Designing Beyond the Screen
Throughout my journey, I've led over 100 workshops, ideation sessions, and design sprints with a variety of product and business teams. Along the way, I've picked up facilitation tactics and approaches that designers typically aren't taught. In my portfolio, I'm excited to share the high-level details of these strategies and how they've shaped my approach to collaboration and innovation.
My approach to facilitation
In general, ideation types falls within one of the five typical categories of workshops - design, empathize, understand, prioritize, refine. However, knowing the tools of facilitation that create different outcomes is more powerful than relying on templates, which is why I like to tailor each facilitation to the specific needs of the project.
Goal:
Understand & Plan
Ideation Type:
Understand
Empathize
Prioritize
These types of workshops can range anywhere from 1 hour to 3 days, depending on the type of challenge and desired outcome. The purpose of these types of facilitation is to bring key team members and stakeholders together to understand the current state and create a shared understanding of what will be tested.
Depending on the number of participants, the time given and the intended outcome, the workshop may cover just the current state or stretch to co-creating a roadmap based off of identified priorities.
Goal:
Prioritize & Refine
Ideation Type:
Prioritize
Understand
Refine
These types of workshops can range from 1 hour to a full day, depending on the size of the team and the challenge at hand. Preparation for these types of workshops need to include understanding the ecosystem in which the team is operating, as well as the problem being solved. Typically, these types of workshops are prioritization, empathising with users and critiquing current work or a blend of all.
Outcomes may include prioritizing features, identifying features that should be emphasized based off of balancing user and business needs or gaining clarity on user motivation and needs.
Goal:
Identify, Design & Test
Ideation Type:
Understand
Design
Prioritize
Empathize
Possibly the most time intensive, yet most productive type of workshop are design sprints or hypothesis testing workshops. During these, Jessa will take a team from ideation to actual prototyping and testing within 4-5 days. These workshops are best when the goal is to actually build and test a concept quickly in order to identify what should actually be piloted.
When time is limited to less than four days, a modified version can be done combining traditional research methodologies and lean UX to create a hypothesis to test. The difference with this, however, is that the designing, building and testing will be done after the workshop.