Organizing a design guidelines workshop
Create consensus together in a quick workshop.
This article is the third part in a series about design guidelines. Also read part one about design guidelines and part two about the golden filter of UX design.
A while ago I created a workshop for a project in order to align stakeholders on design guidelines. The workshop was a success, but I wanted to improve things. So later I repeated this workshop with a group of students in collaboration with Tim Laukens and Celine Duijndam from the University of Applied Sciences Rotterdam. You can read more about the results of this workshop and design guidelines in my article about design guidelines.
In this article I will explain how you can organise a design guidelines workshop yourself. I would like to gain experience by organising this workshop more often, but if other people can join in we might be able to improve things even more together. If you share your own experience after organising the workshop, new insights can lead to a solid workshop format that will help more people in creating good design guidelines.
The workshop assumes you have already done user research, collected user values and created design principles. In the workshop you will generate the design guidelines. You can do the workshop together with other designers and stakeholders in order to create consensus.
As facilitator of the workshop you need to reserve a space, invite people and get workshop materials like sticky notes, writing materials, or a whiteboard. In the workshop you will also need a decider, someone who can have the final word on important decisions to speed things along. This can be you as well, but you could also ask a product owner or scrum master to be the decider.
A workshop also does not have to take more than one hour, if you have a decider for when discussion gets stuck, and if designers and stakeholders are already up to date with most of your research results. There are four steps we need to take in the workshop.
- Introduction and research summary.
- Writing design guideline ideas.
- Putting them on the map.
- Deciding on the best.
1. Introduction and research summary
20 minutes
At the beginning of your workshop, your participants will probably need an introduction on what you’re going to do. But some participants won’t even know what design guidelines are, so they will also need an introduction on design guidelines. Tell them about the difference between principles, guidelines and rules, and how user values and corporate mission are connected to design guidelines.
Next to an introduction of a schedule and design guidelines, a recap of your research insights is also a must-have. Again, some of your participants may already be up to speed, but for most participants a summary of the research can be a good refresher.
In my own workshop, I was able to summarize our research in just 20 minutes because most of the stakeholders were already up to date. If your participants are not at all familiar with the research, you can just ask them to read a report as preparation for the workshop.
In the workshop with students, I had to explain more about what design guidelines are and why we use them. So instead of 20 minutes of introduction, I spent 15 minutes on describing the ideology, and another 10 minutes later in the workshop to describe the findings of a case used in an exercise.
In my workshop, I didn’t show any design principles. But I do recommend to show them, because I saw some participants struggle to generate guidelines because of this. It can also help if participants know about user values, consequences, a mission statement and a strategy. Read more on this in my article about the golden filter of UX design.
2. Writing design guidelines ideas
10 minutes
When you are done with your introduction, the group can start coming up with design guideline ideas. Distribute writing materials and sticky notes, and tell participants they have 10 minutes to write down any guideline they can think of.
Participants can use the principles, your user research, your mission statement and strategy to convert them into design guidelines. Ask them how your principles can be actualized and let them write down their ideas on this. But they can also use their own experience and knowledge to create design guidelines. This is actually more interesting because you might otherwise have missed that experience.
The guideline ideas don’t have to be perfect. They can be composed of keywords, and they can come from outside of your research or strategy. Your participents can become blocked if you ask them to generate final design guidelines, so make sure you tell them anything they come up with is valuable and discussion follows later to decide on the final guidelines.
Any participant should be able to come up with around 10 guidelines. So in the end you should have at least around 40 to 50 sticky notes with ideas written on them, depending on how many participants are in the workshop.
3. Put them on the map
20 minutes
Some guidelines that your participants come up with may overlap, some may not be as important as others and some can be downright impossible to achieve. So it is important to discuss the guidelines and put them on a map. This will take another 20 minutes in the workshop. I like to use something called a MoSCoW matrix for this process of mapping guidelines. But you can also use an Eisenhower matrix or an impact-effort scale.
For the MosCoW matrix, draw two arrows across a whiteboard of flipover sheet, one vertically on the left and another horizontally at the bottom. The vertical arrow represents a scale from very important to not important at all. The horizontal arrow represents a scale from lowest effort to highest effort. When you’re done you can ask participants to put their design guidelines on the scales.
In the end you can divide the scales into four areas. You will have the most important guidelines that also take the least effort in the top left corner, the must-do. In the other corners are the should-do, the could-do and the would-not-do.
But be aware, almost everyone likes to think that their design guidelines are the most important and take the least effort. If you would let everyone have their chance, you could end up with all of the sticky notes in the top left corner of the scales. To prevent that from happening, you can ask participants to take turns mapping a guideline from someone else, and explain why they would put it somewhere. This is a great way to spark conversation and making sure that everyone agrees on the guidelines.
4. Deciding on the best
10 minutes
Also make sure that you limit the amount of guidelines that you will implement. Take for example just the top 10 from the top left corner, and leave the rest for a later moment and put them in the back of your mind.
The last 10 minutes of your workshop you can spend on taking these top guidelines and making sure that everyone agrees on them. Take the design guidelines from the wall, and read them out loud so everyone knows which design guidelines are at the top. Then ask participants if they agree that these design guidelines are the most important ones.
Almost certainly, someone will disagree and remind you of a guideline that didn’t make the top or come up with a new one. At this point things might get stuck between stakeholders, but your decider can step in and take the final decision.
And if you’ve got any time left at the end of the workshop, ask feedback from participants so you can make your workshop better the next time.
