![\"3](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/3-usefule-UX-workshops-to-get-your-team-on-the-same-page-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nA UX workshop can show the way to your team, just like a compass.\u00a0 Get everybody on the same page! I<\/b>nvolve them in the product development process with these collaborative exercises.<\/b><\/p>\n
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A UX workshop can help you gather the team memebers, brainstorm, generate new ideas to make better decisions.<\/p>\n
UX professionals are not lone fighters, but mediators between users, business managers, and developers.\u00a0In the case of UX workshops, they can become actual workshop facilitators.<\/p>\n
In this article we cover:<\/p>\n
UX workshop exercises require the presence of the team. That might be challenging, but it is 100% worth it.<\/span><\/p>\n Getting the team together from time to time and discussing progress and learnings always pay off. Whether it is the beginning\u00a0of the product development process, discovering different product ideas or working on an existing one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As Benjamin Franklin said, <\/span>\u201cTell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n In a UX workshop, we share research results with the participants and let them come up with their own conclusions. <\/span><\/p>\n You can read about the UX research methods <\/a>we use in a previous blog post. Everyone likes when their ideas affect things, so we give them the opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n Invite all decision-makers and stakeholders from the product team who might have valuable input: product owner(s), designers, developers, researchers etc.<\/span><\/p>\n We will introduce three well-known tools here. They can help develop a common understanding about the product and users among team members. So let the fun begin!<\/span><\/p>\n Get everybody on the same page with a UX workshop<\/i><\/p>\n We create personas<\/a>, fictitious characters who embody specific key characteristics of target user groups and thus draw closer to them. <\/span><\/p>\n The first step of any product development is drafting them. They help define different types of people who will use a product and their main characteristics.<\/span><\/p>\n This UX workshop aims not just to create personas, but to get everyone to know the users better by talking about them for an hour. <\/span><\/p>\n Everybody in contact with the users gets together (salespeople, support, business managers) and through examples of actual customers, they fill in the below-introduced template. <\/span><\/p>\n User interviews<\/a> and field research results form the basis of the best personas. Otherwise, we can only talk about \u201cproto-personas\u201d based on our own assumptions. <\/span><\/p>\n Distribute the interview recordings to the workshop participants and ask everybody to represent a given interviewee at the workshop. This means real data and everybody gets closer to the users.<\/span><\/p>\n A canvas is often a good tool to run a UX workshop. This one is for personas.<\/em><\/p>\n We at UX studio<\/a> use the following persona template, free to download <\/span>from our website<\/span><\/a>. We examine four main criteria for each user persona together.<\/span><\/p>\n Luckily, scientists have collected the most common inner motivations:<\/span><\/p>\n Demographic data (gender, age, residence) have very little added value and might lead the way of thinking in the wrong direction. For this reason, do not talk about them during the persona workshop.<\/span><\/p>\n Create user personas at the beginning of the work in order to have the users in mind throughout the design process, to be able to put ourselves into their position. <\/span><\/p>\n Alliterative names for particular user personas makes them more memorable, for example, Truck Toby or Teenage Tina. Drawings are useful, too. Our template also provides space for a short quotation, written as if the user persona uttered it. It aims to summarize the user persona in a single sentence.<\/span><\/p>\n The user personas can hang on the wall to be before our eyes at all times. For this reason, many designers create poster type of personas, as seen below.<\/span><\/p>\n Customer journeys or experience maps help provide a holistic view of a service and map the important aspects to address.<\/span><\/p>\n Just to clarify the terms, customer journey is not the same as the user journey. A <\/span>user journey<\/span><\/a> shows how people move inside an app.<\/span><\/p>\n The customer journey (or experience map) aims to map the whole process the customers go through. It can help to see a holistic picture and examine what happens long before they first use the product and after usage, too. <\/span><\/p>\n During this UX workshop, many previously unimagined things will rise to the surface. It can help to see the product from many different aspects. <\/span><\/p>\n It enables the collecting and organizing of all the information about the connection between a product and its users. The customer journey workshop will help to align the team\u2019s thoughts and ideas. In the end, everyone will have a clear picture of the context.<\/span><\/p>\n So how do we create a customer journey? <\/span><\/p>\n Putting together the customer journey will help generate feature ideas when working on a new product.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Working on an existing product will highlight loads of ideas and points to improve on the product\u2019s experience, too. Prioritize them and choose the most important ideas to start with. <\/span><\/p>\n Not everything can be solved at once, so it\u2019s better to choose up to three topics and start ideating the solution immediately. Start sketching up solutions or building quick prototypes so the theoretical findings will turn into real projects as soon as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n The customer journey diagram is basically a big table. The column of the table represents different phases or steps a customer goes through. These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases:<\/span><\/p>\n In most cases, these three can break down into more phases to fit the given product. The number of steps is flexible, but we recommend fewer broad phases. <\/span><\/p>\n On the horizontal side, different rows each represent different aspects to examine the given phase. We can name three major groups here, too:<\/span><\/p>\n Read about how customer journey (and all the other UX workshops) fit into the product development process in our e-book: <\/span>Product Managers\u2019 Guide to UX Design<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n From time to time you should stop, step back, and look at the bigger picture. The product strategy workshop can help summarize the current state of a product and collect the opportunities. Do this UX workshop with your team every two to four months, or as necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n The product strategy workshop aims at complex targets. First, it can help summarize all the important information collected so far about the product and the market. <\/span><\/p>\n Then, it can help define long-term goals and align them with the business strategy. Communicating these goals with the whole product team helps create a common understating and a framework for future collaboration among members.<\/span><\/p>\n We use our UX Strategy Canvas<\/a>, which helps to summarize research results and ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n On the left side of the canvas, we collect information. See the summary of the product discovery here (pains and motivations), the AARRR funnel analysis and the competitor analysis. <\/span><\/p>\n On the right side, we collect ideas about each finding on the left, and on the bottom, we summarize the findings.<\/span><\/p>\n To summarize, a product strategy should contain a strategy statement or the main goal, a plan to get there and some checkpoints on the way.<\/p>\n Summon the team together from time to time to get on the same page during the design process, whether in the exploration phase or working on an existing product. <\/span><\/p>\n Persona, customer journey, and product strategy workshops can help convey important information about the market, the users, the product and business goals to the whole team. <\/span><\/p>\n They help ensure the members understand this information and develop a common understanding of goals. The UX workshops help develop frameworks for working together, which smooths out the whole design process.<\/span><\/p>\n There are other UX workshops we haven’t discussed here. A look&feel discovery workshop, for example, can help your design team to establish a style guide or build the basics of a design system<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\nInvolve everyone in the workshop activities<\/h3>\n
![\"UX](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/1-ZsD9sRBDpMHTIfFXhiDOoQ-720x540.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nUX workshop #1: Persona workshop<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What are UX personas?<\/b><\/h3>\n
The goals of a persona workshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Canvas](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/Persona-workshop-canvas-720x508.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat does a UX\u00a0persona look like?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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\nAn application used on a mobile phone in a crowded bus requires a completely different design from one used sitting at a desk in a quiet room.<\/span><\/li>\n\n
The output\u00a0<\/b>of a persona workshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Persona](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/Persona-posters-720x481.png\")
<\/p>\nUX workshop #2:\u00a0<\/strong>Customer journey workshop<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The goals of a customer journey workshop<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The itinerary of a c<\/b>ustomer journey w<\/strong>orkshop\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
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The output of a customer journey workshop<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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![\"Customer](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/customer-journey-workshop-720x443.jpg\")
<\/p>\nUX workshop #3:<\/strong>\u00a0Product strategy workshop<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The goals of a product strategy workshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Product](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/product-strategy.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe itinerary\u00a0<\/b>of a product strategy workshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
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\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/ux-product-roadmap-themes.png\")
<\/li>\nThe output\u00a0<\/b>of a product strategy workshop<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"UX](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/product-strategy-workshop-720x501.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nConclusion: do the UX workshop that fits your current design phase<\/strong><\/h2>\n
![\"Product](\"https:\/\/uxstudioteam.com\/ux-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/Product-Designer-Position-Open.png\")
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