Lean and agile methodologies allow the development of mobile applications. in record time, thanks to the collaborative work of interdisciplinary teams over short development cycles. Product design is then done in parallel and no longer upstream as is the case in the waterfall model.

This poses new challenges. How do you iterate effectively on design points like design and user experience? What can you do to ensure that everyone on the team is aligned with the same vision for the product, knowing that it will change along the way?

The Lean UX methodology, on which we are based at BAM, provides answers to these questions, as well as tools to implement them. Today I am going to go into detail about one of them - and in my opinion the most effective - theUX workshop.

What is a UX workshop?

The UX workshop is a collaborative moment of the team where it answers a specific problem concerning the user experience of its product: new functionality to design, user feedback to integrate, iteration on an existing feature, etc.

The aim of a workshop is to produce : it's not just about talking, but about working together (often through creative and fun exercises), and coming out with tangible results (wireframes, prioritized features, new or updated screens, etc.) that can be implemented quickly.

What does it bring?

The main advantage of a UX workshop is immediate value creation. Collaborativity makes it possible to streamline the creative process by taking advantage of the vision, feedback and business expertise of each team member - Product Owner, UX designer, Scrum Master, and developers: there are plenty of proposed solutions, and the best ones are identified more quickly. By validating as they go, the Product Owner allows the team to move forward more quickly.

The consequence of all this is immediate team alignment to the new direction taken by the product, whether aesthetic or functional. Each member adheres to it all the more easily because he took part in its creation.

When to do a UX workshop?

As mentioned above, the aim of a UX workshop is to produce. To do this you have to know exactly what questions the team wants to answer, and in what form.

If you're asking yourself any of the following questions, you probably need a UX workshop:

• What will be the user journey for a new product?
• How will a new feature integrate with the existing user experience?
• How to integrate the latest user feedback?
• My users get lost in the application: how can I improve navigation?
• What will the next screens that will be developed look like?
• What features should be implemented in the coming weeks, and are they well specified?

And in concrete terms, how does that happen?

There are as many ways to conduct a UX workshop as there are companies using Lean methodologies. However, they all follow the same main principles. Here are some tips for making your UX workshops smooth and productive.

Define precisely the subject and the expected result of the workshop

If you have scheduled a UX workshop, it is because you are asking yourself one of the questions mentioned above. Don't stop there: break it down into points or steps that you can deal with one by one. The more specific you are, the more concrete your solutions will be.

Think about the solutions you want to arrive at the end of the workshop, and what forms they should take, such as:

• Wireframes new screens
• Existing screens updated
• new “user stories” written and prioritized
• navigation tree

Go even further: make a checklist of everything that a solution must respect to be considered finalized - choice of color, icons, screen sizes or users concerned, types of error messages, number of clicks to reach an element etc. The more specific you are, the more specific you are, the more quickly your solutions will be implementable.

In a recent example, the product I am developing with one of our customers encountered the following problem: user tests show that a key feature of the application is not intuitive at all. However, after explanations, users are excited about the feature.

We therefore consider it necessary to redesign it to make it more intuitive, with more visible actions, and a clearer hierarchy of information. To know exactly what form these solutions should take, we are scheduling a UX workshop. At the end of this workshop, we want to have wireframes of the redesigned screen so that we can create the associated mockups, as well as the corresponding user stories to be ready to start development.

Invite the right people

To know who should participate in a UX workshop, ask yourself these two questions:

• Are all team members represented? Ideally, to ensure the alignment of all its members, the entire team should be present. However, this is not always possible - and not always desirable if it is too broad. At least one representative of each discipline - technical, design or other - on the team must then be present. He must then inform his peers of the decisions taken during the workshop.
• Do you have access to all the business expertise you need to solve your problem? Sometimes the team doesn't have all the knowledge they need to answer certain topics. Do not hesitate to invite any external business expert who could contribute to the workshop. It is also desirable to invite any project stakeholder who has an influence on the decision chain, always in order to streamline validation and to be aligned with the same objective.

For the UX workshop in the previous example, the following are invited: a developer (who represents the technical team, and who is there to ensure the technical feasibility of the solutions provided), the Scrum Master, the UX designer (myself) and the Product Owner (myself) and the Product Owner (my client, who represents the vision of the product and part of the business expertise).

We also invite a Stakeholder (stakeholder) who is also a decision-maker within the project. And finally, we also invite a business expert external to the team, close to the users, and better able to understand why the solutions originally implemented were not immediately understood in use.

Preparing for the UX workshop

To ensure the smooth running of the workshop, make sure that:

• The meeting place is well suited. Spacious enough to accommodate everyone, equipped with all the equipment you need - board, pens, projector, etc. - and above all, well reserved for the duration of the workshop, in order to avoid untimely intrusions.
• The workshop is delimited in time. Setting a time limit to reach your goals is the best way to ensure the effectiveness of the workshop, by cutting short digressions, even if it means making it the subject of a future workshop. For most subjects, 2 hours will be enough for you. Instead, allow 4 hours for complex issues with high stakes.
• The necessary data has been collected and disseminated: benchmarks, user feedback, analytics data... must have been analyzed and the team briefed.
• An agenda has been drawn up. If the workshop needs to deal with more than one issue, allocate time to each topic, and deal with them in order of priority, so you can defer any minor questions to another workshop if necessary.

Introduce the UX workshop

Always take a few minutes at the start of the workshop to present it, especially if you have participants who are not familiar with the concept. Then remember the questions to be addressed during the workshop, the agenda and the expected results at the end. Make sure they are clear to everyone before you start.

Involve everyone

The UX workshop is collaborative. This allows everyone to benefit from each other's business expertise and experiences, and to reach solutions that can be validated immediately. We must therefore be careful that everyone participates:

• Encourage the timid to speak up, and be careful that no one has the time to speak for too long.
• Try to create a trusting environment where everyone can contribute their ideas without fear of being judged.
• With every decision made, make sure the whole team is aligned. Don't let the group make hasty decisions, even if it means putting off some discussions until later.
• If a participant is hesitant about a proposed solution, do not hesitate to explore with him the reasons behind his reservations, even if he is the only one to have them: he may have put his finger on a weak point in the solution that no one had identified.

During the workshop, we draw the solutions we are considering on the board. To start the discussion, I draw the existing screen. Can I summarize the user feedback that we have had and that we need to send. I hand the pen to the Product Owner, so that he can give us his vision of the functionality. I invite the Stakeholder to validate this vision, since he is the one who carries the decision-making power.

We are starting to come up with solutions. I invite each member present to contribute their vision of the solution. At some point, the developer shows signs of hesitation. Digging a little deeper, we realize that the solution chosen so far requires too much redesign of the page. He wonders if there is not a solution that is simpler, but that achieves the same end result. However, he cannot know what form this could take.

We start from his remark, and continue to iterate. A new solution is proposed. I go around the table to see if it's right for everyone. As is the case, we are addressing the next point.

Fun exercises to help the creative process

The aim of the UX workshop is to produce, and the expected results are often graphical (wireframes) or functional (user stories). This may frighten some participants who are not used to creative processes. Some operating methods and frameworks make it possible to overcome this, by presenting them in the form of fun exercises.

For example, you can start on the principle of divergence/convergence: take ten minutes for everyone to think of solutions individually, then put them in common. Assemble the elements of different ideas, challenge them, and iterate until you reach a solution that is accepted by all.

You can also get everyone to work on a common medium. Start with a drawing or a diagram (for example, a representation of the existing) and ask everyone to add or remove elements, based on their expertise, their observations or the data they have at their disposal. So iterate on the same medium until everyone is happy with the result.

Conclude and archive

Leave a few minutes at the end of the workshop to review the outputs created. Have you answered all of the questions on the agenda? Did the solutions provided convince all participants? Have they all been formalized correctly? If the workshop raised new questions that need quick answers, schedule a new workshop with the team as soon as possible.

Think of keep track of outputs in order to facilitate the sharing and updating of team members not present at the workshop. It also makes it possible to create a history of the project by showing the evolution of the product vision over the course of the workshops.

The UX workshop is a very powerful design tool, because it makes it possible in a relatively short time to find solutions to UX problems that are often complex. This format makes it possible to focus on targeted questions each time and to provide concrete solutions, and it can be repeated often so that any problem put aside does not run the risk of being taken up again too late. It also saves communication time within the team, by ensuring the immediate alignment of each member with the vision of the product, and by validating the solutions immediately with the Product Owner. Thanks to this, it is entirely possible to iterate on product design and design, in the same way and in parallel with the development iteration, all for a more agile, more efficient and more fluid production chain.

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