Design Workshop Activities

It doesn’t matter where you work and what your job role is, if you work with other people together as a team, you will always encounter the same challenges:

• Unclear goals and miscommunication that cause busy work and overtime
• Unstructured meetings that leave attendants tired, confused and without clear outcomes.
• Frustration builds up because internal challenges to productivity are not addressed
• Sudden changes in priorities lead to a loss of focus and momentum
• Muddled compromise takes the place of clear decision- making, leaving everybody to come up with their own interpretation.
• In short, a lack of structure leads to a waste of time and effort, projects that drag on for too long and frustrated, burnt out teams.
  

You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking.

This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!

Customer experience mapping is a method of documenting and visualizing the experience a customer has as they use the product or service. It also maps out their responses to their experiences.

To be used when there is a solution (even in a conceptual stage) that can be analyzed.

Brainwriting is essentially the same as brainstorming. Ideas are generated by asking people to write them down instead of verbally presenting them.

An empathy map is a tool to help a design team to empathize with the people they are designing for. You can make an empathy map for a group of people or for a persona.

To be used after doing personas when more insights are needed.

The lotus blossom method is a creativity exercise. It is a framework for idea generation, starting from one central theme. Eight conceptual themes grow out from the main theme and each of them are used as central theme to generate 8 more themes. Explore!

Following a similar structure of the Persona method, give your design personality by creating a design persona. This can be through visual design, copy, and interactions.

To be used when it is time to focus on product experience.

Dot voting is a collective way of prioritizing and converging on a design solution that uses group voting.

To be used when there are more ideas than can be feasible to develop further.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent a number of ideas or things. Mind maps are methods for analyzing information and relationships.

A concept sketch is a fast freehand drawing.

To be used in Ideation phase.

A brainstorming and prioritizing method that places emphasis on the most important ideas and actions.

A Morphological chart is a method that splits a product/solution into smaller chunks that can then be analyzed and ideated for independently. Afterwards those ideas can be mixed and matched to develop different solutions.

To be used after having a clear overview of the design problem and at the beginning of the ideation phase.