How to: Remote UX Workshops
You want to run a remote Design Workshop with loads of participants online? No problem, with the right agenda and tools!
The current situation forces us to work from home, and adapt the way we work. Yes, in-person workshops are easier and more productive. Nothing beats a collaborative whiteboarding session or paper prototyping to express and discuss some ideas. But hey, let’s see how we can move the best bits online!
This article contains some tips and tricks that are specific to Miro, but most of the points are applicable to any remote workshop and online workshop tools like Mural, Whimsical, Lucidchart etc.
This article is co-writen with Brian Romer & Mary Mikhail.
Content:
- Why a workshop?
- Do you have the right people in the “room”?
- How to: Setup
- How to: Introduction
- How to: Divide and Conquer
- How to: Closing
Why a Workshop?
Purpose
What is the purpose of your workshop? For the following we’ll assume you know more or less how Design Thinking works. We assume you have a goal for the workshop, preparation and workshop outcome are nicely embedded into a wider design process.
Outcomes
What kind of deliverables or outcomes you’re aiming for? Check in with your stakeholders and align the exercises and tools with the desired outcome. Often the most important — yet intangible — outcome is alignment between workshop participants.
Do you have the right people in the “room”?
Participants
Be clear about who should be included (and why). You want participants that can contribute — rather than observers. Invite end-users, practitioners or people with an overview on the question you want to work on — rather than their managers or supervisors, if they are curious, but don’t actually want to contribute. Keep your group small, 4–6 participants works best — or break your larger group down into smaller subgroups.
Pro tip: Look up everyone’s name, title and photo on the web or LinkedIn and set up an area on Miro that introduces everyone.
Time Commitment
Explain participants how much time you’ll be asking for. Remote workshops can be more taxing than in-person workshops because it’s hard to read the room and create a sense of flow, so aim for less time than you would in person.
Time Zones
Find a time slot that works for everyone across time zones, with enough lead time that they can all do a bit of pre-reading and homework before the event. Describe the goals concisely in the calendar meeting.
Accessibility
Ask if anyone has vision, hearing or other accessibility issues that we should address. Make sure that all participants are accommodated for. There could be a channel for participants who have a disability or are more camera/mic shy. Some participants might ask questions or contribute through alternate ways such as having a designated helper to share the screen for a visual reference/troubleshooting.
Reminder
A few days ahead of time, send everyone an email asking them to do some basic Miro tasks like making post-it notes etc. The day before, update the calendar event to remind people to do the Miro homework if they haven’t yet. You want to have all your participants familiar with using the tool before starting the workshop, to make the most of everyone’s time.
How to: Setup?
Shared Canvas
You need a shared space to work collaboratively. Miro, Lucidchart, Stormboard and Mural are among the alternatives.
Teams
Use Teams for the audio, video and screenshare features.
Pro tip: Teams works great but when everyone is on the Miro board, you no longer see the participants’ video squares. Miro has a screenshare option that can be used along with video call functionality. Choose to stick to what your participants would feel comfortable with.
Tool Overload
Try make the right trade offs on what tools you are using. Try stay in the same platforms as much as possible, e.g. choose to do the ice breaker in the same tool that you’d use for workshop.
Breakout Rooms
Workshops live from small side-conversations, you need separate video chat rooms. Zoom has a feature that allows you to do that pretty well, with other tools you might get a workaround by starting multiple meetings at once and direct your participants to which ones they should join.
Work Groups
Making the best use of everyones’ time, it’s best to split up larger groups into smaller groups. Define your work groups prior to the workshop, so that everyone knows which group they belong to.
Rehearse
If leading the workshop with more than one facilitator, choreograph and rehearse who speaks and screen shares when.
Pro tip: we used the notes section in the Miro board to plan out who is doing which part of the board and when they are. While working on the board, it’s where we added to-do lists for collaborative editing as well.
Timer
Make sure you have a physical or digital countdown timer or alarm clock at hand. Keeping tasks time-boxed, even if a bit arbitrarily, helps to keep momentum and to preserve your agenda from running over.
Pro tip: Miro provides a great in-app countdown timer.
What to do?
Draft a minute by minute agenda using sessionlab.com or similar. Identify parts of your agenda that could be discarded if time is short. Identify parts that are crucial to keep.
Pro tip: When planning Miro workshops with participants whose comfort level is unknown to you or if their familiarity with the tool is low, budget double the amount for that person to get an average sense for the activity. Be very generous with time allocations.
Consider the number of participants (and their coordination). Less experienced participants might take up to 2x the time to complete a task.
Layout
In the same way you would lay out exercises in a workshop room, prepare a canvas with areas for specific exercises. It might make sense to have areas for the entire group, for specific work groups and individual thinking time.
Pro tip: Structure the boards in a way that accommodates your workshop type and participants’ familiarity with Miro. If your workshop is a design sprint (where the work is done in stages), you will naturally want everyone to be on the “same page”. Whereas for more individual work, it makes sense to keep work spaces separate to keep participants focused on their work — rather than having a view of others’ workspaces. Having individual spaces for participants can be daunting for navigating. Consider how you’d like to conduct analysis as this may help shape your structure. Other things that are important to consider is sizing and layout as you will want minimal scrolling for your participants and for yourself.
How to: Introduction
Time for technical setup
Will there ever be a meeting that doesn’t start with 5–10 minutes of technical difficulties to get everything set up? I wish there was, until then, plan some time to get set up.
Pro tip: Consider sending the Miro link to participants along with some time in your calendar for technical office hours, where you can guide and direct them in a personable setting.
Ice breaker
Start with something fun. Participants can be nervous, feel under pressure, think they are important. None of which will help you run a good session. Start with an icebreaker that slightly nudges everyone out of their comfort zone … and most importantly makes them laugh!
Pro Tip: Good ice breakers are …
Draw a picture of your each other (if participants are on video call) … without looking at your paper
Draw a device for / or with … a chicken / a horse / a bird
Draw your problem / Describe the problem through some digital post its
Fill in the blanks, e.g. “On the weekend I had loads of fun … “, “This week’s happy thought is … “ — it may be worthy to consider doing the ice breaker in the same tool to do a “technical ice-breaking”
For more ideas check out:
Gamestorming https://playtaboo.com/playpage
https://playtaboo.com/playpage
https://miro.com/templates/ice-breaker/https://miro.com/templates/ice-breaker/
Make it personal
Ask participants to switch on the camera — if they are comfortable with it — its just more fun to see each other laughing, struggling and coming up with thoughts and ideas!
Pro tip: It’s really hard to gauge the room and make it light when everyone is on mute. Ask your participants to keep their audio on and to engage freely to lighten it up. You can even have participants mute and play their own music while getting creative.
Introduction (Main Meeting Room)
Tell everyone why they are are, what they are going to do and what it will lead to. People are used to meetings to … talk and make decisions. The point of this session is not to come to a premature decision following the loudest voice, but to explore options and think through alternatives.
Pro tip: Use a landing page as an overview on the board. This is what participants see when they come into the workshop. If lots of placeholders are on the Miro boards, you can overlay a solid rectangle on top to hide them until you are ready to reveal the frames as you go through the workshop. Another pro-tip is to use a tool familiar to participants to initiate it. If everyone populates excel cells, they get pasted as post-its in Miro and you can have the note keeper annotate the board before the main activity starts. It may even be possible to conduct the entire session via screenshare and annotations in this manner. We sometimes do that during our user research sessions!
Roles
Running a workshop successful requires different roles.
- Facilitator to walk the group through a number of exercises, give people nudges and prompts to work off
- Timekeeper to keep momentum and enable the group to get through the agenda
- Note keeper to keep observations, quotes and learnings
- Technical troubleshooting to help people use the technology
Facilitator and time keeper can be the same person. It is hard to effectively take notes and facilitate at the same time.
Pro tip: Once you’ve laid out all your boards or frames, in Miro you can lock the background elements so it’s harder for people to accidentally move them around. Lock objects in one large selection group rather than in smaller groups, as unlocking can get confusing otherwise.
Pro tip: Copy paste everything into a separate board in case anything gets deleted or misaligned, you’re able to quickly recover mid-session. Have a person dedicated to help out users. Sometimes it’s help with resizing or moving things over, locking frames, etc..
How to: Divide and Conquer
Landscaping (Main Meeting Room)
While you have the attention of the whole group set out the agenda and define the large chunks of work, individuals or individual groups can work on.
If you are working on a process of a service or application, why not break it down into steps?
Pro tip: Prepare different areas on the board for work with the whole group, sub groups and individual work spaces. Make sure to lock the right frames so they don’t move around the board!
Breathing space
Some people come up with great ideas in conversation, … actually most people benefit from quiet thinking time to reflect on complex situations, recollect their observations and come up with ideas.
It is always a good idea to build your session with a mix of the following:
- Individual thinking time — writing up observations, thoughts or ideas
- Workgroups — share and discuss in a smaller group, giving time to every voice
- Plenum — present, pitch, vote in big group
- Facilitation — Moderation of idea collection, voting or idea grouping exercises
Exercises
While facilitation and well-defined tasks are key to keep the energy in the room for in-person workshops. This is even more true for remote workshops.
- Chunks of work — Describe small pieces of work, that can be done in a short amount of time
- Context — Put exercises into context of a wider picture or “landscape”
- Time Keeping — Stick to a timing per exercise — give people control — and stop people from moving around pieces when the time is up
With online workshops which have a tendency to be asynchronous (what participants are seeing may be is different), documentation is important. Adding in written instructions where applicable. If using a tool, leaving in specific instructions can have the added benefit of having users complete tasks at the right pace for them. The idea behind this one is that you have no chance to overhear side conversations and to gauge the room.
Breaks
Make sure to schedule time for breaks. Have everyone get up from the desk — stretch their legs, take a bio break — make sure to be clear about the time when you want them back.
Workgroups (Breakout rooms)
Once the steps are clear, have groups break out into smaller meeting rooms, in which they can work on defined tasks in parallel.
You want to be as efficient as possible with everyone’s time. Having a large group listen to one person at a time is not good use of workshop time. Its much better to have groups of 2–3 people work through parts of a challenge — and bring them back to the larger group.
Pro tip: assign groups before hand so everyone knows in which group they are. prepare different areas on the board for each sub group. People can easily copy paste notes and ideas they come up with.
Again, you might want to follow a breathing structure. Start with your first big item — and give people individual thinking time to reflect and write up ideas for problems or solutions.
Have them share ideas — one at a time. Work through the material together and further refine notes or group them into topics.
Have the group vote for the most prominent pain points or the best ideas that should be moved forward and back to the main meeting room.
Give each workgroup time to further flesh out and prepare a presentation back to the larger audience.
Combine (Meeting room)
Getting everyone at the same time is a challenge. Maybe give early teams a coffee break — and have them start presenting once everyone is ready.
First, check in whether ideas and observations still fit into the larger landscape — or make changes if necessary.
Then have each workgroup present — on a strict timeline — that also leaves time for questions and clarifications. Have a different person serve as a note taker to fill in things while people are sharing.
Get everyone to vote on the outcomes. Get to a consensus about priority or next steps. Add the links to video/recordings/other artifacts in in the board. While things are fresh, add any relevant detail for documentation.
When using a whiteboarding tool, going back to it for surveys/followups/comments is sometimes very easily done and and closes the feedback loop faster.
How to: Closing the workshop
If your exercises went as expected and you hit the time … respect! This is tough to do especially online. Plan buffer time — and a fun way to close the session
- You can ask everyone to draw a picture about their experience with the workshop … in 1 minute!
- You can ask everyone how it went for them, about a thing they were surprised about or learned
- You can share a print out of the workshop board right after the workshop — which gives you more time to actually write up learnings
Did you conduct any online workshops so far? If yes, how did it go? We are also very curious to hear whether any of the above helped you run a future workshop?
