Design Thinking & Co-Creation

“Deidre, I want to thank you for what I thought was an excellent event! You have helped to inspire a group of sometimes “set in our ways” engineers. All of the feedback was very positive, and I look forward to seeing this product taken to the next level.”

– Vice-President, Liebert/AC Power

About The Workshop

I facilitate the 2-day or 3-day workshops and invite members from various functional areas across a product team or across teams spanning multiple organizations. Workshop participants typically include Designers, Product Managers, Software Engineers, Product Marketers, Quality Analysts, Tech Writers, Service & Support Reps and on occasion, members of senior management. The workshop framework can be scaled to accommodate single product teams of varying sizes and multiple product teams who are attempting to solve a common set of design problems . Pre-work is assigned to participants a few weeks prior to the workshop as a measure to help keep workshop exercises and discussions on track and productive. At the workshop, participants are divided into small groups. I coach and challenge each team on effective brainstorm techniques and how to work together to rapidly produce a testable paper prototype in 24 hours! Real customers/end-users are invited to join the workshop and test methods are used to obtain early user feedback to validate emerging design ideas. The case study below describes one such workshop that I conducted with a software team at Emerson Network Power.

Case Study: User Interface Re-Design of Web Application for Data Center Infrastructure Management (Trellis)

I guided each team through several participatory group activities to produce a paper prototype in 24 hours that represented their idea (a.ka. "design hypothesis") for what they believed would be the best new features or improved features for a re-designed product interface. After the draft of their prototype idea was complete, I instructed each team to make a list of the 10-12 use cases they believe were addressed by solutions in their prototype. As the teams worked, I guided UX designers to walk the room, observe and make note whether there were common capabilities being conceived across each prototype idea.

With six workshop teams participating, the final result was six rough but distinct and divergent prototypes that would be evaluated the next day by end-users. I invited a group of product end users to join Day 2 of the workshop to review the concepts and provide the teams with immediate feedback on their design hypotheses. Users were asked to interact with each prototype to complete several tasks that were hypothesized by each team as 'critical' to the users daily task workflow, i.e. "critical user journeys" or CUJs. After attempting the CUJs, users were then asked asked the following follow up questions to dive deeper to help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of each prototype idea.

• What needs further investigation?

• What has the most value to you?

• What about this idea creates excitement?

• What about this idea way off?

After the Day 2 of the workshop, I worked with UX designers and researchers to take the artifacts produced back to the Design Lab for further refinement.

Day 3 of the workshop, teams used the refined prototypes to pitch their design innovation ideas to members of the senior management team to obtain early buy-in and feedback. Designers then worked to incorporate the additional feedback. They referenced the notes they took during their workshop observation about which use cases and capabilities were common across two or more ideas. Upon identifying the common capabilities, designers began exploring ways to merge them into single design patterns to satisfy specific use cases. By doing so, ultimately there was design convergence on a cohesive Product Vision of the new user interface within a few weeks after the workshop which was tested and further validated with end users.

Summary:

DAY 1 - Identify the Design Problem, Model the Design Hypothesis: Participants arrived at the workshop with a completed A3 that outlines their idea as a 'hypothesis'. All ideas were ranked by viability and risk. Teams 'swarm' to build a prototype to represent their ideas.

DAY 2 - Test the Design Hypothesis: Prototypes were tested with real end-users. Teams revised their prototypes the same day based on user feedback.

DAY 3 - Pitch The Story: Teams used storytelling to communicate what they learned to the other teams and to key executive stakeholders. Teams also explain the value proposition of their revised prototypes to senior executive stakeholders/investors who are invited on the final day.

Product Vision

A completely re-imagined UI concept in 2-4 weeks! Shown on the left is the old/legacy UI and shown on the right is the vision that came out of the Design Thinking workshop for a new UI design (to preview screens, click the controls below each image to advance to the next slide). During the workshop, I trained the teams how to use storytelling techniques to pitch the business value proposition behind their concepts to senior leadership. The divergent design concepts from each team were converged to inform a final holistic North Star UX Vision for the product. The slide decks below show the product user experience before the workshop (L) and an early iteration of the converged prototype that represented the the UX Vision that came out of the workshop (R) .

Photo Gallery

The final UI Vision was the result of early user input and early input from a multi-disciplinary product team. Look closely at the team's paper prototypes and you may notice some features that made it into the final product vision because they tested well with customers who were invited to the workshop to provide early feedback.