I'm Boudi, Senior Ux/UI Designer at Enrian. Today, I would like to show you how I do design thinking workshops with our clients. From start-ups to large banking institutions – I believe that everyone should apply this strategy when doing changes or improvements to a solution/app. What’s better – you get to work with great people and that is fun!
Let me walk you through a few stages of our workshop. Keep in mind that this is just a sample project, normally we tailor-made it for each specific client who needs our help.
It is good to have Mission and Vision statements. These don’t have to be final and may evolve over time, but we need to have them established as solid foundations. We then move to the description of our target audience.
In other words, we are asking our clients: “For whom do we design this tool?”
For example, when developing internal solutions for large banking institutions, we focus on getting to know the context and defining the problem statement rather than Vision and Mission. It’s all about flexibility!
After the basics, we develop our personas. Why do we do this? It’s simple – to better imagine the key person that will use the tool. We need to understand a person’s needs and interests to tailor-made the solution to their preference. What is challenging about this is that businesses often don’t have a clear understanding of the end-user. It doesn’t have to be picture-perfect, but it will live with us for the lifetime of the project.
This is where we help and do our magic!
And what about the competition? This is also a key part of understanding the service we will be developing as we may consider some good examples already out there. Being aware of what the competition is doing is something we don’t want to miss.
By completing the first step, we usually have enough empathy for our end-user. We can then do the workshop itself, where we brainstorm and develop a clear development strategy.
During our 5-hour workshop with real end-users and the business owners, we normally ideate solutions for the top voted problems of the tool.
To focus on the most important ones, we go through three steps:
We use a sailboat as a reference. In this step, we use as many sticky notes as we can and just write things that we think current asset owners love and most importantly, what they don’t like - what’s slowing us down. Each workshop participant then votes on the problems that need to be fixed.
We then take top-voted problem statements and mark them as challenges. We do this to better set our minds to “solution mode” before we go to the next step.
And we move to solutions! We describe the challenge and provide the action steps necessary to resolve it
The last step is the Impact/Effort chart where we sort our actions based on how difficult they are to complete. The key is to start developing high-impact and low-effort solutions first and move to more challenging, less important tasks later on as they take a lot of time and programming capacity. This way we can put it into the backlog and start working almost immediately, so the results of our work come quick.
I recommend you give design thinking a go! Doesn't matter if you just started the development or you already have the full app. This method will help you to get the job done within hours instead of months. And that's what matters!
Mouhanad Alboudi, Senior UX/UI Designer, Enrian
