How To Run A Design Thinking Workshop

are you looking for an innovative way to solve problems and bring your team together in this video we're gonna teach you all about how to give a design thinking workshop hi I'm Jeff head of design at career foundry be sure to give us a like and subscribe to our Channel now Design Thinking is interesting idea because it's taking what designers know and do and letting other people do it but design is something that we should all be doing and something we should be sharing so it's a really interesting concept and it's super popular it's gained a lot of traction so many people's first experience with design is actually through design thinking but don't get caught up too much on the terminology if you're a designer you'll feel this you'll know this intuitively if you're not a designer you're basically just teaching people and intro to design so everything that you teach them they're going to be excited about so you can feel confident knowing that this workshop will be a fun experience now of course some of you might have already run from design thinking workshops if you have any tips about running Design Thinking workshops of your own please leave them down in the comments we'd love to hear about them a design thinking workshop has three pretty huge benefits first of all is creative problem-solving in action secondly Design Thinking workshops facilitate innovation and teamwork the very creative nature of it is thinking outside of the box and coming up with innovative solutions lastly as well as facilitating innovative solutions it teaches creative thinking which can be a hugely strategic advantage for companies so now that we know the what and why of running design-thinking workshops let's look at how you can plan for these workshops first thing you want to do when you're preparing for the Design Thinking workshop is set the objective now you need to know exactly what you're running this design thinking workshop maybe you want to create a new product or maybe you want to optimize an existing product and you just want to make it better imagine you're working for a company called love foundry an online dating service the goal of Design Thinking workshop for love foundry might be to better understand the onboarding the initial experience that users have with the app so you could focus on that for your design thinking workshop next you want to find a space for your workshop and I can't just be any meeting room it has to be a place that has really good lighting comfortable seating and you might want to even consider some nice music for your workshop you're trying to get people into a creative mindset so think about that when you're looking for a place for your workshop now for a crucial part of the planning phase the agenda the agenda is gonna be a list of all the things you'll be doing for your workshop day now golden rule number one of making an agenda is don't overfill it you're gonna be surprised you're never gonna have enough time for anything so make sure that you give lots of space in your agenda items and second golden rule of agendas is make sure that each agenda item is based on an activity something action related so they're gonna be doing during the day now okay you're making your agenda but what is the time frame now ideally you get as much time as possible I've done a Design Thinking workshop in four hours it was pretty packed I'd recommend doing an all-day workshop now that that you would probably block out nine to five but the the workshop itself might be more like ten to four with bricks for lunch and you know breaks between so just keep in mind how long your agenda is gonna be for and we definitely recommend doing an all-day Design Thinking workshop so now that you've got your agenda set it's time to think about the materials you'll need for the workshop so there's some digital materials you're going to need first most simple digital material is a watch I definitely recommend a watch so you can time things check what's going on of course you're going to have your phone with you which is a good thing you can use your phone to take photographs during the workshop if you have a Bluetooth speaker you can actually control the music from across the room so you can take a photo really quickly and pause the playlist all in one go and this is also super helpful and if you're going to be running the workshop all day I definitely recommend having some slides and a slide deck something like keynote you can have that on your laptop and that can be projected onto onto the wall or I can maybe be a TV screen regardless you're going to be away from your laptop and the wall and the screen so you're going to probably want to have a clicker maybe some sort of USB thing that plugs into your laptop then you can control the slides from all the way across the room you can control them music you can take photos of lovely people doing design thinking and you'll be all set that way with your digital materials and tools for yourself ready it's time to think about the materials you're going to need to provide for the participants because when you run a workshop you also bring the supplies that they're gonna need so things you recommend would be post-it notes always post-it notes markers for the post-it notes it's better than using a pin in the post-it notes because if you use a marker on the post-it notes you can see it from far away so people in the back of the room can see what was written on the wall so that's a nice combination another nice combination is of course paper and pins so you're gonna be sketching and doodling you need to have lots of paper on hand people can try something throw it out try it again in addition you're gonna need some tape so if you're gonna be drawing things and putting them on the wall and when they put this on the wall with the tape they're also gonna probably want to vote on things so your needs and those little dot votes they're gonna be different colors stickers that are circular you're gonna use those for different things like whose idea was the best vote with your doctor so you can use these stickers to do things like vote in addition you might want to consider having a whiteboard around you never know when you need to illustrate a concept or maybe you want to keep track maybe you want to have something like points for the day you can use the whiteboard to keep track of things like that so now that you have your sort of material is gonna be working with with your hands you also need to consider things to eat so when you're running an all-day workshop this can be important to have snacks lying around and I don't just mean any snacks we're not talking like donuts and you know skittles and things like that what we want is healthy snacks right you can't afford to have a bunch of sugar crashing while you're doing this Design Thinking workshop so take all the things like the supplies the snacks and kind of put them throughout the room arranged neatly but kind of in different spots that they feel like they can help themselves to them throughout the day [Music] now that you have all the physical things set you've got the space the agenda supplies the materials and the snacks it's time to talk about how to conduct the workshop the first thing you want to have is an introduction we're gonna give a nice brief overview of what you're gonna be doing throughout the day this will set the expectations for everyone when you show something like the introduction it's good to see how they feel about this and you can kind of gut check what they thought they'd get out of the workshop versus what you thought they'd get out of the workshop there's a really very crucial important part of the workshop and don't forget if you're gonna be filming or taking photos of the workshop you need to get their consent upfront so make sure that they're all okay with having their face photographed and wherever you'll be posting it might even be good to indicate where you're gonna be posting these photos and what you're doing with them exactly and if it's sitting you know maybe a more corporate environment you might want to even have a written consent form so that everyone's aware of the data policy of your workshop so the first real action of the workshop you want to do something bold you want to do something that wakes them up you want to do something to get the blood pumping and start getting them to be a bit more collaborative none of this sitting in the chair and watching you talk at them that's not what a workshop is that's a TED talk you're doing a workshop so what you want to do is do an icebreaker this might sound a bit cheesy to you you might be like oh that's what we do in summer camp when we were kids but this is a really great way to get everyone up because actually what people do is sit in little clusters around their friends an icebreaker gets them up they start walking around the room interacting with people they loosen up they start to have fun maybe a little smile comes across their face so icebreaker it's a really great way to get a workshop going I recommend you jump into them as quickly as possible what are some good icebreakers you can obviously look online but some of you I've seen worked really well is just do rock-paper-scissors games so you say everyone does rock-paper-scissors with each other in little pairs now the key is once you win at rock-paper-scissors you move on to the next person but once you lose at rock-paper-scissors you have to cheer for the person that just beat you so as people go through you end up with just two people and everyone's cheering and everyone's excited and one's watching it like it's really interesting fun drama of human life but really getting them to get their blood pumping giving them walking around so something like this will be a nice way to get everyone ready for the sort of collaborative you know positive encouraging workshop environment that you want to create so when you're going through a design thinking workshop you want to go in the actual phases of a design thinking process now you don't want to start at Step five and work backwards you want to start at step one and go all the way step five so step one is empathy this is super important for designers you want to put yourself kind of in the shoes of the user who's going to be using your app or service or anything like that so this is a good thing to start with get in the workshop you got the icebreaker everyone's excited to work and now they need to get their mindset into the same as the user so there's a couple ways we can do this you don't always have enough room and your workshop to bring all your users into that space so you can do some things to cut approximate the feelings that the users are having with the app so let's take our example of love foundry now how do you get your workshop participants to feel like single users who are looking for love using an app well you know you can start off by having them interview each other so you pair them up you know get everyone to sit down together and you can give them a set of questions to ask or you can just let them sort of free flow but have them say something like you know what was your last experience with a dating app how did that feel how could you improve the experience and ask very open-ended questions like that none of this yes/no thing and then the other person can be responding and that can be some sort of them approximating a user so then the person who is doing the interviewing can also take notes and when they're taking these notes they can use a framework that's something we do a lot in design just a way to categorize what's being said so that's kind of a way that you can kind of understand it so one of the nice frameworks that we like to use is saying thinking doing and feeling so it kind of starts at the visual on the face what are they saying what's the literal words coming out of their mouths what are they doing maybe what's their behaviors where's their body language like you know cocking their head to the side these are all like the doing so saying and doing is a bit more obvious and then thinking and feeling is a layer below that's one way to get into the empathetic mindset another way would be to give that empathy map so epic empathy map is kind of like a poster you can put these on the wall and then what they do is they show like a persona like a stick figure drawing some sort of approximation of the user and then it's divided up into different quadrants around it so it's also four things but they're slightly different so you have the empathy map in the wall and the first thing they look at is what they're seeing so say okay for our love foundry users what do they see you know what's what's in their life what's going on visually for them the next thing is hearing so they think about what are the users hearing as you can tell it's kind of getting them to role play get them in the real mindset of the user just by doing these two things in addition to that if you talk about what they're saying and doing that's also a part of the employee map and then also there's thinking and feelings so it's got some of the similarities there but and one approach you're having someone interview and either give their real-life experience or what they think the experience is like and another one they have something on the wall and as a group you kind of fill out what the user might be going through so those are two nice ways to get an impotent mindset right away in your design thinking workshop so now that you have two activities for the infancy stage it's time to move on to the second stage the second stage is defined so what you're going to do is something called reframing and this is a really clever way to do problem-solving in a creative way so it's like you kind of make your mind shift into thinking about something from multiple perspectives now if you did the interview approach that I talked about earlier each person will have kind of paired up and interviewed another person so they'll all have notes inside those notes will be insights so to be interesting to sort of try and find the things they learn insight is just something you learn from some research or some interview so you take those insights and you move into something called a point of view statement so this is something where it says a user needs something and it's because of an insight so what you're going to say for the love foundry example maybe there was people writing busy a lot so your insight could be for instance that people are very busy and that's part of the reason people use dating apps because it helps them to fit it into their lives so you know the busyness of these these people's lives middle aged urban professionals are looking for love on their phones because they have very busy lives there's your point of view statement now what you want to do that's a reframe right so now you're thinking about what the hell would happen to interviews a bit differently now we can do another reframe and to put it into a how might we statement how might we is a really nice way to reframe things from problems into challenges and they're really great because the way that the the verbage use is is really clever it's how means you haven't jumped the solution you don't know what's gonna happen yet so how it's great for that might its meaning it's a possibility you know like it's something that could happen and then we it's very inclusive so it's saying how am i we together how might we do something about this challenge so the how might we statement for love foundry might be how might we provide a safe easy dating experience for urban professionals that are super busy so you're kind of reframing it again right how might we is an action by providing some sort of product or service and a negative mentions the target demographic so that's kind of how the how might we works and the reason you do a how might we the define stage is you're gonna want to get everybody on board maybe you have teens you know something like that you might want to get the teams on board for what they're gonna work on and the define phase is a good time to bring in some decision-making so you can have everyone put their how am i wheeze on the wall and then you know those dot votes we talked about those little blue stickers you can have them put those onto the ideas all know how might wheeze and that way they can vote on what they want to work on so at the define phase it's a really good time as an activity to have them you know do one of you statements have them do how might we stay Mets a reframe and it's also really nice to have them vote on what they're gonna work on of course they could all work on their own how might we but it's nice to in a workshop environment to have people working together so I recommend doing teams having teams work on one how might we so from this point on these people might be working on the same idea together and how might we is a really nice way to make sure that you have the right idea and it's for the right person and make sure that's very specific the more specific the better okay so you have some activities you can do in the empathy stage and also the defined stage but what about the ith stage so stage 3 is ID 8 and this is time to break out some of those artistic designee type skills that you kind of figured you're gonna be doing and Design Thinking workshop this is thinking visually it's basically sketching novel solutions to the challenge you've already decided on now this phase will be kind of polarizing for non designers which you'll definitely be doing this for non designers so what you want to understand is that not everybody at their daily job sketches and doodles that's something that only US designers get to do on a daily basis so be aware that a lot of them are gonna feel a little bit unsure of their artistic skills so you wanna make sure that you set a very safe space so when you talk about the fact that you're gonna have them sketch anything they're gonna maybe clam up a bit so you want to say things like there's no artistic skills required here it's not important how it looks it's important that you're just thinking visually and that's what you're wanting them to do you want to get them in the mindset of someone who's just you know thinking how can I solve that how am i twee and they just visually show it it could be a diagram it could be a stick figure actually stick figures are really really nice at this stage so what you want to do is just have them sketch a few solutions to this how might we it's early it's not gonna be perfect it's not important how it looks or that it actually solves the problem right you just want to get something and then the next thing you can do is have them get feedback on their sketches and not only just get feedback but have them explain their sketches to somebody else and in this process they'll be diving deeper into thinking and this is where some has really creative problem-solving will come out just the sheer act of trying to visualize something can kind of get your brain working in new ways and also the the act of presenting something can help you understand better the idea or trying to flush out so in the id8 phase you can do some of these activities so sketching getting feedback sketching again doing this over and over until people start to feel happy with the the ideas they're starting to generate now for the fun part we're at the fourth phase now and the fourth phase is prototype so depending on how much time you have here there are a couple different ways you can prototype so if you you know something like two hours maybe bit more you could do something kind of high fidelity and that could be maybe you take a quick you know easy tool that everyone understands like keynote which is not a design software rights for non designers and maybe you could you know prototype quickly some of the sketches they did earlier into something that's almost like a nap you know like jump straight to the full experience you could do something like that but since you're working with non designers you know gauge the room see what the kind of skill is in the room there's also a nice tool called prot now what prot lets you do is you can make sketches of screens on paper and product as a mobile app you just take pictures of each sketch and then you can turn that into a cook up a prototype that feels real even though it's you know just pencil maybe scanned it and using a photo so like they can basically have the entire experience of the app using just this prototyping tool called prop those are two like maybe activities you can do for people that have a bit of design experience or you know ones you feel confident can work with digital tools like that if you don't have as much time you can also do things like make storyboards storyboards is just turning something that's a static visual and to multiple visuals so it kind of starts the process of things going from just one image to a video and the way that we experience you know services apps products things like that it's more like a movie than it is a picture so you want to start to get to that kind of feeling you want to make their ideas which they sketched out in the last phase and the idea phase tape take them from something static you know simple into something that's moving something that's like an experience so at this point prototype it's all about learning by doing you want to be doing things here you're gonna be making things that's why it's the fun phase for a lot of people they never had the opportunity to prototype so it's gonna be really interesting moment for you to watch people prototyping it's gonna be like oh wow I just had something that was a small sketch on a piece of paper and something it feels real and that's the whole point of the prototype phase so coming back to the love foundry example what we're trying to do here is help busy people find love on this app so it's more of a product right so let's let's think about storyboarding so storyboarding can be a really nice way to prototype this how might we challenge we're trying to solve so what you could do is you know the key here is that they're having a busy busy day so maybe a storyboard you kind of map out what that busy day is and by doing this you're getting into that sort of experience that you want to get out when you're prototyping and you'll be thinking about the user you'll be thinking about little moments where you can use love foundry to you know help them find love throughout their busy day so this is a perfect idea perfect activity for you know prototyping things in the Design Thinking workshop so this is a fun one it's pretty visual doesn't require a lot of artistic skills though because it can literally just be stick figures and do about something like 10 to 20 different steps and you can prototype those things out like that oh yeah and don't forget you can also just have them act it out a lot of people don't feel comfortable making things like storyboards or sketches or you know apps and things like that if there may be you know not the the visually or you know technologically inclined you can just have them act it out because you know what better way to experience the service then when it's acted out right in front of you now for the final phase the test phase now this face is gonna feel kind of familiar because it's kind of all about getting feedback but here it's a bit different because now the solution is gonna be pretty fully fleshed out you know if you've done something like a storyboard or maybe prototype the you know sort of an app experience it's gonna be ready to show that this part is all about getting someone new to test this thing for the first time so if you had groups before you want to get someone from a different group testing so you've got your idea it's ready maybe it's a service that's acted out maybe it's a product it's storyboard and out so you have that that that's that kind of experience ready you want to bring someone in to experience it for the first time so what's great about that is this person has never experienced that before so they're gonna be able to give you really good kind of first-hand how it feels kind of feedback and and that's gonna be a really great time to capture all that feedback so that you can improve what's happening a really nice way to think about capturing that feedback is to take notes again structure it into four different things so you want to take notes about what was working so that's always important you want to affirm what was happening want to make sure the team knows that the thing that they did is working well also what's not working so maybe the person who's testing this out says and this parts not working for me also maybe I didn't understand that so she's not working for me to get those two things figured out so the positive the negative right what's working what's not working also if they have questions the questions they ask be very insightful so you also want to capture all the questions they have if they're confused about something and then ask a question it's probably a good chance that that team didn't quite you know sort out that's to that part of the experience also this is also really a important point is to capture the ideas so when someone tests something for the first time they're gonna have really good ideas on how to improve it immediately it just sort of flows out they're like oh you could try this thing here like really good thing to do is capture that immediately because that's gonna be not just feedback but ways to turn that feedback into actually things that can improve so between those four things what's working what's not working questions and ideas you can get a pretty good understanding of the experience that you're a prototype before so that's what the test will give you really solid actionable feedback that you can turn into making whatever you've done better now that would be the end of the five phases of a Design Thinking workshop in real life Design Thinking itself is cyclical so you might go you know one two three four five and then bounce back two three and then four and five but in a workshop it's gonna be very structured you're gonna go one two three four five right that would be the end of the workshop so you know what do you do after that basically what you've created is a fully fleshed tested idea that can be built so after the workshop you know the next day at work you could just start working on that product so you're gonna have something that's you know very sketchy but has some feedback and it's fleshed out so that's kind of the whole point of Design Thinking workshop so I've just walked you step by step through an entire Design Thinking workshop but Design Thinking itself was created in the 90s I'm curious do you think that Design Thinking workshops are still relevant we'd love it if you let us know in the comments what do you think this kind of workshop is still something you would do to learn more about running Design Thinking workshops head on over to our blog you can find a link in the description below thanks for watching see you next time you

Channel: CareerFoundry

Views: 86,311

Keywords: Design thinking workshop, Design thinking, Design thinking 2020, Design thinking process, How to design workshop, What is design thinking, UX workshop template, Design thinking method, UI UX workshop, Creative thinking workshop, UX activity, CareerFoundry, UX design, Design workshop activities

Id: A5agx1J9dJQ

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020