Design workshop

[Jellybean]

Hello out there,
I am after some ideas for running a workshop to help inform a website redesign for a college/university/polytechnic (what you call it depends where in the world you live ).

The work is long overdue, so there are great expectations on the UX and design team. The product owner and Marketing Manger have done research to look at features on other websites to help them come up with ideas. They have a vision for the site, but this seems to focus on the homepage (and the inclusion of videos all over the place). Design wise all we have are catch phrases like ‘modern’, ‘clean’, and vague statements about ‘the vibe’.

The plan is that I (the UX) run a workshop to help the designers gather some information and get some more concrete information from the marketing manger.

I have done various workshops with them in the past for other projects. For these I have done activities like the looking at other sites and get people to write comments about what they like and don’t, and sketching activities.

These have been great, but they have had a UX focus not design. Also I have found cracking that ‘vibe’ thing and getting more of what’s in their head is challenging.

Does anyone have any ideas for workshop formats, activities, etc to help?

Yours, with no vibe and not feeling that modern,
Jellybean

[Lukcha]

A big +1 to Joe’s comments.

Additionally, paying some attention to defining the audience with some concrete, identifiable attributes (including who you’re NOT designing for) gets everyone on the same page, is well within the scope of marketing input, and will help you in future research or usability testing tasks. Just remember that if anyone uses the word ‘personas’ that marketing personas and UX/design personas can be fundamentally different.

I sometimes find it helpful, if some of the team or stakeholders have excitedly started developing a vision, to generate some discussion points and comparison points by collecting visual references—a folder/subfolders with screenshots and screen clips of design elements from other sites/apps/interfaces/designs that help identify and document the vision. Include snippets and design ‘patterns’ like menus, headers, content filters, etc, as well as general ‘brand’ stuff like use of colour, layout, content tones. I’ve found this to be important because an unarticulated vision can be so vague and flexible that it bends in too many directions depending on subjective or contextual factors. Making it a little bit more explicit is easy, fun, collaborative and gets people talking while still leaving plenty of room for designing a proper solution.

[Jellybean]

Thanks @deprecated and @Lukcha. Really helpful.

This is a project I should be excited about, but when it comes to this site nothing has ever been simple. A large organisation where there are too many fingers get in the pie making changes (without a thought for the users - I find out after things are done), no content management, no site strategy, and everything I work on feels like a battle. (Never thought I would say this but it has been far more fun the last few years working on internal applications. )

Now it feels there is hope a redesign will magically make things ok. I know it won’t solve the problems, but with any luck I can solve some for the users.

I’ll definitely be preparing myself to ask lots of whys (I love the simplicity of the why), and dig in my heels for our users.
And @Lukcha thanks for your tips on capturing design ideas. That will be useful.

Thank you.

PS… had a little fan girl moment @deprecated when I saw your reply - I have your book.

[treyroady]

Is it just me, or do Joe’s comments seem to have disappeared? This particularly confusing considering that this thread is linked in several others as a good resource for the problem, and it missing might cause problems for others trying to trace back.