How to maximize team participation and the value of the outcome when running a UX workshop remotely. Different platforms have different benefits and downsides, so choose depending on your circumstances and needs.
Even though in-person UX sessions are typically ideal, sometimes budget or travel restrictions necessitate remote UX work. This article presents guidelines for remote user research, UX workshops or presentations, and collaboration.
Storytelling is a powerful technique for UX teams and for working with stakeholders, but only if you use the proper words for your audience's domain. Here are tips for building vocabulary for your stories.
The most common pain points with service blueprinting are setting expectations, determining scope, and communicating insights, according to 97 UX professionals.
Although there can be many different instigators, roles, and activities involved in a discovery, all discoveries strive to achieve consensus on the problem to be solved and desired outcomes.
The type of workshop will dictate which tools your team should use. Ultimately, with limited time and budget, your best bet is to use a tool your team already knows how to use.
There are 7 activities that act as a foundation for every UX exercise during a workshop or collaborative team meeting. By understanding these, you can create almost any other exercise you need.
Many issues in the user-experience field don’t have a simple answer. Rather there’s a tension between two good answers that are often polar opposites. Both extremes can be useful perspectives, and both have their advocates when people debate UX. How do we resolve these differences? This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the UX Conference in Las Vegas.
Meetings are for sharing information; workshops are for solving a problem or reaching an actionable goal. We compare the differences in purpose, scope, length, structure, and preparation time for workshops and meetings.
Top Tasks are a tool used to focus a design team on the same, best set of user tasks. It comprises a list of 10 or fewer activities that users should be able to achieve using a design. If people can’t do these things, the design has failed. It takes a small amount of effort to create Top Tasks lists, but their impact is great.
Great design doesn't just happen. Rather, the organization must build 6 pillars that carry UX to success: capabilities, executive support, teams, resources, process, and schedule.
Collaborative sketching is a powerful tool for building buy-in for design decisions; however, it can be difficult to get stakeholders comfortable with the idea of drawing in a group setting. These variables help make group sketching more productive and effective with stakeholders.
Before you draw a single pixel, define what user need you're trying to solve with the (next-step) user-experience design. UX should be grounded in real user needs.
Service blueprints are the primary tool for service design, but practitioners often misunderstand how they relate to journey mapping, who should be involved in the process, and how to sell their value to the organization.
In ideation and many other UX activities, we want to include stakeholders and get them to participate in sketching UI prototypes and other visuals. Here are four tactics to getting everybody to sketch in your UX workshops.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
In a museum, knowing the backstory of an artifact makes it more interesting. Similarly, in a UX project, you can make better decisions when you know the context of your UX artifacts like journey maps and wireframes.
Agile development teams that struggle to keep track of UX work in the product backlog can utilize a separate backlog for UX. This method can help siloed teams where UX and development aren't in direct communication. Separate UX backlogs do have pros and cons, which are discussed here.
What does it mean to be a "designer?" Let's broaden the definition, based on the purpose, not the discipline. (Keynote by our Chief Designer, Sarah Gibbons)
Edgar Anzaldua presents a 6-year case study of learning and applying ever-more subtle UX concepts and growing his influence. Always something new to learn, from junior to senior professional level.
Teams who don't know much about UX, often ask you "so when will you give us the design?" during the early design-thinking stages. Areej Aljarba used design thinking itself to overcome this misconception. (Video from 'Back in the Real World' panel with past UX Conference participants.)
How do you decide whether to have a meeting or a workshop for a given problem or stage of your UX design process? Both involve a group of people, but there are 5 big differences, and the two formats work for different situations.
An 8-step process for UX designers and researchers to collaborate better with their stakeholders, for increased collaboration, to help stakeholders meet their goals, and to ensure the impact of your work.
Advance planning and having thought through alternatives can save you when facilitating a UX workshop and the unexpected happens (as it always does). Jan Haaland shares his experience during a panel with past participants in the UX Conference.
At the core of all the myriad of exercises and activity types in UX workshops are a simpler set of 7 foundational activities that can be blended to achieve the desired result.
With experience, UX teams have evolved techniques for better collaboration and design practices to involve and engage remote and distributed team members. With participants at the Virtual UX Conference.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
A general technique that's helpful in many kinds of UX workshops and design ideation is to first have team members work independently to create diverging ideas and solutions. Then, as a separate step, everybody works together to converge on the final outcome.
A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.
In UX design, you always have to prioritize. Features, personas, usability problems, and the list goes on. Dot votes are a simple way to find the group sense of what's the most important.
The facilitator of a UX workshop, meeting, or other team activity anywhere in the design process has the job of enhancing the group's performance by optimizing the process through structure, activity, and guidance.
To launch a new design operations practice in a company, prioritize and aim for manageable and achievable first steps. Preferably measurable ones that can prove value and form the basis for subsequent steps.
Unsure how to get started using UX mapping methods? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to visualize UX insights and ideas into mapped visualizations.
In the discovery phase of a UX project, a problem statement is used to identify and frame the problem to be explored and solved, as well as to communicate the discovery’s scope and focus.
Even people with limited drawing abilities can learn to sketch a wireframe if they learn a few common conventions used to represent various design elements.
Feedback during design critiques can be filled with hypothetical scenarios and unactionable suggestions. The right facilitation techniques help stakeholders and team members stay on track while still feeling heard.
Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.
We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.
Set yourself up for journey-mapping success by educating yourself on the basics, defining objectives, building a crossfunctional team, collaborating on the map, and optimizing your presentation.
Communication is the top challenge when designing remotely, according to 213 UX professionals. Receiving feedback, replicating informal conversations, and maintaining a clear direction on projects were the biggest communication concerns.
