How to run Co-Create Workshops
Candice Boucher
Co-creation is an important phase in the development of products or services; it’s a forum that gives all agile participants the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and ideas towards the final solution.
Typically, these take place as half-day workshops per feature and include:
- Product owner
- Designer
- Developer
- Business Analyst
- Tester
Agenda:
- BA Business case: As-is journey (if existing product/service), define problem statement.
- UX Research Playback
- Design trends: where similar products or services exist or drawing parallel industry inspirations.
- Customer insights: understand customer pain points.
- Persona creation: visualise who you are designing for.
- User Journey Creation: map out the optimal flow.
- Low-fidelity wireframes: Crazy 8 collaboration
- Feature matrix prioritisation: define the most to least important features; this will give you the next starting point for the next co-create session.
Co-create workshops should be:
- Time boxed: Limited in time to create a space for innovation to occur.
- Visual: make use of sticky notes or white boards
- Focused: purpose and working towards a goal in mind
- Organised: prepared and structured
Things to aim for:
- Flexibility: Discover connections between ideas
- Fluency: produce new ideas
- Originality: seek to innovate patterns to solving
- Awareness: move beyond simple or obvious
- Courage: explore without judgement
Things to avoid:
- Overthinking: Try not to get into the solution of each idea; first gather all ideas; then, after the exercise time box is reached, assess and think through the idea.
- Talking instead of drawing: There should be no talking about the solution; the idea is to capture your ideas on paper only.
- Passing judgement: Create a space that is safe to voice ideas without judgement.
- Perfection: Do not aim for perfection; rather, ensure that many ideas are generated and then assess each idea for relevance.
- Fear: Have the courage to voice new ideas.
Crazy 8 Method: Take a feature from the backlog and map out the user journey:
- Draw 8 blocks on an A4 piece of paper.
- Allow each team member to sketch out what the screens will look like for that feature using the 8 blocks.
- 90-second time box
- Allow each team member to present their solution.
- Find commonalities.
- Mock up one end-to-end solution.
Why is this process valuable?
- It gives designers a starting point for creating their mockups.
- It can be used as a reference point for user story creation.
- Communicates functionality to the team.
- It can be used to get early feedback from users.
- Allows for quick iterations and refinements as it’s not been timorously committed to design or development software.
Tips to create great wireframes:
- Start with a basic structure—think about the header, footer, and basic web layouts.
- Purpose: ensure that each element on the page is useful to the user at the given stage of the interaction.
- Gather feedback.
- Commit to software.
- Research: check industry standards for your components
- Check for UX principles.
- Prototype
- Usability test
- Refine