Design thinking workshops are an essential part of any product design initiative. They help designers speed up their work, focus on the right problems, and align easily with key stakeholders.
As a professional in the field, you are likely to be leading design thinking workshops regularly, even if they are referred to by different names. Your role is crucial, as UX design itself is heavily based on design thinking principles.
In this blog, I look deeper into how to run an effective design thinking workshop. I’ll talk about it all — what design thinking is, how you can run design thinking workshops effectively, design thinking workshop activities and exercises, who you should invite, how long it should be, and a lot more.
What is design thinking?
Most UX design principles and processes come from the basics of design thinking.
Design thinking is a five-step process of solving complex and ambiguous problems:
- Empathize — Understanding user needs and pain points
- Define — Narrowing down the research into specific problem statement(s)
- Ideate — Finding solutions to the defined problems
- Prototype — Preparing an MVP to test if the solution solves the problem
- Test — Actually testing the prototype with users
What is a design thinking workshop?
A design thinking workshop is a way of going through the design thinking process in either one meeting or a series of short meetings.
The entire design thinking process can take weeks if not months. But, a design thinking workshop aims to go through the basics and essentials quickly.
In the spirit of Agile, it’s usually beneficial to run a few smaller iterations of the design thinking process rather than go through a lengthy waterfall approach — design thinking workshops help achieve exactly that.
How to run a design thinking workshop
Unsurprisingly, the structure of a design thinking workshop doesn’t differ much from the design thinking process itself. It usually consists of five main parts:
- Gathering existing insights (since it’s hard to do any new research in such a short time)
- Defining problem
- Ideating solutions
- Choosing solutions
- Prototyping
Block 1: Gather insights
The first step to running a design thinking workshop is to ensure everyone has access to the same information and insights. Different people in the group will bring different perspectives, and the design thinking workshop is the most effective when everyone sees the same picture.
If you don’t have too many insights yet, dedicate some time before the workshops to dig deeper into qualitative and quantitative data to find them.
Optimize the workshop time by aligning on the insights beforehand. But, there will inevitably be participants who arrive at the workshop unprepared, so plan accordingly.
Block 2: Define the problem
Now that all known insights are easily available, it’s time to define a shared problem statement. You’ll likely find more than one problem to solve, but the goal is to find the most important or urgent one. Other issues can be addressed in follow-up workshops.
Without a single well-defined problem, the group will likely pull into different directions during the next steps, so spend as much time as needed on this step.
Block 3: Ideate on solutions
With a clear problem to solve, it’s time to ideate potential solutions.
Some teams prefer to work asynchronously at this stage, debriefing after problem identification, working independently for a few days, and then reconvening to discuss ideas. While viable, this approach limits the ability to build on each other’s ideas, which can reduce overall effectiveness.
I recommend conducting a few ideation cycles. If you have 30 minutes, don’t spend 20 ideating and 10 sharing solutions. Instead, do three quicker cycles with, say, seven minutes for ideation and three for sharing. The extra sense of urgency will energize people, and the frequent sharing of ideas will keep the inspiration flowing.
Block 4: Choosing solutions
Now, the tricky part.
The most common approach to ideating on solutions and picking the best is to rank all solutions with some framework, such as ICE or impact matrix, and focus on the most valuable one.
Here’s what I prefer doing — I prioritize options based on how much I can learn from testing them. Not only does the extra learning make the next iterations better, but it also fuels better learning about users, which will help with all other initiatives.
If you’re not pressured for quick results, prioritize learning over short-term impact. It will pay off in the long run.
Block 5: Prototyping
In theory, the last step of the design thinking workshop should be to deliver a working prototype, but I always skip this phase.
There are a few reasons for this:
- After all the previous steps, people are already mentally tired
- UX designers know best how to approach actual execution, so there’s no need to involve additional stakeholders (although getting feedback along the way is still crucial)
- In reality, it often takes a couple of days to develop and approve the final MVP
If you really want to work on prototyping with the whole group, here are a few options.
- Use a virtual whiteboard for everyone to create rudimentary wireframes for further refinement
- Share screen and design on a single file with feedback and discussions on the go
- Split into smaller groups with at least one UX designer in each and come up with a small MVP prototype each
Who should be invited to a design thinking workshop?
Inviting participants to a design thinking workshop comes with a constant tradeoff. The more people you invite, the more diverse insights and ideas you’ll get, but the less time-efficient and energized the meeting will become.
Over the years, I’ve found that the sweet spot is usually between five and eight people, with up to twelve if the problem is very complex and requires multiple perspectives.
It’s a good practice to have at least one representative from the customer support, marketing, product, design, sales, and tech teams. This mix ensures that all bases are covered and the group benefits from various insights.
How long should a design thinking workshop last?
Well, it depends. Take three factors into account:
- Size of the group
- Size of the problem
- Level of precision you are aiming for
Bigger problems and larger groups will naturally take more time. If you aim to develop a full MVP within the workshop, you’ll need more time. But a one-hour session may suffice if you’re simply looking for a starting point.
And you don’t have to cover the entire design thinking process in one go. You can break it up into multiple sessions — one for gathering insights and defining problems, another for ideation and solution selection.
Ultimately, a design thinking workshop might be anything from an hour-long session to a week-long design sprint.
If you are just starting, I recommend a three-hour session with 45 minutes dedicated to the first four steps. Prototyping can be done as a follow-up activity.
This division of hours will give you a fantastic starting point. And then, of course, you need to experiment until you find the best setup for your team.
When to run a design thinking workshop
Clearly, design thinking workshops come with many benefits. But they’re not a silver-bullet solution. They are a great tool only if you:
- Know more or less what your strategic objectives are
- Already have a healthy amount of insights
- Lack of ideas and inspiration
Without some high-level objective in mind, you’ll have problems identifying valuable insights and figuring out which problems are worth tackling first.
And if you don’t have any preexisting insights to process, focus on gathering them first. No one needs workshop outcomes based purely on guesstimates and opinions.
Lastly, if you already have tons of well-thought-out ideas, testing them out will, in most cases, give you better ROI than another ideation session.
Closing thoughts
Design thinking workshops are a minimized version of the whole design thinking process.
Although going very deep in such a short time is impossible, they can’t replace the whole design thinking process. They are a great way to make the first steps fast and adopt a truly iterative approach to product design.
Whether as an ad-hoc workshop to align stakeholders and elicit ideas or as a part of the regular iterative design process, design thinking workshops are a great addition to any UX designer’s toolbox.