INTRODUCTION

We’ve all been there. You’re starting a new project and you’re already stuck. Where to begin? You’ve heard that a lot of people don’t like what exists right now – whether it be a website or an app or some other product. But how do you move forward? My recommendation? Step back.

Hear me out. We all want to jump into action and start redesigning or rebuilding something better. But how do you know if it’s going to be better if you don’t slow down and really consider the why behind your product? That’s why I like to jump into workshops – specifically, workshops that focus on the users of the product.

Here are a handful of my favorite user-focused workshops you can try out with your team. Each has its own purpose, but they’re intended to build upon one another – starting high level and getting more and more tactical. You can pick and choose which workshops are best for you based on how well you know your users already.

The UX workshops included are:

• User brainstorm session: determining your target audience
• Tweet writing: stepping into your users’ heads
• Persona exploration: visualizing your users
• Empathy mapping: understanding what makes your users tick
• Solutions & anti-solutions: brainstorming solutions

“How do I figure out who my target audience is? Can’t we just target everyone?”

It’s tempting to think that your product or service could appeal to everyone, but that’s rarely the case – or even desirable. Successful products are usually designed with specific users in mind. Your goal should be to identify and focus on the audience whose needs most closely align with what you’re providing. This targeted approach allows you to create a more impactful and effective solution. So, how do you figure out who your target audience is? Let’s start by narrowing it down.

User Brainstorm Session

Start simple! When there’s a question as vague as “who are our audiences?,” there can be a LOT of answers. So, get them all on paper. 

Set a timer for a couple minutes (I usually start with 5 minutes). Ask your team to write all their thoughts down on sticky notes and place them on the board. If participants begin to slow down, you can always end the timer early.

Next, have the group organize the sticky notes to better define these groups. This’ll allow you all to see where the team seems to agree or disagree.

Then start talkin’! It’s important for the entire team to know who you’re trying to reach. So start sharing what you’re noticing. Start asking questions. Work with the team to get aligned and figure out who your most important audiences are.

✨ Pro Tip: As participants are writing their thoughts, take notes on questions that pop into your head. What audiences seem to come up a lot? What audiences appear to be outliers? What audiences seem to be contradictory? These simple questions can be a goldmine of information (or a can of worms you want to address early)!

“How do I begin to think about what we want to achieve for our users?”

It can be incredibly challenging to step outside of yourself and into the shoes of someone else – especially if they’re not super similar to yourself. That’s why I like to ease into it. This exercise doubles as a sort of icebreaker, as well as a creative way to get into your audiences’ heads.

Tweet Writing

Despite the myriad of opinions about X (formerly known as Twitter), it is a great way to quickly and succinctly (or sometimes not so succinctly) get someone’s opinion on things.

This activity is a bit of role play. Invite your participants to take a moment to imagine that they are a member of the primary audience. Envision that the new digital experience is live, they’re using it, and they love it. Set a timer for a few minutes (2 minutes is typically enough). Then ask your participants to write a tweet about it!

At the end of the two minutes, ask everyone to read through the tweets. Invite participants to comment on items they like (or even disagree with!).

✨ Pro Tip: Many virtual workshop platforms (such as Miro) have built in voting capabilities. If you’re crunched for time, set up some quick dot voting that allows users to place 3 dots on their favorite answers. Then, just discuss the items that got the most votes!

Note that people may sometimes have a hard time getting into the mindset. If this is the case, it can help to invite participants to close their eyes for a few minutes beforehand and ask some thought starter questions. “You’re using the new website. What do you think? What really makes your life easier? What’s memorable to you?”

Another thing – you can (and should!) participate in this exercise too! Throw some emojis in there. Tag another user. Use some hashtags. By participating yourself, you set the tone for participants to let their guard down and play. Even if you don’t know the audience very well, what’s important is the vulnerability. Let yourself get it wrong. Ask participants to help you learn. This is an excellent opportunity to build a relationship with your team, and building that relationship is easiest if you let your guard down first.

“How do I begin visualizing who my users are?”

Discussing users can be overwhelming. It’s easy to go down rabbit holes and realize you’ve missed some crucial information or discussion points. That’s why I like to do a guided persona exploration exercise, where we slow down and discuss each audiences’ demographics and personality, goals, pain points, and motivations one at a time.

Persona Exploration

Before starting this exercise, prepare participants for what to expect. Tell them, as a team, you’re going to go through four main topics, one by one, and discuss each individually.

Personally, I prefer to lead users in a specific order: (1) persona (demographics/personality), (2) what they’re trying to achieve, (3) pain points, and finally (4) motivations. This allows participants to move from something physical and tangible (e.g. gender, family make up, job description) to something more abstract (e.g. emotional state, fears, goals).

Set a timer and let everyone start dragging sticky notes to the board and enter information. I like to start with 3 minutes for each block. If you find that people are still pretty active at the end, you can always extend the length (and vice versa).

Then, chat! Call out trends you’re noticing. Call out questions you have. Bring up items that contradict one another. I’d set a timer for these too (5 minutes is usually good), as it’s easy to lose track of time here! I’d also recommend having someone on your team in the background adding notes as you keep participants engaged.

✨ Pro Tip: During the pain points/motivators, it’s common for participants to focus only on what pain point their product or service alleviates. This is useful, but it can be valuable to encourage participants to think about other pain points. Are they a parent working all day before ushering grade school kids around to activities all evening? Are they in a highly stressful and competitive industry? These items may not result in specific solutions, but they can help you understand how the product fits into the user’s life and how small design decisions can really help them out.

“How do I better understand what makes my users tick?”

This workshop is meant to be much deeper. It requires more empathic work, but the reward can be immense. Why? Because the more deeply you know your audience, the better you can anticipate their needs. This allows you to alleviate their concerns or pain points before your users are consciously aware of them. It can take time, but I promise it’s worth it.

Empathy Mapping

Empathy Mapping involves moving through four quadrants for each persona – all of which come together to thoroughly understand your users on a fundamental level. The four quadrants are:

1. Thinks & Feels – Values, motivators, fears, feelings
2. Sees – Environment, marketplace, competition
3. Say and Do – Quotes, actions
4. Hear – Opinions, external influences, media channels

You can move through these in any order – or if you’ve already done a persona exploration exercise, you can do them all at once! Just make sure you give your team enough time to complete the activity. I like to do 2 minutes of time per quadrant, or 6 minutes for all of it. Of course, your group may need more or less time – never be afraid to pivot accordingly.

Like other workshops, you’ll see trends pop out, but I would recommend really focusing on the contradictions. Do their actions go against their own motivations? Do they hear things that go against their fears? These contradictions can all exist at once, and when examined can provide some deep fundamental truths about your users.

“How do I find solutions that will help my users?”

If you’ve gone through all these workshops, you’ve had plenty of time to get to know your audiences. Now it’s time to bring it back to your product. A solutions & anti-solutions workshop allows your team to begin brainstorming ways to solve your users’ biggest challenges.

Solutions & Anti-solutions

Start by deciding which user you want to discuss, and what major challenge you can help them solve. These should come up pretty naturally in the other workshops, but if you’re stuck, ask your team “out of all our user’s challenges, which are in our control to help them with?” If there are multiple, there’s nothing wrong with doing this workshop multiple times!

Now’s where the real workshop begins. The task for everyone is to enter solutions (or anti-solutions) into sticky notes and place them on the board. An anti-solution is anything that would actively go against helping your user achieve their goal. While solutions are more valuable, it can be difficult to solve a problem with a blank canvas. It’s often easier to come up with tactics that won’t solve the problem. Then your team has somewhere to start.

This is a workshop your team can complete all at once – no need to start with anti-solutions and then move to solutions. I like to set a timer for around 5 minutes, and then take 5 to 10 minutes to discuss common solutions with the team. Consider respectfully poking holes in solutions as well. There’s nothing wrong with bringing up potential roadblocks – so long as you approach the roadblocks with the goal of overcoming them.

✨ Pro Tip: It can be difficult to poke holes without being discouraging. My best advice is to slow down and reiterate what’s good about the idea before bringing up your concern in the form of a question.  Consider saying something like “I love that [the solution] would solve [user’s problem]. I’m wondering if we need to think about the amount of time it’d take to accomplish this. What do you all think?”

CONCLUSION

Well, there you have it! 5 workshops that you can mix and match to help your team make user-based decisions. What do you think? Have you tried any of these workshops before? How did it go? Did you need to tweak any of the workshops for a specific reason? I’d love to know! Comment below to let me know, or message me on LinkedIn.