5 UX Workshops and When to Use Them: A Cheat Sheet

What Is a UX Workshop?

UX workshops are intensive collaborative sessions used to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge throughout the design timeline. Workshops enable participants to come together for a concentrated time of idea generation and hands-on activities that allow them to achieve an actionable goal.

Several variables distinguish workshops from traditional meetings:

• Purpose: While meetings are a way to share or exchange information among team members, workshops are a method to solve a problem, develop a plan, or reach a decision.
• Scope: Meetings typically allow shallow coverage of many issues, while workshops are best for deep, focused coverage of one issue.
• Length: Meetings are usually measured in half-hours or hours (hopefully!), while workshops are measured in half-days or days.
• Structure: Often, meetings are passive in nature (i.e., attendees listen and absorb), while workshops encourage active participation in activities such as sketching, brainstorming, affinity diagramming or artifact creation; these activities organize and capture group progress. 
• Preparation: Workshops take much longer to prepare than meetings, because of the length, materials, and tools required, activities that need to be planned, and necessary buy-in.

When deciding if a UX workshop is appropriate for your situation, remember this guideline: Meetings are for project updates or general awareness discussions. Situations that require greater input and consensus from diverse groups or that would benefit from greater sense of shared ownership may require a collaborative, hands-on format such as a workshop.

Types of UX Workshops

This article outlines 5 common types of UX 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

There are many different ways to shape and structure UX workshops, and there are, therefore, many other types of UX workshops not included in this list; however, these 5 UX workshops are very common and useful to UX practitioners who need to build buy-in for their processes or collaborate with diverse stakeholders.

Discovery Workshops

What Is a Discovery Workshop?

The goal of a discovery workshop is to create consensus for project milestones and plans. Discovery workshops can be a useful tool for helping UXers:

• Understand business requirements at the beginning of an initiative
• Gather existing knowledge from client or stakeholder teams
• Create consensus on plans and priorities for a project

Common Scenarios for Discovery Workshops

Discovery Workshops typically occur at the beginning of a project or at the beginning of significant key substages of a project when there is a need to:

• Understand existing research and gather existing knowledge in order to determine additional research plans over the course of the project
• Understand stakeholder expectations
• Build a mutual understanding of the overall project direction, key milestones, and vision for the entire team
• Get a glimpse into the broader context (e.g., culture, parallel efforts, etc.) that may affect the project

When to Have a Discovery Workshop

Some common opportunities for Discovery Workshops across a high-level design process are shown in the timeline below:

• Soon after project initiation so that alignment can be created around overall goals, and the core team can gather existing information from stakeholders or clients
• At key milestones with the project, such as small subphase kickoffs, where the core team can have focused information gathering with the subteam involved closely in that subphase

Planning a Discovery Workshop

When planning a Discovery Workshop, include the core-project team leads, plus any project sponsors or champions. Create a formal environment for structured discussion (e.g., a conference room with plenty of whiteboard space) and use a mix of methods for both diverging to understand the current state and converging to make decisions about plans, people, and processes that will shape the approach to the project. Conclude with a documented understanding of the current state and an action plan for moving forward.

Empathy Workshops

What Is an Empathy Workshop?

The goal of an empathy workshop is to help teams or stakeholders understand and prioritize user needs before designing a solution. Empathy workshops are used to:

• Understand who the relevant customers or users are
• Gain clarity and consensus on user needs, motivations, and behaviors
• Build empathy for users

Common Scenarios for Empathy Workshops

Empathy workshops typically occur at the beginning of a project or after some user research has been completed in order to:

• Shift stakeholder perspectives from a features-first mindset to a users-first mindset,
• Prime stakeholders with a user-centric attitude as the project gains momentum
• Share compelling user-research insights that may influence future design directions

When to Have an Empathy Workshop

Some common opportunities for empathy workshops across a high-level design process are:

• As soon as the project kicks off, so that you can share existing user insights with stakeholders, priming them to adopt a user-centric mindset from the beginning
• After new research has been conducted, so you can share results in order to shape a new potential design direction for the project

Planning an Empathy Workshop

Plan to invite core team members, key stakeholders, and users, if possible and appropriate. Anyone with key knowledge of user research is a good candidate for an empathy-workshop participant. An informal environment that encourages brainstorming from a user’s perspective (e.g., creating empathy maps or quick customer-journey maps) will lead to a shared, documented understanding of user needs.

Design Workshops

What Is a Design Workshop?

The goal of a design workshop, sometimes called a design-studio workshop, is to rapidly generate and discuss a wide set of ideas. Design workshops are used to:

• Utilize idea-generation activities like sketching to encourage discussion
• Incorporate crossdisciplinary perspectives
• Create shared ownership in project success by inviting others to participate in cocreation activities

Common Scenarios for Design Workshops

Design workshops can happen at any “diverge” phase of the design cycle, when there is a need to: 

• Rapidly generate a wide set of ideas for a well-defined design challenge
• Involve people from different teams to broaden the perspective
• Dig deep to refine a set of potential concepts or solutions late in the design process
• Foster shared ownership around a product or UX vision

When to Have a Design Workshop

Some common opportunities for design workshops across a high-level design process are:

• At project kick off, in order to build ownership and buy-in for the design process and ideas
• After a phase of user research, where the insights can be used as inputs for generating useful features or solutions
• After an initial design phase, in order to refine design directions and explore deep-level user flows or journeys (as opposed to feature ideas)

Planning a Design Workshop

The power of design workshops comes from varied perspective, so invite a wide range of roles. The workshop environment should be informal and make use of creative tools such as markers and blank paper for sketching, adhesive for mounting sketches on the wall for discussion, and green- and red-dot labels for voting on ideas. Plan for a structured sequence of rapid, timed sketching cycles, presentation, critique, and choose a prioritization method such as dot voting. After the team has diverged and explored many ideas, a design direction should be agreed upon and continued to be explored outside of the workshop by the UX-team leads.

Prioritization Workshops

What Is a Prioritization Workshop?

The goal of a prioritization workshop is to build consensus on which features customers (or other stakeholders) value most and prioritize them. Prioritization workshops are used to:

• Refine and rank features or ideas
• Create focus
• Build consensus on which goals, ideas, or user groups to prioritize

Common Scenarios for Prioritization Workshops

Prioritization workshops are beneficial anytime critical decisions need to be made or when the team needs to agree on an action plan, such as when:

• There are too many competing priorities
• Stakeholders are asking for too much and there is scope creep or feature overload
• You need to weigh the value of planned feature releases against each other in order to shape a roadmap
• You want to bring sponsored users into the process in order to have them weigh in on features or items that they value most

When to Have a Prioritization Workshop

Some common opportunities for prioritization workshops across a high-level design process are:

• At the onset of a project, if there are many competing internal initiatives, and you need an understanding of how to prioritize timelines or resources
• During user research, when you can bring users together in order to influence the prioritization of feature development
• Later in the process, after design is already underway, if you experience scope creep and need to reset on what is truly prioritized

Planning a Prioritization Workshop

Include core team members and key decision makers in your prioritization workshop. Make use of idea-prioritization activities such as numbered index cards for voting, sticky notes to be moved around for forced ranking, or sticky dots for dot voting. Structure the workshop to build toward an output of consensus on how to move forward with a set of features, ideas, or initiatives, giving each team member a chance to contribute to the final action plan.

Critique Workshops

What Is a Critique Workshop?

The goal of a critique workshop is to provide space in our design process so that design decisions align to user needs. Critique workshops can be a useful tool in helping teams:

• Evaluate existing content or designs with user needs as a lens
• Rapidly identify quick fixes for optimization
• Note necessary long-term evolutions or optimizations

Common Scenarios for Critique Workshops

Consider using a critique workshop as a checkpoint before new design projects begin, or at intermittent design reviews, such as when there is a need to:

• Understand how well the design supports usability heuristics or design principles established by the team
• Discuss the user flow through a design, by examining each screen or flow through the lens of a specific user group or persona
• Hear perspectives from different expertise areas and feedback from teammates with different job functions
• Explore the designs of competing products or other experiences that have elements or qualities that you want to achieve

When to Have a Critique Workshop

Some common opportunities for critique workshops across a high-level design process timeline might be:

• At the beginning of a project, where the team reviews the existing design against known goals, heuristics, or principles in order to shape the new design
• As part of an iterative design cycle, where quick, regularly occurring critiques keep the design on track

Planning a Critique Workshop

A critique workshop typically works well with a small group of multidisciplinary roles who are critical to the design process. Plan for an informal environment to encourage sharing and open discussion, with handouts or pictures of the designs in question posted up in a visible space and whiteboard space for capturing new ideas. The workshop structure should be a facilitated discussion with activities that help participants rate the design against some sort of existing set of objective criteria. Conclude with agreement on a direction for a new design (or next phase of the design).

Scale, Combine, and Adapt These UX Workshops

Though each workshop is presented individually within this article for the sake of clarity, these workshops can be scaled, combined or otherwise adapted to be more effective or appropriate for specific UX challenges. For example, you might host a discovery workshop that employs prioritization exercises in order to build consensus, or you might facilitate a design workshop that encompasses elements of critique in order to continue refining ideas after ideation.

The length of each workshop can also vary based on project needs, scope and stakeholder availability. As an extreme examples, I’ve hosted a discovery workshop that lasted 3 days because client buy-in and alignment was very important to that particular project, whereas Agile teams might fit a mini version of a discovery workshop into one morning within a week-long sprint. As long as you use workshops when there is truly a need to collaborate across diverse roles or create buy-in and ownership and you design your workshop to make effective use of all participants’ time, there is unlimited opportunity to use these workshops to be an effective UX practitioner.