Design Studio workshop

TL;DR

Design studio workshops quickly generate multiple concepts for features and evaluate them. Invite a diverse group of participants for maximum effect.

What you'll need

  • Sharpies,
  • Blank paper
  • Mobile screen printouts
  • Post-its
  • Stickers

A design studio workshop is used for rapidly generating concepts and then evaluating them. Obtaining input from colleagues in your team and/or stakeholders can drive engagement and ownership of the project. It can help generate concepts and design directions that one single person / small team could not come up with. A design studio workshop is best run at the divergent parts of the #double diamond process.

Before

Who should be invited? Inviting a diverse range of attendees adds to the chances of success. Choose participants from your team, stakeholders and colleagues not associated with your project.

Grab sharpies, blank paper (multiple printouts of mobile screens will speed up the process), post-its and stickers.

During

To produce as many ideas as possible, you’ll want to run rapid, timed sketching cycles. You can use an activity such as 8 ideas in 5mins and mention that at this stage, every idea is a good one. Stick those ideas up and ask participants to run through each of them quickly with the team.

Once this stage is done, you can use #dot voting to establish concepts you want to prioritise investigating.

Next, ask participants to work for 5 minutes fleshing out their best idea, and again, present to the team. After that participants are allocated another 5 minutes to sketch a potential user flow using the previous sketch as a base. Use dot voting again to obtain an understanding of which ideas designers might want to move forward with.

After

After this workshop is complete, designers will have a number concrete ideas to go forward with. An understanding of how these have been developed adds to the chance of success.

If you want to up your UX game, take the Product Design (UX/UI) Master Course over at DesignerUp