Mobile UX workshops

What is an UX workshop?

UX workshops consist of collaborative sessions with clients to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge they have. Workshops make it possible to reunite people from different teams to work together on a common goal.
Is a common issue the miss communication or the independent goals across teams in organizations.

Workshops give the opportunity to get the sales, marketing, developers designers, and decision-making team together and work towards achieving an actionable goal.

The type of workshops we are covering in this project are based in new recommendations of designs, defining frictions and goals, similar to a product strategy workshop where we will integrate new designs and testings.

There are multiple types of workshops like: Persona workshop, Customer journey workshop and Product strategy workshop.

The workshops I have conducted have three different stages:

Discovery

Discovery session with the client where I will need to figure out the client's current situation.

Live session (Live workshop)

A live session where I will present new designs, best practices, and possible new tests for the new ideas
The live session is interactive, conversational.

Results session:

We will analyze the testing results or the implementation results.

What are the main benefits of a workshop for a client?

Find frictions or common pain points between the user and the product.
During the discovery call, I will discuss the possible frictions and what has been acknowledged until then and a thorough analysis of the user journey from start to and their analytics.
Helps to understand how those frictions are impacting the business.
Analytics can be our best support. If I spotted a very long checkout process, or maybe a confusing form within the checkout, most of the time the bounce rate will be higher on that specific page, this tells me a lot of users are leaving the checkout process because something is not going well.
We could observe the percentage of users dropping out and spotting this on time can stop future customers from leaving their site and finishing their purchase.
It helps to bring the team working together towards the same goals.
Is not every day the marketing team work with developers. Every department has its own individual goals and needs to fulfill within the business. The end goal comes within the client, and as UX’s designers, we come to represent the client's need which is the ultimate goal. This is the reason why these sessions are eye-opening.
Fresh ideas and see things from a different perspective.
Coming from an outside perspective can be beneficial, there is a lot of bugs and design errors internal teams don’t see because they are exposed to the product on a daily basis.

How do I prepare a workshop?

Before the discovery call or first contact with the client I like to have a look at their site, the reason why is due to reducing the elements that will make more bias, after talking with the client I am usually exposed to their business insights, analytics, and goals.
I like to have a look with fresh eyes and see what is like for a user to come in for the first time.

How to conduct a productive discovery call?

Is important to create a positive experience with the client as well, I like to make my first interaction with the client conversational, and let them talk.

There are specific points and topics I need to get into in order to collect the necessary data to do my analysis.
What I learned in my workshops was the importance of listening to the client, once you get started the conversation ideas and current issues will flow. If you keep the discovery call in an interview format is more likely the client will answer short questions or might not remember some of the points. This is why I like to keep it conversational.

Things to cover in the discovery call:

What are your main goals for the {current period}?
What is your Value Proposition?
What are the current frictions?
What tools do you use to analyze user data?
Have you spotted any unusual data in your analysis? ( ex. High bounce rate on checkout)
What metrics do you review to determine success? What KPIs are most important for you?
Keep everyone engaged in the call, ask for everyone's opinions and if it gets out of topic don’t be afraid to redirect the focus to the questions listed earlier.

Presenting your ideas- How to communicate during the presentation?

While presenting your ideas, regardless of video conference or face-to-face interaction is important to make the presentation conversational.

During my time doing workshops for clients across different markets, I learned a few tips that I would like to share:

Explain the process of the workshop, what are you going to cover, how long it will take, all the ins and outs to have a better understanding of the session.
Do not read what is on the screen
Explain what is presented in other words, give examples.
Use images and examples to support what you are communicating in a more visual way.
Ask questions while presenting your ideas, keep the client engaged.

After the workshop

After the workshop I keep the communication going through the live trix or emails. Is important to set a meeting with the client 2-4 weeks after the session.
The reason for this meeting is to make sure there is to know the status of the tests, to help to prioritize or to make sure no doubts about the session.

Communication will take place every 2-3 weeks until the share of results.

The communication has to be fluid to be familiarized with the testings and with the current traffic and events in the company.