During various stages of designing products, I have been conducting different workshops and design activities to collaborate and generate more ideas with the different teams at Razorpay. Collaborations with different stakeholders helped us generate more ideas and gave us a chance to involve them from the very beginning of the process which in turn helped us to drive the product ownership across the team. These sessions at times also helped us to converge towards the right solutions when we have had a lot of ideas generated.Here is a list of 5 such exercises and sessions I have organized, facilitated, and moderated so far along with the team at Razorpay. These exercises are adaptations from various design practitioners like Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and many others. I hope you find this helpful.
I believe that the design process, in general, has to be very organic and flexible, it should be able to provide what a designer wants to achieve/understand through that step of the process in order to design a good product. Having said that, there is no one right way to conduct these exercises/workshops, these are just the ways we have done it in the past wherein we reaped a good value in return.
Stakeholders
Designers, Developers, PMs, PMMs
Duration
1hr
Conducted for
Brainstorming solutions for the identified problems in user research.
We conducted this session after the team had done extensive user research on onboarding-related challenges. There were a lot of pain points collected from the research and the designers wanted to brainstorm solutions with the team. I was acting as a moderator for this session.
Before the session
Initially, we collated all the pain points identified during the research. Then listed them by the phase of onboarding they belonged to. Once that is done we tried to club identical problems and came down to ~4 problems per stage. Then we constructed those problems into questions that basically induce collaborative thinking. For instance, a problem like this There was a significant drop off in signup when the users start their journey on mobile, can be put in the following format
During the session
Duration : 5-10m
An inevitable step in all brainstorming exercises is to set up the context. In our case, we prepared a one-slide presentation on the insights from research. This is to give the participants an idea of what has happened so far and get them onboarded so that they are able to empathize with the situation they are put in.
Duration: 20mins
The most important point here is participants individually answer/add suggestions to the presented question. Since this activity needs to be free of bias, the moderator makes sure this activity is conducted silently and any active interactions are avoided. Facilitators can help in any doubt clearing if required.
Duration: 20mins
The participants were asked to stop adding any new points to the board, they were then asked to present any three important points that they have listed on the board. The number of points discussed was decided based on the number of participants and the time remaining. During this phase, the facilitators checked if there are any similar ideas presented and marked them as duplicates or clubbed them into one idea.
Duration: 10mins
Before voting the moderator re-arranged the ideas to keep them agnostic of the contributor. We had provided the participants with five votes each and asked them to add their votes to any of their favorite ideas or suggestions. We asked them not to cast votes on their own ideas. They were asked to finish up all their votes within the given time.
Followup
The designer along with the other product stakeholders then reconciled all the ideas collected and listed them based on the number of votes. Then depending on the criticality of the problems we categorized the answers on an impact vs effort 4-quadrant graph. This gave us a clear picture of what all problems we should aim at solving first.
Snaps from the sessions
Stakeholders
Designers, PMs
Duration
Asynchronous exercise
Conducted for
Prioritizing the features according to user stories
We had identified a set of user personas from the research inferences. At this point, we wanted to identify the features to be built based on the identified pain points. This exercise was conducted asynchronously over a week's time.
Once the personas were finalized we went on to narrate their daily journey with their business (as we were working on a B2B product). This helped us note the pain points better as we could relate and understand the overall triggers for every action they might perform in the product.
From the journey, we took out the places where they might use our product to achieve their goals. While doing this we also converted their pain points into features and tagged them contextually as important, frequent, and urgent.
There is a famous rule that Ben Schneiderman came up with regarding the information hierarchy. According to which any information can be positioned hierarchically in the following structure.
Based on this approach we created the following 2d framework which helped us to decide on the placement of different identified features. Here is how we placed them, a feature that solves an important, urgent, and frequent pain point goes on at the overview level. the ones that are neither frequent nor urgent can be kept at a level deeper in the product architecture.
With this framework as a base, we went ahead and drew out the information architecture of the whole application. We followed this method to create the first MVP version of the application. When we moved ahead and wanted to scale the product with more features, following the same framework made it easier for us to pinpoint the sections that needed changes in the application clearly.