How to facilitate a workshop with customers for understanding their needs?

Task 1 – Energiser:

Usually, during a workshop we will ask people to write things down on a post-it and stick it up on a board, so the energiser needs to get people to do this.

The energiser should take no longer than 15 minutes total and ideally get people talking/thinking.

Task 2 - Likes/Dislikes:

The next stage involves understanding the participant’s likes/dislikes.

Asking people to write down their top dislikes/likes and add them to the board.

After the points have been noted down then spend some time again grouping these ideas into themes and discussing as a group to make sure you are clear of any recurring themes.

Task 3 - Goals:

If the workshop is with the business/organizational owners then it’s critical to understand their goals and needs.

It is important to understand what they require from your website/product. 

What are their pain points? What do they really want to achieve by using your newly designed digital solution?

Are they likely to change their model in the near future? 

Where do they want the organization to be in 5 years time? What is their 10 year plan?

Will they be exploring different countries quite soon?

This helps to form the basis of the requirements for your project.

Task 4 - User Personas:

As with any good project it is useful to have a bank of user personas to work with.

Use personas to develop user-centric designs.

Personas are the representation of real people that are used to influence the features and functionality of a project.

Persona needs to built upon real information gathered from the discovery phase of a project.

What are their needs? What are they looking for? And how can we help them reach their goals in the most user-friendly way?

Task 5 - User Needs:

Once you have all the information above you then can start to paint a picture of your users’/organization’s needs.

User need stories can form the basis for requirements of a project. (“As a (user) I need to (achieve something)”)

Here are some examples of user needs:

"As a customer I need to be able to review my order after I have placed it”

“As a new subscriber I need to be able to edit my email address”

“As a staff member I need to be able to run an export of all users from the software every Friday at 4pm”

Task 6 - User Stories:

“As a (user) I need to (do something) so that I (can achieve something) therefore (extra requirements surrounding the task that are important).

Ex - “As an order fulfilment officer I need to run an export at 4pm on a Friday so that I can meet the deadline set by my publisher at 4.15pm  therefore the export can’t take more than 5 minutes.”

Task 7 - Prioritizing requirements:

MoSCoW method:

Must have – Mission critical, the project cannot complete unless we do this.

Should have – Very important but not 100% essential

Could have – Nice to have if there is time / budget

Would have – Not essential, the project can easily launch without this

We also like to add to this list an extra W for Won’t have.

Task 8 - Build Rapid Prototypes for seeking early customer alignment