Design Thinking Workshop

Summary

Move from user research, through concept development, to a tested prototype and implementation plan, all in one intensive week of design thinking. Our team leads you through the Design Thinking (iteration zero, design sprint) process, leaving you not just with the genesis of a new product, but also the knowledge to run the process yourself next time.

Details

Using your data or ours (for instance from a Workplace Anthropology study), we identify the key users, their important tasks and the tools they’ll need to achieve success.

We take the whole team out to observe these users performing the tasks you care about. Then, your whole team works with us to extract the key pain points from their observations, and turn those into goals for the new product.

Once we have goals, we get the team thinking creatively about potential solutions, and narrow those down into a workable set which we storyboard and build as a paper prototype.

We test the team’s concepts by running a quick usability study with the prototype, then use the results of that study to create a high-level implementation plan, prioritizing the capabilities that will add the most user and business benefit.

Through this whole process, the key members of your product team are exploring, learning, and becoming more user-centric in their approach to product development. We help them become data-driven rather than opinion-driven. We show them how to use what they’ve learned during the design thinking process through the whole of the product development lifecycle.

Deliverables

Output from the workshop consists of

  • Visual summary of user experience across time, interaction points with each area of the company.
  • List of top user pain points, core user experience goals.
  • A user-tested paper prototype and a set of design principles from which to build working code. This becomes the system “blueprint.”
  • High-level plan. Capabilities/agile stories mapped in the order of the user’s journey through the product. Stories prioritized (backlog) and split by phase.
  • A best practices list to guide future development work, which also serves as a set of guidelines for redesigning other areas of the site thanks to the re-usable design pattern approach
  • Risk mitigation plan. Risk areas identified, along with the metrics to track during development and release in order to mitigate those risks.

Benefits

  • Creates a picture of true user needs, pain points with current offerings, and potential directions for truly differentiated and satisfying products.
  • Prototype interface design allows intuitive communication between team members, with management, and with users.
  • User feedback very early in the process verifies the team’s assumptions and ensures that development starts on the right track, delivers core functionality early, and that the delivered functionality will be well received by the target audience.
  • Project team becomes better integrated, shares common understanding of design principles and core data, and thus can develop solutions faster and with less room for inaccurate assumptions of user needs.
  • Overall time-to-plan is much shorter than with conventional practices.

Price: US$ 58,000 – see our Pricing page for more information

Duration: two days of highly interactive classroom style learning, followed by an intensive week-long design thinking workshop. Subsequent coaching calls as necessary during your implementation process.

Prerequisites: high availability from your main business and technical staff for the workshop week.

Next steps

To find out more and to discuss how a design definition workshop can improve your whole development process, talk to us by e-mail: info@ [this site’s domain]