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March 6, 20243 mins Read
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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: 

  1. BA Business case: As-is journey (if existing product/service), define problem statement. 
  1. UX Research Playback 
  • Design trends: where similar products or services exist or drawing parallel industry inspirations. 
  • Customer insights: understand customer pain points. 
  1. Persona creation: visualise who you are designing for. 
  1. User Journey Creation: map out the optimal flow. 
  1. Low-fidelity wireframes: Crazy 8 collaboration 
  1. 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. 
  1. Visual: make use of sticky notes or white boards 
  1. Focused: purpose and working towards a goal in mind 
  1. 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