Workshop-LN

LN Oven UX Discovery Workshop

Collaborative cross-functional workshop to align engineering, sales, and product teams toward a more intuitive, modern oven interface.

Project Goal

To uncover usability issues, align team visions, and generate innovative interface features for industrial ovens through a 2-day in-person UX workshop.

Challenge

Lincoln's oven interface had grown overly complex due to engineering constraints and lacked alignment with the end-user experience. The challenge was to align all departments around user needs and translate that into a unified design direction.

Project Overview

Duration: 2 days

My Role: UX Designer & Workshop Facilitator

Team: 10+ cross-functional team members from engineering, sales, support, and product

Deliverables: Personas, Pain Points, Solutions, UI Sketches, Summary Deck

Participants identified over 70 ideas for improving Lincoln ovens.
Ideas were synthesized into 9 comprehensive solution areas.
These areas align directly with user pain points.
They form the foundation for the next phase of design and innovation.

Day 1

Goal

Uncover user needs, align teams on personas, and generate actionable solutions for LN oven improvements

Activities

. Company & Industry Research Presentation
We began with an overview of LN's product lineup and market challenges, highlighting usability gaps in current oven interfaces and missed opportunities in service, training, and automation. This set the stage for an informed, user-centered workshop.

2. Persona Introduction
I introduced the concept of personas—who they are, why they matter, and how they drive user-centered design.

3. Guided Persona Creation
Each team collaboratively created realistic personas based on real-world LN user roles, such as:

Store employee
Field technician
Franchise owner
QA tester
Mechanical engineer

4. Deep-Dive Group Activity
Participants were divided into small groups. Each group selected a persona, reviewed their goals and pain points, and then brainstormed solutions to meet that persona’s needs.

5. Solution Sharing & Justification
Each group presented their top ideas. We discussed how the solutions addressed the user needs and how they aligned with LN’s business priorities.

6. Prioritization & Ranking Exercise
Everyone participated in voting for the top 5 solutions that would deliver the most value to the company. These became the core focus areas for Day 2.

Personas Created

Use icons or pictures for each: technician, franchise owner, service manager, engineer, etc.

Example Persona:
Name: Frank H.
Role: Franchise Owner
Bio: Owns and operates two pizza locations; values performance and minimal downtime
Goals: Reduce service costs, streamline recipe customization
Pain Points: Requires technician help for routine tasks, limited UI flexibility

Outputs from Day 1

By the end of Day 1, we had a strong foundation built from real user insights and cross-team collaboration. Participants engaged deeply with the personas and surfaced meaningful pain points across different user roles. Each group contributed creative, grounded ideas based on real-world challenges.

7 user personas representing key roles
50+ pain points mapped across personas
70+ solution ideas generated
Top 5 solutions selected by team consensus

Day 2

Goal

Transform raw ideas into structured solutions, validate against business needs, and propose UX-focused enhancements for LN’s oven systems.

Activities

1. Recap & Categorization of Day 1 Outcomes
We opened with a review of the top solutions from Day 1. I grouped the 70+ ideas into key solution areas and walked the team through how these categories connected back to the identified personas and business goals.
Solution Categories Included:

Training & Guidance
Diagnostics & Testing
Recipe Flexibility
Maintenance Tracking
Real-Time Alerts
UI Accessibility
Automation & Connectivity

2. Deep Dive: Frank’s Persona & Journey Mapping
To showcase real user impact, I led the team through a detailed analysis of Frank, a franchise owner persona.

We reviewed Frank’s current experience, highlighting moments of frustration around oven reliability, unclear maintenance needs, and costly service delays.
Then, we introduced an improved future journey, demonstrating how integrated alerts, built-in support tools, and role-based UI could simplify his day-to-day operations.
A refined persona was created based on group feedback, now reflecting enhanced expectations and new goals with our proposed solutions.

tegrated into existing workflows and hardware.

*Right: Current user journey before improvements

*Left: Improved user journey after implementing the solutions

3. Open Discussion: Feature Exploration
We hosted a short, interactive session to explore additional ideas that emerged overnight. Topics included:

Camera-based recipe detection
Event logging
Serial number scanning
Smart error alerts
Real-time service contact via the UI

UI Sketching Session (3-Hour Design Sprint)

After the Day 1 workshop, I synthesized the team’s top-voted solutions and translated them into low-fidelity UI sketches within a focused 3-hour design sprint. These sketches visualized concepts such as diagnostics pages, recipe control settings, and real-time system feedback. The goal was to complete a rough visual framework in time to present during Day 2. These early concepts helped tie the user needs to interface possibilities and supported the final solution presentation.

Reflection & Learnings

What I learned

Designed and ran a full 2-day UX discovery workshop
Created all materials and visuals from scratch, tailored to client context
Led discussions, mapped insights, and translated outputs into design direction
Collaborated with both technical and non-technical teams to define realistic solutions

Driving Strategic UX Conversations

This project was more than a workshop, it was a chance to lead cross-functional teams through real-time discovery and design. It strengthened my ability to turn complexity into clarity, especially when aligning diverse departments like engineering, service, and product.

My Exprince

How to facilitate collaborative UX workshops that create alignment across stakeholders
The power of visual thinking tools (personas, journey maps, feature boards) to drive shared understanding
How to transform raw ideas into actionable UI concepts in a short timeframe
The importance of adapting UX strategies to embedded systems with hardware constraints

"This project confirmed that UX isn’t just about the screen—it’s about aligning people, goals, and systems to design better experiences at every level. "

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