Successful digital projects, effective digital products and services and great user experiences need multidisciplinary collaboration. In this post I’ll go through why I value techniques that facilitate this multidisciplinary approach so highly, and how business units across the University are calling on us to help them do the same.

In Website and Communications, we’ve become adept at bringing people together and facilitating this collaboration, opening up and democratising contributions to bring in new perspectives, generate new ideas and solving problems in new ways.

We value workshopping skills so highly, we developed a half day training session on the topic which forms part of our user experience and design thinking training programme.

Learn more about our user experience training

Workshops help tackle a range of digital challenges

Business units across the University and beyond invite us to design and run workshops to help solve their digital strategy, research and design challenges.

Our workshops can:

• support the delivery of digital strategies that stakeholders can get behind
  • Learn about how we helped IGMM develop their digital strategy
• tease out a team’s assumptions and preconceptions about their customers through persona generation
  • Learn how we helped the Cityscape project prioritise development by focusing on the most pressing user needs
  • Learn how we combined insight from remote interviews with workshops with Edinburgh staff
• get fast consensus about what action to take in response to usability testing research findings
  • Learn how we’ve been helping IS Helpline to fix the most costly issues with their self-help materials
• develop testable assumptions of the potential value of products and features using Lean UX hypotheses and frameworks like the kano model
  • Learn how we’ve used the Kano model to prioritise EdWeb development and Lean UX hypotheses to test our assumptions prior to significant development investment
• generate tens, if not hundreds, of design ideas that are rapidly iterated and refined through collaborative sketching
  • Learn how we worked with over 60 colleagues at once to channel and refine design ideas
• facilitate faster generation of better quality content through pair writing
  • Read more about how we have introduced pair writing to improve the quality and productivity of content development
• get you working directly with your target users to better understand their needs and solve problems together
  • Learn how we helped the VLE team to engage differently with students and identify new features they wanted

Students participating in workshop at the Festival of Creative Learning

And we don’t just talk the talk. Workshopping is a regular part of our team life. We collaborate more effectively when we employ the same principles on our own projects.

Lizzie leads a workshop activity at our annual away day

Workshop and training activity in 2016-17

In the past 12 months alone we’ve used workshops to:

• Support 18 business units bring together almost 150 colleagues to achieve consensus and solve digital management challenges though design thinking
• Help 5 business units prioritise the issues they’ve observed in 8 rounds of usability testing we’ve undertaken for them
• Engage the University’s technical and design communities in the shaping of expectations and requirements for a new website search engine and the design framework, EdGEL
• Prioritise software features on anticipated customer value to support EdWEb CMS development planning
• Generate content in direct collaboration with subject matter experts for a range of website development projects and trained 36 colleagues in how to do this for themselves

Duncan Stephen leads a review point during a digital strategy workshop

Get in touch to discuss your digital challenges

If you’re looking for a new way to kick off a project, solve a problem, or get your stakeholders united behind a shared vision get in touch. We can help your team working more effectively together and ensure digital projects go more smoothly.

Contact Neil Allison, User Experience Manager