How to run Co-Create Workshops

By 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: 

1. BA Business case: As-is journey (if existing product/service), define problem statement. 

2. UX Research Playback 

• Design trends: where similar products or services exist or drawing parallel industry inspirations. 
• Customer insights: understand customer pain points. 

3. Persona creation: visualise who you are designing for. 

4. User Journey Creation: map out the optimal flow. 

5. Low-fidelity wireframes: Crazy 8 collaboration 

6. 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: 

1. Time boxed: Limited in time to create a space for innovation to occur. 

2. Visual: make use of sticky notes or white boards 

3. Focused: purpose and working towards a goal in mind 

4. Organised: prepared and structured 

Things to aim for: 

1. Flexibility: Discover connections between ideas 
2. Fluency: produce new ideas 
3. Originality: seek to innovate patterns to solving  
4. Awareness: move beyond simple or obvious  
5. 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: 

1. Start with a basic structure—think about the header, footer, and basic web layouts. 
2. Purpose: ensure that each element on the page is useful to the user at the given stage of the interaction. 
3. Gather feedback. 
4. Commit to software. 
5. Research: check industry standards for your components 
6. Check for UX principles. 
7. Prototype 
8. Usability test 
9. Refine