UX workshop

The workshop stage of the UX audit serves to establish a connection between an organisation’s business goals and its target users, their journeys, and the challenges they may encounter. A one-and-a-half-hour workshop is conducted with key stakeholders of the project, either remotely or in person, to establish the following:

• Target users and their journeys
• Target users’ current challenges
• Standards such as accessibility and device support
• Competitors
• KPIs and metrics

Our UX workshops always start by recapping the project process and discussing objectives. We take this as an opportunity to ensure all relevant stakeholders are engaged and have an opportunity to give their opinions and insight into objectives and the current state of play. This is also utilised to capture known information on challenges and outline key journeys to review and standards that are in place.

In the example of UX workshops for proto-persona creation, the focus is placed on gaining insights into key user groups to inform persona creation. Our team first outlines the project background and aims to ensure all participants are aligned and then provides information about personas and how they are used. From this, the focus of the session is identifying who the key audience groups are, before diving into capturing information on each prioritised group.

Workshops that sit within the UX audit serve to ensure that stakeholders are involved and engaged within the UX audit process. These workshops enable our team to understand stakeholders’ goals, objectives and expectations for the UX audit and the user experience of the digital product in general. As a result, we can ensure that the recommendations we provide at the end of the UX audit are aligned with business goals and stakeholder expectations. The insights gained from these workshops subsequently inform the proto-personas, which are created as an output of the UX Audit. Key information concerning target users that we acquire during the workshops is central to the proto-personas and is supplemented with further detail from other components of the UX audit, such as user observations.

We believe in a collaborative approach to enhancing the user experience within our UX audits, so our workshops welcome a range of representatives from different departments across an organisation to gather as many perspectives and insights as possible. These workshops foster positive dynamics between our teams, resulting in trust being built, efficient communication and mutual understanding. We conduct our remote UX workshops using Miro, a collaborative note-taking platform that allows all involved in the workshop to make contributions on a communal whiteboard from anywhere in the world. Stakeholders are able to add comments to this board at any point during the UX audit to promote the continuous sharing of ideas and flow of communication between our teams.

Participating in a UX workshop facilitates a collaborative environment between our team and stakeholders that applies a user-centric, aligned approach to the UX audit process in a structured and engaging way. Development of proto-personas based on stakeholder insights and user data helps to ensure that decisions are made with users wants needs and challenges in mind to create products and services that resonate. Conducting a UX workshop at the start of the project also helps to uncover business objectives and ensure that UX audit recommendations are aligned with organisational goals.

The outcomes of the UX workshops will be used to inform the following pages of the UX audit process.