Design Workshop Types

Discovery workshops usually occur at the beginning of a project or a stage. They help teams understand business requirements and find agreement on project plans based on their existing knowledge.

Discovery workshops should include key project roles such as team leads, sponsors, and other individuals who are in charge of making vital decisions about the project's future.

The outcomes of this type of workshop may include:

• Defined requirements
• Documented scope and milestones
• Described project processes and roles^[1]

Planning a vacation involves figuring out how to get to the destination, where to stay, what to see, and what luggage to take. Likewise, product or service development also requires planning and defining goals. That's when a discovery workshop comes in handy.

What are the goals of a discovery workshop?

• Understanding stakeholders' vision of the project and their expectations
• Evaluating existing research data and developing research plans for the future
• Building a mutual understanding of the project's vision, key milestones, priorities, risks, and requirements within the team
• Discussing all the aspects that may influence the project, like culture, mindsets, the collaboration between different roles, responsibilities, etc.

Empathy workshops invite team members and stakeholders to define and prioritize user needs before designing a solution. The best timing for these workshops is at the beginning of a project to develop empathy for users and introduce a user-centric approach within your team.

Another occasion for conducting empathy workshops is after new user research or testing has been conducted. You can update your roadmap of design decisions based on recently collected research findings about user behaviors, needs, pain points, and preferences.

Empathy workshops provide an excellent opportunity for UX practitioners to draw stakeholders' attention to users and explain how your product or service can fix their problems and fulfill their needs. Use them to explain the impact of the user-centric approach on business success.

The goals of empathy workshops include:

• Building empathy for users
• Understanding user needs, motivations, pain points, and behaviors
• Shifting stakeholder perspective from a feature-first to user-first mindset
• Introducing user research findings to influence future design decisions

Critique workshops help ensure that designs adhere to current user needs. The discussion should have screenshots or prototypes that need to be evaluated at hand and a whiteboard to capture new ideas. Invite people fulfilling multidisciplinary roles critical to the design process, like UX/UI designers, engineers, business analysts, product designers, UX writers, or others responsible for these tasks.

Critique workshops may take place:

• At the beginning of a project. Teams evaluate designs against user goals, heuristics, or principles to shape the new design direction.
• At important milestones of the iterative design process. Critique workshops help ensure designs are on track with user needs, principles, or other measurable criteria.

Contrary to its name, critique workshops don't aim to attack or tear down a designer's work. Critique workshops are focused on:

• Evaluating existing content or designs from users' perspectives
• Evaluating designs with usability heuristics or design principles formulated by the team
• Thinking of possible and quick solutions
• Building long-term plans for design optimization
• Hearing out the opinions of teammates with different job functions
• Comparing competitors' designs or other experiences that have features you want to add to your product or service

Design workshops are aimed at brainstorming and generating all possible, innovative design solutions. They allow for engaging people with cross-disciplinary roles on a team in an informal discussion to capture the most remarkable and unexpected ideas. For the discussion, prepare a whiteboard, colored sticky notes, or markers, or if it's online, make sure the digital tool is easy and quick to learn.

When is the best time to hold design workshops? Generating ideas is always welcome, but sometimes, they might shift teams off track. So, the ideal timing for having design workshops includes periods like:

• The beginning of a project: To inspire collaboration and build ownership of ideas and the design process.
• After user research is conducted: New findings might inspire new design solutions for existing problems.
• After the initial design stage: To evaluate and adjust the existing design direction and explore new user flows.

A design workshop enables collaboration among cross-disciplinary team members, allowing them to express their most extraordinary ideas without fear of judgment.

The goals of design workshops include:

• Fostering discussion and capturing as many ideas as possible
• Involving people from different teams and looking at challenges from their perspective
• Encouraging shared ownership of the project's success and product vision. It means that everybody on a team has a clear vision of product scope, takes responsibility for their contribution, and understands how their work influences users

Prioritization workshops serve as filters for evaluating multiple features and determining which ones have more value and priority for users and stakeholders. Prioritization workshops help save existing resources, prevent your team from burning out, and assist in achieving milestones.

Conduct prioritization workshops when:

• It's the beginning of a project, and the number of features and ideas is overwhelming
• You're conducting user research and decide to engage users to prioritize features based on their needs and preferences
• The design creation is in progress, you experience scope creep, and need to reevaluate the tasks needed to achieve a milestone

While design workshops encourage team members to generate as many ideas as possible, prioritization workshops help slow down and take a fresh look at what features are a must and what are nice-to-haves ones that can take a backseat.

Conduct prioritization workshops to:

• Prioritize features and ideas
• Clean up feature overload and prevent product stagnation
• Shift focus on important and feasible features
• Find agreement with stakeholders

Ideation defines the 3rd step in the design thinking process and involves generating ideas to solve a specific challenge in a judgment-free environment. Likewise, during ideation workshops, participants are encouraged to share as many ideas as possible.

Ideation workshops are characterized by:

• Unusual settings: It's better if the workshop location is outside of a familiar working space to introduce new stimuli. Make sure participants still feel comfortable sharing their thoughts.
• Judgment-free environment: While the discussion is going on, teams should focus on the quantity, not the quality of ideas. You'll analyze them later in a follow-up session.
• Teammates from various departments: Invite people from various departments to hear diverse, out-of-box perspectives.

What is the best time to conduct ideation workshops?

• At the very beginning of a project
• After the completion of user research
• At any design stage where progress is slowed and you need to find new angles

Ideation workshops pursue the following goals:

• Encourage out-of-box thinking: Without the fear of being evaluated or judged, participants feel more liberated to generate the most adventurous, unexpected ideas for hard-to-crack challenges.
• Generate as many ideas as possible: The focus is on quantity instead of quality. Later on, the team can analyze and filter the most valuable ideas.
• Receive diverse opinions: Ideation workshops encourage inviting not only designers. Marketing people, developers, or project managers may offer innovative ideas and fascinating insights into your target users.

To reach these goals, facilitators often rely on diverse ideation techniques that help put people at ease, stimulate creative thinking, and generate the most outrageous, eccentric ideas.

For example, brainwriting is an alternative approach where participants don't say their thoughts aloud but are asked to write them down and pass them to a neighbor, who, in turn, can add new ideas or read them all out.

Another technique that can be used is Worst Possible Idea, where participants are asked to come up with the worst possible, stupidest, and even contradicting ideas as solutions. Interestingly, this method helps relieve anxiety and tension and can lead to the most reasonable solution.^[2]