, or there are multiple problems in the task, or different people have a different view on what the problem in the task is.
We work on ideas that address the problems that came out of the As-Is scenario. This is where we’d get to introduce emerging technology if it’s appropriate, but we generally find everyone can contribute to this part. We then filter down the ideas using guidance of impact and feasibility to work out the ones that are the most appropriate to focus on for the rest of the workshop.
Use an impact against feasibility graph to help decide which ideas are worth taking forward. May need to do voting to help decide. Need to decide on one idea to take forward to day two.
We map out the ideas we’ve selected in to a flow of how the task will be completed if the new ideas were implemented. This complements the As-Is scenario and makes sure everyone’s understanding of the idea is the same. This is important as people often interpret the same idea or technology as something different.
Present summary from each group. What they've produced and the conclusions they've arrived at.
- Individual introductions.
- What ETS is.
- What Design Thinking is.
- What we’re going to do over the two days, examples of what we’ve done with it before.
- Customer Introduction / Problem Explanation
This is the first step to understanding the problem we’re working on. This is where we focus on the person or people who experience the problem we’re working on. This is largely to give the people not familiar with the problem as full an understanding as possible.
For a two day design workshop, it is possible to explore several persons
In this we map out the problems in terms of what the user needs to do. Essentially it is a flow of the task they’re trying to complete with the problems. We often find this useful as it shows the problem in the task isn’t always what we intuitively think it is, or there are multiple problems in the task, or different people have a different view on what the problem in the task is.
An ‘As-Is’ scenario map should be produced for each persona that has been identified.
We work on ideas that address the problems that came out of the As-Is scenario. This is where we’d get to introduce emerging technology if it’s appropriate, but we generally find everyone can contribute to this part. We then filter down the ideas using guidance of impact and feasibility to work out the ones that are the most appropriate to focus on for the rest of the workshop.
Use an impact against feasibility graph to help decide which ideas are worth taking forward. May need to do voting to help decide. Need to decide on one idea to take forward to day two.
Present summary from each group and the idea they’re going to work through the following day.
We map out the ideas we’ve selected in to a flow of how the task will be completed if the new ideas were implemented. This complements the As-Is scenario and makes sure everyone’s understanding of the idea is the same. This is important as people often interpret the same idea or technology as something different.
Work to put the scenario in terms of a who a what and a why. Should be a single statement that defines the idea. Hills can be defined from this to document what it is you want to take forward
Present summary from each group. What they've produced and the conclusions they've arrived at.