With any redesign effort, we face a number of challenges. One key challenge is gaining a proper appreciation for technology constraints and business requirements associated with the overall effort. In addition, there is also a need to include members of the team in the early concept phase as well. Their involvement is essential to ensure that design concepts are aligning with expectations.
Recently, we had the opportunity to help a client redesign their website. This site was moving from a “view only” type of model to providing customers with the ability to perform self-service transactions online. By the time we were brought in, the project team had already spent a good deal of time creating story cards and requirements. In addition, they had already chosen a development framework which had its own strengths and weaknesses.
An important step in the process was to hold a co-creation workshop. This workshop was held after personas had been created that helped to create a consensus among the project team about the primary needs and expectations of the users.
This is the type of rough wireframe that participants product in a Co-creation Workshop.
The co-creation workshop itself was held over four hours. The attendees were broken into two groups of four and asked to generate four ideas for the design of each task on the proposed website. They were provided with Sharpies and paper with design grids.
- Focus: It was important for us to review the key findings from the persona work we had just completed to ensure that everyone was clear on the expectations of our target users.
- Planning: Since we were redesigning a self-service website, it was important for us to invite people who serve in front line roles and work with customers on a daily basis. Representation from design/IT, marketing and the call center is key in this regard. In addition, it is important to have representation from project management and design.
- Keep the Attendee List Small: Ideally, it is best to keep the number of participants around six to eight. For our recent workshop, we had eight participants and broke them into two groups with a moderator for each.
- Data: The goal of the workshop is to generate LOTS of ideas. These ideas also generate a lot of discussion. All of this serves as a crash course for the design team on business processes and rules.
- Expectations: We did our best to establish the expectation that our participants were not invited for their artistic abilities, but rather we needed them to assist us with matching their specialized knowledge with idea generation. Sharpies were the design tool of choice since using them meant there would be less opportunity to focus on detailed designs. We were looking for high level concepts.
Overall, our co-creation workshop was a success. We spent four hours together and focused our time on two primary scenarios. The eight participants generated over 60 wireframes and had a great time doing so. In the end, we walked away from the co-creation workshop with a number of design ideas that took platform constraints and business rules into consideration.