Design Workshop Deliverables

A facilitator's primary goal is to document all insights generated during a workshop and ensure that team members can easily refer to them in the future.

Your team may need workshop deliverables for:

• Planning the next steps
• Making a final design solution
• Supporting your case during disagreements
• Planning the next workshop

Depending on the type of workshop, teams can develop different types of deliverables. For example, during a discovery workshop, you'll probably get a product vision board, product roadmap, and UX strategy canvas. Ideation workshops can result in sketches and affinity maps, and so on.^[1]

One of the primary sources of workshop documentation includes notes taken by the facilitator during the workshop and notes generated by participants on critical topics. The team may use these notes as a reference point to support an idea or clarify things in the future. If you don’t like the idea of storing piles of sticky notes or sheets of paper, you can digitize them in a simple Google Docs, Notion file, or using the Post-it app.

During in-person and hybrid workshops, facilitators often use whiteboards and easels to capture participants' ideas, sketch user personas, or jot down the product vision. All products of shared outputs should be documented and saved since they represent the entire team's work.

Take photos of whiteboards and easels so that people can reference them in the future. Plus, it's much easier to upload digital assets to a cloud service and share them instantly with team members or clients instead of storing piles of paper.

Workshops often include activities that participants are expected to complete individually. For example, during ideation workshops, participants often spend the first part of the session reflecting on a problem and developing ideas on their own, and then they may converge and consolidate those ideas.

You don't need to store all of the participants' notes. Prioritize and decide on which outputs should be digitized for easy referencing in the future.

The goals of discovery workshops include defining the requirements, documenting the project scope and milestones, and describing project processes. It's crucial to thoroughly document this data and digitize it soon after the workshop for further reference.

Requirements can be determined during other types of design workshops as well. The point is that a facilitator should be prepared to write down the requirements or take a picture of them on the whiteboard before the team gets carried away with discussions and forgets about them.

By the end of the workshop discussions, the team often comes together to define the next steps. They generally include certain activities — for example, clarifying user needs by scheduling a few interviews, updating a user persona if necessary, wireframing a possible design solution, discussing its possible technical requirements with the dev team, etc. The next steps will also include one or more assignees responsible for these tasks along with the due date.

A clear outline and concrete goals help the team see the tangible results of the workshop and motivate them to keep going.

Workshops conducted at the early stages of a project usually lead to the definition of roles and responsibilities. Documenting this information helps avoid confusion about who on a team is responsible for each task.

For example, is your UX designer responsible for user research and information architecture on a project, or do you have a UX researcher or information architect to take care of those tasks? Who does the UX copy for designs — UX writers, UX designers, or UI designers? Who is responsible for aggregating and analyzing UX research findings? How does the team process bugs?

The goal is not to create a long-read document that takes time and effort to scan. Team members and other stakeholders should be able to access this workshop deliverable whenever they need to find and refresh data quickly.

Once the workshop is done, facilitators should take some time to document the findings that came out of it. If the workshop spans a few days, be sure to document each day thoroughly.^[2]

Ideally, the post-workshop report should align with the list of outcomes created at the beginning of the workshop to plan and structure the session. The document may include attachments or links to other deliverables (screens, ideas, notes, user flows, etc.) stored in the cloud and demonstrate the workshop's benefits to the participants and stakeholders.