Guiding 100 UX/UI designers through a process to design a new feature for an existing product (Detailed Case study)
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The client - CareerFoundry
CareerFoundry is an online bootcamp that offers flexibly paced programs for career changers in a number of fields including UX and UI design. I was asked by CareerFoundry to run and design a workshop for their UX (User experience) and UI (User interface) design students. It was a fun but intense event where the biggest challenge was creating and facilitating a very interactive online event for 100 people. |
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The Challenge
CareerFoundry wanted to provide their UX and UI students with new ways of working as well as a way for them to connect and collaborate with fellow students that would increase their current level of motivation on the course
Additionally they wanted me to create a workshop that focussed on creating a new feature for an existing website.
The difficult part
CareerFoundry was going to invite all UX and UI students to participate in the session and said that I should plan for 100 students to attend. They wanted a really interactive session that would last 1.5 hours and be held online so that students all around the world could attend.
The approach
To create an interactive, online workshop for 100 people means you’ll need to put them into small groups where they can work together in breakout rooms. This makes sense when you consider what designing is like in the real world. It’s rare that you sit on your own designing something in a vacuum.
Collaboration is the key to unlocking potential within teams, so teaching the students techniques to help them share ideas, listen to each other and be inspired by each other would not only be fun but useful for their future careers as UX and UI designers.
Having only 1.5 hours to design a new feature together meant that my instructions had to be extremely clear and easy to follow. If I had to answer lots of questions about what they were meant to do or how to complete tasks I’d quickly waste lots of time and lose momentum. It would also become boring and frustrating for the participants, so clarity was key.
The workshop
1. Ice breaker: Your first pay check
The workshop would be hosted on Zoom and we would use Miro as our collaboration tool. While almost all of the students would have been familiar with Zoom, only a small minority of them would have used Miro. I would say Miro is a simple tool to use but with only 1.5 hours for the whole workshop I had to make the onboarding as simple and as smooth as possible.
I decided to use the ice breaker as the moment to introduce Miro and get the students using the tools that they would use for the rest of the workshop. It was also when I first put them into a breakout room, in groups of 5 people. They got to introduce themselves to each other and get to know the people they would be working with for the rest of the workshop.
After explaining how to navigate the board in Miro and some of the simple drawing tools I asked the students to think about what would happen when they finally landed their new UX or UI design job. I asked them to think about what they would do with their first pay check and gave them 3 minutes to draw it.
CareerFoundry wanted to provide their UX and UI students with new ways of working as well as a way for them to connect and collaborate with fellow students that would increase their current level of motivation on the course
Additionally they wanted me to create a workshop that focussed on creating a new feature for an existing website.
The difficult part
CareerFoundry was going to invite all UX and UI students to participate in the session and said that I should plan for 100 students to attend. They wanted a really interactive session that would last 1.5 hours and be held online so that students all around the world could attend.
The approach
To create an interactive, online workshop for 100 people means you’ll need to put them into small groups where they can work together in breakout rooms. This makes sense when you consider what designing is like in the real world. It’s rare that you sit on your own designing something in a vacuum.
Collaboration is the key to unlocking potential within teams, so teaching the students techniques to help them share ideas, listen to each other and be inspired by each other would not only be fun but useful for their future careers as UX and UI designers.
Having only 1.5 hours to design a new feature together meant that my instructions had to be extremely clear and easy to follow. If I had to answer lots of questions about what they were meant to do or how to complete tasks I’d quickly waste lots of time and lose momentum. It would also become boring and frustrating for the participants, so clarity was key.
The workshop
1. Ice breaker: Your first pay check
The workshop would be hosted on Zoom and we would use Miro as our collaboration tool. While almost all of the students would have been familiar with Zoom, only a small minority of them would have used Miro. I would say Miro is a simple tool to use but with only 1.5 hours for the whole workshop I had to make the onboarding as simple and as smooth as possible.
I decided to use the ice breaker as the moment to introduce Miro and get the students using the tools that they would use for the rest of the workshop. It was also when I first put them into a breakout room, in groups of 5 people. They got to introduce themselves to each other and get to know the people they would be working with for the rest of the workshop.
After explaining how to navigate the board in Miro and some of the simple drawing tools I asked the students to think about what would happen when they finally landed their new UX or UI design job. I asked them to think about what they would do with their first pay check and gave them 3 minutes to draw it.
The ice breaker worked well in that it was a bit of fun but more importantly it got them using the tools that they would be using later on to design a new feature.
2. Choose a problem to solve
Next up I presented all the groups with 3 problems to choose from. Using a simple “dot voting” technique each group selected the idea that they would work on for the rest of the session.
2. Choose a problem to solve
Next up I presented all the groups with 3 problems to choose from. Using a simple “dot voting” technique each group selected the idea that they would work on for the rest of the session.
3. Design sketching session - Or “Stealing other people’s ideas is fun”
One thing I wanted participants to realise during this workshop is the power of collaboration. When working together, especially for creative tasks, working collaboratively has always produced results that I would never have created on my own. Sharing ideas and listening to ideas from other people can spark off a whole new set of ideas that would never have been created if it wasn’t for some good old fashioned team work.
I got the team to perform a design sketching session. It consists of two 10 minute rounds of sketching a solution to the chosen problem. After the first round the whole team individually shares their ideas and gives feedback.
In the second round people should attempt to create what they think is the best possible solution to the problem. They should do this by doing one of the following:
- Update their idea based on feedback they got
- Update their idea by stealing from other people's ideas
- Steal someone else’s idea entirely
- Create a whole new idea inspired by what they saw
Read this post to see how to run sessions like this in detail
4. First round of solutions
In the first round they got 10 minuted to come up with a solution. If forces you to come up with something
5. Second round of solutions
Using the feedback they got from the first round and the ideas they got from other people they had to come up with a better solution
6. Pick a winner
After the two rounds you could see that within each group there was some consensus being reached for what constituted a good solution to the problem. People within each group had borrowed the best bits of each other's ideas or were inspired to create new ideas which would better solve the problem compared with what they had created in the first round.
The ideas that come out of sessions like these are concepts that you can take forward and further refine into fully fledged designs.
7. Showcase
At the end of the session I had time for a few groups to show off and talk about the solutions they had come up with. This was a moment where all groups were back together again and could share their experience of the session.
Conclusion
From my point of view the biggest challenge was creating a fun and interactive workshop where 100 people would feel they had learned a technique which they could apply in the real world - all in 1.5 hours. This required lots of planning up front to make sure that instructions were clear and easy to follow.
The workshop ran smoothly and each of the teams was able to collaboratively design a new feature. I think, stretching out the workshop to 2 hours would be wise to have some contingency incase of technical issues and it would also allow some extra time for teams to discuss their ideas and for the showcase at the end.
Overall the workshop was a success with many positive reviews and comments.
7. Showcase
At the end of the session I had time for a few groups to show off and talk about the solutions they had come up with. This was a moment where all groups were back together again and could share their experience of the session.
Conclusion
From my point of view the biggest challenge was creating a fun and interactive workshop where 100 people would feel they had learned a technique which they could apply in the real world - all in 1.5 hours. This required lots of planning up front to make sure that instructions were clear and easy to follow.
The workshop ran smoothly and each of the teams was able to collaboratively design a new feature. I think, stretching out the workshop to 2 hours would be wise to have some contingency incase of technical issues and it would also allow some extra time for teams to discuss their ideas and for the showcase at the end.
Overall the workshop was a success with many positive reviews and comments.
“I really enjoyed this event and would love to participate in more events like these. It was nice connecting with other students across the globe.”
Interested in this workshop or in something similar? Get in touch!
