Here’s the low down on how to run a quick (45 – 60 mins) face to face workshop, introducing user centred design concepts to people new to it.
It aims to keep the teaching to a minimum and very much focuses on ‘learning by doing’. I’ve included the slides as an embed in this post to help visualise things, but also as an editable download at the end, so you can make it your own.
There are three introductory slides to begin with. One is the title slide – over which I just chat briefly about the benefits of user centred design. A key element of this is emphasising that a focus on meeting user needs helps the organisation achieve its own outcomes. An example of this is designing digital services so good, people choose to use them; rather than forcing people via channel shift tactics to cheaper, online channels.
I then explain what we will be doing – using two design approaches to help identify ways we could improve a process, service, or product. These approaches are personas and empathy maps. I chose these because they are simple and effective, but also it’s possible for people to have some fun with them.
The next two slides give an overview of personas and empathy maps – nice and simple. I chat through them, then get straight onto the exercise steps.
Step 1 – make your persona. In groups, I ask everyone to use pen and paper to come up with their personas. They could be external to the Council (residents, communities, businesses etc) or internal (colleagues, councillors, and so forth). I give them a list of characteristics to note down, but encourage people to add their own to flesh out their characters, and to draw a picture if they wanted. After 10 minutes, I ask a couple of tables to feedback on their personas, which often raises a few laughs and keeps folk engaged but also gives them confidence they are on the right lines.
Step 2 – identify a thing for them to do. This is a super short element, where the groups are asked to give a task to their persona. A slide gives some examples, but they they are encouraged to come up with their own.
Step 3 – produce an empathy map for their persona doing that thing. This is the longest section of the exercise. I put up a slide to remind everyone of the thinks/says/feels/does elements of an empathy map, and let the groups get on with creating them for their personas attempting the thing they identified for them. At the end, different tables spoke about their maps.
Step 4 – create actionable insight. Finally, I ask the groups to come up with practical ideas for improving that user’s experience, given their new found understanding of their situation. A slide suggests changes to communications, content and interaction design, process tweaks, and so on. Again, feedback at this stage helps embed and validate the learning.
Finally I present a slide summarising everything, which really centred on two main messages:
- your users are not horrible people – they don’t deliberately set out to annoy you and do the wrong thing. They are people with a lot going on in their lives – just like you! Try and be more understanding and make it easier for them to do the right things.
- this didn’t take very long, so you have no excuses! – the whole exercise was done and dusted in less that 45 minutes. For me this really emphasised the point that time is no impediment to user centred design – you just need the will to do it, some paper and pens, and colleagues to join in with you.
You can download the slides if you would like to run this exercise with your teams. If you leave the Localise logo somewhere on them for a bit of credit, that would be nice!
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