5 types of UX/Design workshops

Despite the name, a workshop should still be a little fun. These sessions between creative/brand/tech agencies and clients will touch upon aspects of the user experience but that’s only the beginning of the work. They’re condensed, accelerated collaborations meant to jumpstart the discovery and strategy for your new website or brand. Work that would have taken weeks gets accomplished in a matter of days.

The Task at Hand

Ultimately, a workshop attempts to arrive at a fundamental truth -- why does your organization really want/need a website redesign? Beyond the fact that it’s been six years or the site looks dated -- why has your team decided on this and what’s the actual purpose of a new digital presence for you? Lead generation? Recruiting? Increased donations? Brand awareness? All of the above? A workshop also surfaces what your team does not want from the website, which can be just as illuminating and valuable.

Workshops are two or three devoted days for the teams to get acquainted and clarify the scope, milestones and direction of the project early on, taking the ideas originally in the RFP and fully fleshing it out into an agreed-upon plan. It’s team therapy, a marathon ideation session, a high-level conversation that transcends a standard meeting or presentation. It speaks to the vast gap between a partnership versus a vendor and creates a shared sense of ownership and solidarity of vision for the build.

The Best Laid Plans

A workshop should coincide with the project kick-off that includes essential team leads, key decision-makers and internal stakeholders. Again, this is less of a presentation and more of a collaboration: seat accordingly. If the creative/brand agency is doing all the talking, the workshop won’t bode well. Conversely, if the client gets into a rabbit hole of tertiary inter-office tangents and the agency doesn’t refocus the conversation, the result will be equally fruitless.

Coming into the workshop, there will already be preliminary discovery and user research from the agency’s side -- these insights providing buy-in and a guide for the work ahead. And this work, distilled to its simplest terms, is figuring out who the client and their audience is, what they both want, and how this relationship can be mutually beneficial for both parties. 

Workshop Breakdown:

• Brand Attributes
• Voice & Tone
• Content Readability/SEO Overview
• Proto-Content Samples
• Proto-Personas
• User Journeys
• Competitive Analysis
• Preliminary Sitemap
• Sketching Wireframes

Key Considerations:

• What are your priority pages? What’s the purpose of each of these?
• Who comes to your site and what do they do while they’re there?
• What’s the referring source of traffic, e.g., direct, organic, email, Social?
• What’s the desired engagement from a user on these pages?
• What kind/positioning of content and which CTAs would best maximize this conversion?

A Shared Vision

The joint creative endeavor of a UX workshop not only expedites the process for creative/brand agencies and clients but also minimizes the budget by addressing red flags and icebergs before they have a chance to emerge. All of this establishes an invaluable trust between the teams moving forward and ensures that the new website will best represent the original vision.

5 Types of Workshops:

• Discovery workshops: Communicate the current state and create consensus for milestones and plans
• Empathy workshops: Help a broad team or stakeholders understand and prioritize user needs before designing a solution
• Design workshops: Rapidly generate and discuss a wide set of ideas with a diverse group of attendees
• Prioritization workshops: Build consensus on which features customers (or other stakeholders) value most and prioritize them
• Critique workshops: Ensure that design decisions align to user needs

Source: Nielsen Norman Group