Running a successful remote workshop
How your online activity can be as effective as an in-person one
As is true for many companies, it’s been seven months since all of Shopify started working remotely. As we quickly pivot into a new way of working, there’s a lot we need to figure out on the go.
Recently my team was working through a problem that needed alignment and exploration. Instead of a regular meeting, the UX team rallied together to run an interactive, cross-disciplinary workshop — just like we would have in the before times. Despite the occasional bad internet connection and awkward silence, the workshop ran extremely smoothly and accomplished the same things that an in-person workshop would have. I want to share what went well for our team, so others can improve their remote workshops too.
Step 1: Identify the type of workshop you need
There are a number of workshops you can do with your team depending on the problem you’re trying to solve. Nielsen Norman Group has a great cheat sheet you can use when trying to identify the type of workshop you might need for your problem.
My team’s goal was to better understand our users’ pain points so we could prioritize opportunities before jumping into designing a solution. For this problem, we decided to run an empathy workshop with two activities to help us identity merchant opportunities.
Once you’ve identified the type of workshop you need, it’s time to start planning.
Step 2: Sweat the small stuff
When you run a workshop in person there’s a number of things you don’t really have to think about ahead of time. It’s easier to figure things out on the spot. With remote workshops, it’s really important to be organized and plan everything out so that there are as few hiccups as possible. Here are some small things that made a big difference:
Plan your activities ahead of time
Find the activity that will best solve the problem your team is working on and map out how you’ll tackle it. This will help you allocate enough time so you don’t run out. Include some buffer time because you might go over! Because our team was doing an empathy building workshop, we identified activities that would help us better understand a user journey (i.e., a user journey map). From there we collectively decided how much time we wanted to allocate to the activity.
Create an agenda and share it
We prioritized sharing the structure of the workshop so participants would know what the workshop would cover ahead of time. This isn’t necessarily different from planning a regular workshop, but when everyone is remote it’s important to consider that some employees may be balancing work with the demands of life at home (eg, family commitments), so this allows people to make adjustments if they need to.
Make sure everyone has access to docs and tools
For our workshop, we used Miro, which is great for workshop collaboration. Tools like Miro or Figma require the right permissions for teams. Make sure everyone has access to the right boards and files beforehand so you don’t waste time setting up.
Create your groups & breakout rooms beforehand
Having breakout rooms or separate meeting links ready on deck will ensure that collaboration runs smoothly. You can do this differently depending on what you’re using for your virtual meetings. In our case, we created separate Google Hangouts and shared out the links with the groups.
Over communicate with your team
Make sure you align often so you’re all on the same page. Myself and the two UX designers planning the workshop would have remote working sessions and communicate asynchronously on the logistics of running the workshop. Keeping a checklist also helped us stay on track and not miss anything. Our checklist included things like activities, time, groups, etc. All the small details you don’t want to miss.
Step 3: Give all the context
Because things move fast and not everyone may have the latest insights, there’s important context team members need in order to successfully contribute to a problem space. Before jumping into the activity, we gave the 15 participants all the context they would need to successfully participate. We touched on the vision of the workshop, what merchant segments we would focus on, and even showed some previous research that would help participants understand real user pain-points and needs.
Step 4: Run your activity
As I mentioned we used Miro, an online whiteboard program designed for distributed teams, for our workshop. What’s great about Miro is that you can create different boards for different groups, and each group can work on the same board together in real time.
Depending on the workshop you’re running, you might be doing an activity that better suits your team’s goal (e.g., Crazy Eights). In our case, we needed to gain the deepest amount of empathy for our merchants. To do this, we created an interactive journey map that helped us try to think like our merchants. A journey map might look different depending on your product and the problem you’re trying to solve. For our team, we identified the different stages in which our merchants would interact with our product. (e.g., discovery, onboarding, maintenance, etc.) Then, for each stage we thoroughly thought about 3 main concepts:
- What are merchants thinking?
- What are they feeling?
- What are their pain points?
Each team (4–5 people) had their own journey map and would work through it together. We allocated 30 minutes for our journey map activity but found that teams needed more time because of the number of different ideas that were being generated in each section.
For some, a journey map might be enough for the UX team to go off and work with. In our case, we wanted everyone in the workshop to think of a few opportunities for the pain points that surfaced.
Our second activity was called: How might we? The aim of this activity was to review any negative emotions and pain points that surfaced in the journey map, and think about how might we turn them into an opportunity within our product. If you’ve never done this activity before, there’s not really a right or wrong way — the idea is to go for quality over quantity so you can have a few good opportunities you can then turn into potential solutions for your product.
This activity paired really well with our journey mapping, because the team was able to think of opportunities while problems they flagged were fresh in their minds. In an office space, you might run this activity using post-it notes, but since we were 15 people online, we used Miro for this activity as well. It was easier to keep all the groups in a central place, plus it saves the facilitator time when they go back to group and theme all the HMWs.
Step 5: What to do when the workshop is done
What you do after your workshop will vary depending on what type of workshop you ran, and your end goal. In our case, me and the other two UXers worked together to find common themes that came out of the user journey map and matched them to the possible opportunities that came out of the second activity. We shared our findings out in a Google deck with stakeholders and participants, along with next steps so the team knew how we would take action on our findings.
With a bit of planning, your remote workshop can be just as engaging and effective as an in-person one. Depending on the size of your workshop, small aspects like breakout rooms, and checklists really make all the difference for a smooth remote workshop!
