okay here’s the good news running an effective remote Design Thinking workshop is absolutely possible but there’s a lot to consider in order to make it a success I’m Brittany bowring and I have run over 100 workshops you might even say I’m a workshop the holic terrible recently of course because of the times I had to take all of my workshops remote and I’ve learned a ton about what it actually takes to plan and execute a really effective remote workshop in this video I’m gonna focus on design thinking and I’m gonna tell you all about how to plan and execute a really great remote design thinking workshop step by step if you’re new to design thinking you might want to consider watching this video first and then coming back here and learning all about how to take your workshop remote and if any questions come up during the video please feel free to put them all in the comments we will make sure to answer them as soon as humanly possible if this is your first time on the career found your YouTube channel you might want to consider subscribing there’s a ton of really valuable and free videos all about UX UI web development design thinking so definitely consider subscribing if that’s at all of interest to you okay let’s jump right in okay in this video I’m gonna use an example so we can keep referring back to a specific example when we’re talking about different exercises and the whole workshop itself so the example we’re going to use being that we’re you know doing a lot of remote work these days I thought that we could use a really cool example of an elementary school that’s now having to transition to basically doing all of their schoolwork online so we’re kind of going to tackle a little piece of that specific example of a challenge just so you know I thought I’d give you that up front okay so the first thing we’re gonna talk about is the preparation of your workshop there’s a lot to prepare for obviously and I always say the more prep you do just the more successful your workshops going to be so that’s something really important to keep in mind you almost want to over prepare for it that’s what I always do anyway and it always works out great okay so the first thing you’re gonna do is scope out your challenge and set your objectives so this is super important to basically align everybody who’s involved in the workshop on what we’re actually doing it will really help everyone to know why they’re there what’s the challenge and also it will kind of motivate them to be to want to be a part of this really exciting Design Thinking workshop so for a mentor eSchool example we’re going to be talking about the challenge around basically making the online classroom experience a little bit better so we’ve heard from students that they are feeling a little bit frustrated because they can’t get in touch with their instructors you know in real time they want to ask questions and they have to wait to get feedback and it’s just not working very effectively for them so that’s the challenge that we’re gonna focus on it sounds a little bit broad right now a little bit it unspecific but that’s totally okay because actually within the Design Thinking workshop we’re going to be narrowing it down a little bit further so the next thing you’re gonna do is plan your workshop agenda this means that really planning every single activity that you’re going to do the cool thing about design thinking is that you can pull all these different exercises together as long as they’re sort of in the right realm of the phase of design thinking that we’re working in so the important thing here is to plan enough time everything’s going to take a little bit longer than you expect especially remotely this is one thing I’ve learned I thought everything would happen much faster when it was remote because there were less you know conversations happening in the room but that is absolutely not the case it takes longer you have technical difficulties you have people who are you know stepping out of the room coming back in the room it’s a whole shebang so definitely give yourself a little bit more time than you think you might need you also want to plan for breaks every hour and really try to stick to it being on camera and having you know these screens in our faces we almost get tired a little bit faster than we would in person so you want to make sure that you’re giving around 10 minute breaks every hour of your workshop the next thing you’re gonna do is gather all of the necessary materials okay the next thing you’re gonna do is gather all of the necessary materials and of course because you’re doing this workshop remotely when I say materials I kind of mean tools we’re gonna be using a lot of online tools to make sure that we can communicate with our participants that we can exchange information and I have a few favorite the video conferencing tools that I would suggest is called zoom you may have heard of it before it’s gotten a lot of more popular since we’ve all been working remotely zoom is really great because you’re gonna have this gallery view kind of like the Brady Bunch if that means anything to you it means something to me it means something to some people watching I think anyway but you can have everyone in a grid view so you can see everybody at once the other cool thing about zoom is that you can actually put people in different groups you can separate participants into rooms where they can privately have discussions so if you have a larger team this is really nice when you want to sort of share ideas but you don’t want to go through the process of sharing it you know with everyone which can take a lot of time just so you know with zoom you will need a paid account if your workshop is running for more than 40 minutes which probably workshop will if you don’t want to pay for it you can use Google Hangouts which i think is just the second best option the next thing you’ll need is a digital whiteboard so there are several tools to choose from I really like mural because it has all these really great templates all these really great warm-ups and they have this kind of very creative feel but a lot of people also use euro miro a lot of people also use Nero which is also a really great tool in it’s kind of just your preference so I would suggest that you play around on both of them and see which one you prefer you’ll need some post-its like these ones here and some markers I like to have these no matter if I’m doing a workshop remotely or not because I’m always taking notes throughout the workshop and it’s just nice to have them all on post-its you can rearrange them all so you can have them on behind you and you know throw workshop participants something if you need to so it’s really handy to have them I also really recommend having magic paper on the wall behind you this way you can show people the expectations you can even have your agenda up behind you it’s really cool this magic paper it’s static cling to the wall it’s magic basically so that’s good add a little magic to your workshop right and the last thing that you need is some good lighting a professional camera I mean you don’t necessarily need a professional camera but I highly recommend getting a light to shine your face so there’s nothing worse if you are the facilitator to have this dark room where everyone can really see your face it’s super important that you have a professional appearance when you’re facilitating your Design Thinking workshop even remotely ok the next thing you’re gonna do is invite all of your participants very exciting times I recommend in workshop of this caliber not to have more than kind of like 8 to 10 participants even 10 is sort of pushing it when it’s a remote workshop this is a really important step though because your participants need to know a lot more than just the date and time of the workshop they need to know why they’re being invited to it they need to know what the outcome is going to be and also if they’ve never done Design Thinking before you should also provide a little bit of context around what Design Thinking is what they can expect this will just help everybody relax a little bit so that when they come to the workshop they’re ready to work and they’re not nervous or feeling uncomfortable because they don’t understand what’s about to happen to them hopefully nothing Bad’s gonna happen to them but you never know all right I’m just kidding all right okay the last thing you’re going to do to prepare for your Design Thinking workshop is to have an onboarding call with the team this is super important because you’re going to assign them some pre-work before the workshop and this is also your opportunity to really set expectations with the team to tell them a little bit more about what’s gonna actually take place you can tell them about the activities you can kind of reassure them that everything’s gonna be okay so the pre work that you’re gonna assign for your participants is going to be all about user insights you want them to gather as much information about our users as they possibly can so for our elementary school example what we’re gonna get all of our participants to do is to get in contact with as many elementary school students as we can probably also their parents you know to make sure that it’s all cool but what you’re gonna do is really try to encourage them to interview as many students as they can to ask them questions to get them talking what would be even great would be to actually sit down with them or even just remotely and kind of watch them as they experience a classroom setting right so watch them on the platform they can talk you through them experiencing a course them prepping an assignment them trying to contact their instructor the more that you can get out of them the better at this stage so what you’re going to get your participants to do after they have interviewed one or more users is you’re gonna get them to build a really simple empathy map now this is something that it has four quadrants it’s basically just a piece of paper with four quadrants on it and you’re gonna have says does thinks and feels and for each user you’re gonna get the participants to just fill out a few things maybe place a few remarks under each of these quadrants and this gives a really nice whole picture of the user experience so that’s what you’re gonna explain to all of your participants in the onboarding call I also always suggest after you have this onboarding call really nice to just send a follow-up email afterwards telling them that you’re really excited about the workshop you’re happy to have them on board and just summarizing everything that you laid out in the call itself okay now you’re all prepared for your workshop so it’s time to deliver it for gosh sakes let’s do it all right you’re all set to deliver your workshop so the day arrives you’re jumping in and this is how I would recommend that you roll everything out you’re going to start with an introduction and briefing for all of the participants this should take around 15 minutes ideally and I really really can’t stress enough how important it is for you to set a little bit of a foundation a bit of context and try to practice a little bit of empathy for your participants there’s going to be some Design Thinking skeptics in the room which is a bummer but it happens all the time so the best thing to do there is to start off with a story I often start off by telling them a little story about how I also was a bit of a skeptic of design thinking but I’ve seen it be so effective for so many other companies that I really am excited about us using it today if you don’t have your own success story to share then I would recommend finding a case study from a company there’s tons of them out there you can literally find a company that everyone will recognize and you can tell a little bit of a story around how they use design thinking to solve a really interesting challenge this helps so much just to set a nice tone for the beginning of your workshop I also like to have the project leader basically reiterate why everyone’s there to set everybody up just by telling them you know here’s what working on we’re so thankful and happy to have you guys here really make participants feel like it’s a big deal because it actually is they’re dedicating a lot of their time a lot of their energy to this workshop the last thing you want to do is make sure that everybody knows what to expect from our workshop tell them you know in and around when the breaks will be tell them what the outcomes going to be of the workshop what are we working towards and of course answer any questions that might come up from any participant at that point then you’re ready to basically jump in to your icebreaker I love an icebreaker I’ll tell you right now the icebreaker activity should really never be missed it’s something that I think a lot of people feel is frivolous like it’s something you don’t necessarily need but actually it’s so important to set a nice tone to literally break the ice well not literally because literally breaking ice is like when ice shatters but what I’m saying is literally put everyone at ease super important to do for your workshop one of my favorite icebreaker activities is the sketching game and this one can be done on mural or miró you give all the participants a little quadrant on your whiteboard tool and you give them an animal name and they have to sketch that animal all in one minute so they have one minute to sketch out this animal then the next round you get them to draw a different animal and give them only 30 seconds so then it’s a bit more rushed and then the last round you give them a new animal and only ten seconds and that is the most fun round and I’ll tell you right now even for people who aren’t you know very energetic or they you know don’t often like to participate in these kind of goofy games this is such a hit with everybody it just makes everyone laugh and it truly breaks the ice so now you’re ready to get into the good stuff we’re going to go into the phase right away of building empathy so everybody has come to the workshop having done their pre work their homework hopefully and this is the point where you’re all going to share with each other what you discovered you’re gonna find out from everybody else whether or not everyone’s kind of aligned on where the users are having difficulties where their biggest challenges are this is a very very important step you should take about 30 minutes to do this what you’re gonna do is use mural to create sort of one big empathy map so at the end you’ll have combined everybody’s ideas onto this one map a little really really clear picture of our user it’s a great great place to start all right it’s break time so this is the first break I know it seems like it’s coming up fast but if you think about all the timings that makes perfect sense you can take a ten or fifteen minute break here tell everyone to mute their mics no one wants to hear anybody in the bathroom you know I mean so make sure you don’t forget to tell participants that and also just tell them to turn off their camera but make sure you tell them not to leave the room because if they leave the zoom room then it gets a little bit complicated you got to let them back in it the whole thing so just tell everyone turn off your mic and turn off your camera and see you in 15 minutes okay now you’re moving into defining the problem statement this should take about 20 minutes could take a little more time could take a little less just kind of depends on how everyone is in the room so what you’re trying to do here is narrow down your challenge a little bit more so instead of having the challenge of how do we improve the lives of students trying to work remotely we’re gonna try to see you know the real trouble or struggle that they’re having and try to narrow down our focus a little bit the first thing that I recommend is making a point of view statement so this is basically summing up your user and their challenge right in a one solid statement so you can follow this really simple formula to develop your point of view statement should be user needs to do something because of then a surprising insight for example remote students need a way to get answers from their instructors quickly because otherwise they feel frustrated and demotivated at school what’s really important for your point of view statement is that it is human centered focused on the user right and the other thing is that you want it to be sort of the right size of challenge and this can be a little bit tricky because if you go too broad then you’re gonna have way too many options and way too many solutions coming in and basically your challenge isn’t really well defined but if you go too narrow then we don’t we’re not open to like a variety of different kinds of solutions so you really need to hit that middle point all right after you have a point of view statement what’s really really great is to move into how might we how might we use our one of my favorites Design Thinking exercises because it’s just a really great way of reframing a challenge so for instance at how might we for this very challenge could be how might we make it easier for students to engage with their instructors so the how might we framework is actually a really cool one because all the words are chosen very specifically how the might and the we in order for us to kind of reframe the way we’re looking at a challenge so how instigates action or it kind of makes us think like yes there is there’s a way how will we do it might actually kind of shows us that there are different possibilities there’s not just one solution as that will fit all of our challenge there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution that’s what I was going for there and then there’s wheat which makes us think of the team we’re working together towards solving this challenge kind of a heartwarming activity if you ask me okay now that you have a really nicely defined challenge you also have a lot of really great user insights we’re moving into ideation this is a really exciting part of the design thinking process because this is when we can really get created and start kind of trying to think of possible solutions I like to start with an activity called challenging assumptions this is a really cool one to do in a group especially remotely it’s super easy basically everyone takes a moment to write down a few assumptions that they’ve made about the user and the challenge and then everyone shares these assumptions with each other and other people kind of you know react and sort of challenge those assumptions it’s a really great way to kind of like almost like unload all of our assumptions on the table and then we can move on from them and basically go into our ideation section where we’re really completely clear headed it’s a really really great activity so the next thing that I would do is an individual brainstorming session this one’s kind of free-flowing but it’s a nice time to kind of separate everybody you’ve got a lot of information you have now some time to sort of think it through and sort of come up with some fun ideas that you think could actually help solve the challenge so I like to do this and then have everyone come back and present to the group that’s a really nice thing because now everyone’s kind of getting inspired by each other and maybe a little bit influenced but in a good way this is a really nice kind of pre sketching exercise to get everyone just sort of brainstorming and thinking then I would move in to a more concrete sketching exercise that would give everybody around thirty minutes or so to actually sketch out one idea that they’re really excited about and they’d like to move forward with so one idea that they basically want to prototype and test so it doesn’t matter really how you tell everyone how to sketch this part what I would usually do though is tell everyone on a one single piece sheet of paper to sketch their idea and try to explain it as best as possible with some visuals of course now you’re ready to move into prototyping and testing now this section of your remote workshop isn’t going to take very long probably around 15 minutes but everyone is going to move into the prototyping and testing phase on their own afterwards so there will be a little bit of work after so in the context of Design Thinking it’s not import that your prototype looks beautiful that it’s complete that it’s an MVP you definitely want to explain to participants that a prototype just needs to basically be able to explain the idea clearly you need to be able to take this prototype it might just be a paper prototype it might be a few slides on a keynotes it could be really anything but you need to be able to present it to a user walk them through it and be able to kind of get feedback on the idea so it does need to be extremely clear that’s super important so in this section of the workshop you’re just actually explaining you know how prototyping works and testing works because everyone’s gonna go off and do it on their own afterwards so once you’re done explaining answering a few questions from participants making them feel comfortable to go off and start prototyping you’ll move in to the debrief so now you’re moving into your debrief this would probably take around 20 or 30 minutes but what’s really important here is that everyone feels comfortable moving on to the next phase right so you’re actually gonna send everyone off to do prototyping to do testing so you want to make it clear what is expected of them and when you will have a follow-up to share basically everything that happened in the testing phase make sure that everyone’s clear on when that’s gonna happen you know how much time they have to prototype and test their idea that’s just super important so that people feel comfortable it’s also just so important to help your participants understand how what their work is going to be contributing to the bigger picture so make sure that they feel like it’s really important and you’re very thankful for all the time that they’re dedicating to this another thing that I really like to do in a debrief is to get some feedback from the participants right then and there I’ll tell you right now if you ask for feedback afterwards you will get probably about 30% of the feedback that you’re looking for because people will see the email forget about it put it off and you’ll just never hear from them again so I really recommend in the workshop to ask people for one thing that they really loved about the workshop one thing that surprised them and maybe something that they wish would have happened or maybe they wanted you know more time for something or they want which they were better prepared whatever it might be it’ll help you learn a lot about your facilitation and for the next workshop that you’re going to run and the last thing I love to do is after the workshop is done Steve said your goodbyes which is a difficult thing to do by the way on zoom’ I have a really hard time say goodbye like you know because it’s this whole thing where everybody’s there you don’t you got everyone saying goodbye as a whole thank you I mean it’s if you have any tips on that in the comments that would be really great I love that but anyway make sure that you send them a really nice follow-up email kind of a thank you even if you’ve grabbed a couple of screenshots of the mural a couple of screenshots when you guys were all on the zoom chat it just kind of puts a nice like bow to your workshop it wraps it up in a bow it puts the cherry on top you know any one of those will probably make sense I think yeah so do make sure you do that it kind of really sort of finishes the workshop on a high note all right everybody congratulations you’ve now finished your first Design Thinking workshop whether or not you did it physically or just in your head at this point but congrats all the same I would like to finish off by just sharing a few best practices a few kind of like tips and tricks that will just help you out if you’re really new to workshops to remote workshops to design thinking the whole shebang so let’s jump in the first one that I mentioned before is over-prepare I can’t stress this enough it’s so important literally lay out every single exercise you’re going to do prepare the times make sure that you you prepare for a little bit of extra buffer time in between those things make sure you prepare all the templates you have all the activities the icebreakers you have everything in order before going in I swear it’ll put you at ease and therefore it will put your participants at ease and your workshop will be much much better the next thing to do especially in a remote workshop is to introduce the tools ahead of time so you don’t want to bring everyone into the workshop and it’s the first time that they have used mural or seen it before and they’re just really struggling to actually move around on the platform so super important in the onboarding call to explain the tools that you’re going to use if someone needs help or like has never used any of these tools before make sure that you encourage them to visit mural or Miro to you know jump on a zoom call if they’ve never done that before just to make sure that all of those Nicoll hiccups can just be subsided so that you can really just focus on the work another thing that I would recommend is keeping your workshop short this is why you give people pre work this is why you get them to prototype and test after the workshop because I’m telling you in a remote workshop setting the energy trying to keep the energy up is almost impossible so you really need to work extra hard so that’s why I recommend your workshop not being more than a couple of hours the fourth tip that I would give you is to try to really create a professional environment so that was like with the lights with the setup make sure you have a your face is really clear and you can see it maybe even add a few things to the background so that it just sort of feels like a little bit more of a production than just any old zoom call that people are doing this will really help people focus and feel a bit more motivated ok the last tip is that I would really encourage all of my participants to wear headsets and not just use the audio from their computers because you’re gonna then pick up all of the sounds around them the other thing that I always tell participants at the top of the workshop is that they need to all mute their mics if they’re not speaking they need to mute their my car also we’re hearing like the baby screaming in the background someone in the kitchen banging around the pots and pans it’s so so distracting so just tell people up front make sure that they’re doing those things okay everyone thank you so much for watching this video I hope you found it really helpful I’d like to wish you good luck with your first or maybe it’s not your first with your remote Design Thinking workshop I hope that some of the tips and tricks and just the overall kind of step-by-step video format really helps you if you do have comments or questions after watching this video again please put those in the comments because we will definitely respond to them and answer all of your burning questions and if you’d like more videos like this one please subscribe to the Korean foundry youtube channel it’s a great place a lot of great people a lot of great information so why wouldn’t you just click the old subscribe button and also have a really great day i’m brittany barring see you later [Music] okay [Music]