Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

Student Counselling- What makes a workshop?

Workshops – like so many techniques of improving user experience – don’t need to be long or complicated. If fact, they should save you time.

Workshop phobia

Working in UX, we’ll often unearth somewhat of a fear of ‘workshops’. They’re somehow seen as taking up more time and effort, and as being a bit scary. In my experience, people would much rather come to a meeting than a workshop.

Of course, the idea that a workshop is more time-consuming than other kinds of discussion is at complete odds to why we run them – to save time, to avoid duplicated or wasted effort, and to build clear consensus more easily.

How many staff make a workshop?

Another thing that seems key to the concept of ‘a workshop’ is that there are lots of people there. So when we needed to discuss some key issues in our project working with Student Counselling, it seemed a bit grand to call meeting up with just two of their core staff for an hour and half a workshop.

Nevertheless, we sat in a room and got out the tools of the trade in UX– Post-its, sharpies and a nice bit of blank wall. Together we worked through the ideal user journey for their site, and established exactly what information they need from their webform. We still had time for a few more ‘meeting-like’ activities of clearing up a few of the nitty-gritty details in the content.

Post it notes

Keep it simple – but benefit from experience

The fact is that a UX ‘workshop’ doesn’t need elaborate pre-planned slides, multiple people or long blocks of time. The idea of these techniques is that anyone can give them a go – all it takes is a pen and paper and, crucially, a plan.

The planning and strategy behind it is of course where experience comes in. The training and development the Website Programme has invested in User Experience gives us great understanding and wide-ranging experience of the right approaches and techniques to apply in a project.

If you think your digital presence is in need of some attention, get in touch to explore how a workshop – on whatever scale – could help you, together with usability testing and appraisal, user research and more.

Contact the University Website Programme

If you’re interested in knowing more about user experience techniques, you can join the University UX mailing list.

UX mailing list – Website support wiki [EASE login]

 

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel