WORKSHOP FACILITATION

Project type: Creative collaboration at Dropbox

SUMMARY

Workshop facilitation has played a key role in gathering insights as well as getting stakeholder buy-in on the projects I've worked on. Even though this is not a case study, this is the type of workshop I did with Dropbox's Customer Experience team.

Background

Customer Experience is as close to the customer as you can get. People in CX know the ins and out, the daily struggles, the biggest pain points and opportunities. It's a goldmine of information for a UX designer.

CX teams often feel that they are not heard by the bigger organisation (this is not only in Dropbox but in most companies I've worked for). My goal with these workshops was to introduce design thinking and spark creative contributions from the team. I wanted them to feel that if they collaborate, unveil the biggest challenges and give actionable recommendations we could prove value within the rest of the organisation.

The first step was to find a space within the Dublin office that we could use as a permanent design/collaboration room. I wanted to get people out of their desks and moving around to help break the work routine and entice creativity. We had enough space to hack together a generous area to work on creative collaboration, which has now become semi-permanent.

Over the course of a year we did dozens of workshops, most of them I've facilitated but have also started helping others organise their own. We looked at Google Venture's Design Sprint as a reference and we've adapted workshops based on our needs and availability.

Voluntary participation was slow at first (CX is typically full of caring introverts) but as time passed, the word of mouth spread and we had many join subsequent workshops.

Some of the workshops and activities we've done:

Strategy alignment workshop

Findability workshop

Research and presentations

Empathy maps

User journeys

How might we

Crazy eights

Outcomes:

Helping non 'designers' design

Building team confidence

Encouraging diverse groups to collaborate

Many ideas to share with the product team

Alignment over problem prioritisation

Stakeholder sign-off