Optimizing design thinking discovery: workshops vs interviews
Published Nov 5, 2022, updated Nov 6, 2022
As a user experience consultant, I facilitate lots of workshops, and I often use design thinking as shorthand for workshops—as if they're one and the same. However, for a recent client, I realized workshops are one way to deliver design thinking, but you often have better options.
Photo by Shridhar Gupta on Unsplash
For a recent project, the product manager wanted to leverage "design thinking" to get better outcomes for a new product planned to begin development in the next sprint. He wanted deep, detailed discovery to identify a comprehensive set of pain points and requirements from scores of business units scattered across the globe .
And he wanted each of the business units aligned around the pain points and requirements the product would address.
So let's do some workshops!
He didn't actually say, “let's do some workshops”. He said let’s do design thinking, and in my head, I thought let’s do some workshops!
But that voice in the back of my head kept nagging. From my experience, I knew a workshop was neither the best way to discover insights or to synthesize them into requirements.
When people say, "design thinking", they often imagine workshops, groups of people collected in a room or around a Mural board flinging stickies and innovating. However, design thinking doesn't need or require workshops. Designers used workshops as a low cost entry to introduce design thinking to organizations. As this most recent project shows, workshops are neither the only, nor the best way to bring design thinking's tools into an organization or project.
When people say, "design thinking", they often imagine workshops, groups of people collected in a room flinging stickies and innovating.
Workshops generate breadth and drown in depth
To ensure my team delivered the best discovery, we focused on how we planned requirements gathering. We wanted deep, detailed context, pain points, challenges, requirements, and business needs.
One reason I love workshops is how quickly you can map a broad, complex landscape. Workshops get your team to breadth fast. From experience, I also knew that the more breadth you capture, the less time you have for depth. With 25 people in a workshop, you can’t go deep with everyone, so I knew we had to schedule interviews where we could go deep with each participant, ask follow-up questions, and probe into the whys behind what they thought.
If we scheduled 25 interviews, we'd have 25 stories focused on our problem area, with stories from every business unit that described what they wanted to do, the challenges they face, and what they needed to overcome them. This treasure trove of data also meant we would reveal 25 ways these business units did not align and agree.
Small groups create better synthesis
After over 20 years, I knew that buried in all the interview data, patterns would reveal similar challenges and shared needs. I also knew my small team of technical architects and user researchers could make great work of this synthesis in a short time.
I also knew that if we threw this data into a workshop and had business unit representatives sort through the data, we’d end up with a few ideas and directions but nothing like the well-formed synthesis my small team would generate.
So just as I chose to move discovery outside of the workshop to interviews, I chose to do the synthesis outside of the workshop, as well.
Workshop collaboration creates shared vision and alignment
One of the reasons I really like to kickoff projects with workshops is alignment. The easiest way to surface conflicting perspectives and assumptions between stakeholders and silos is to throw everyone into the same room and talk about the same things. The differences some out in the conversation, so the workshops inherently leads to better alignment among participants.
After we completed discovery and synthesis outside of a workshop, the next client request was to help globally dispersed business units in varied operating contexts come to some agreement about a core set of shared pain points and requirements that the product could address and deliver the greatest value.
A workshop is a great environment to generate this kind of alignment. So that's what we did. We invited the interview participants, key stakeholders, and representative end users into a workshop to review, discuss, challenge, and adjust the synthesis work.
Did we identify the right pain points? Did we miss any? Did we capture them wrong?
Did we capture the right requirements and expectations for your business unit?
Most important, with everyone in the room, we prioritized pain points and requirements together. At the end of the workshop, all participants could see the board and see the prioritization everyone had agreed to.
The alignment didn't just happen in conversation, we could see it on the board.
The easiest way to surface conflicting perspectives between stakeholders and silos is to throw everyone into the same room and talk about the same things.
Workshops provide a low-cost entry for design thinking
Design thinking promised non-designers they could use design methods to leverage designerly thinking to solve business problems in more innovative ways. Both designers and teams use design thinking methods outside of workshops. So, why do we associate design thinking with workshops?
Workshops offer a low-cost, low-commitment, low-impact way to bring design thinking into an organization.
Workshops let you meet and align with broad sets of stakeholders in a brief amount of time. To fit methods into a workshop’s brief, few hours, design thinking methods operate at lower fidelity than traditional design methods. The low fidelity of design thinking workshop methods allows rapid iteration that enables more and better alignment.
Rapid iteration at lower fidelity saves time, but this time savings doesn’t come for free. Compare a workshop empathy map to a researched persona. Or sketched process flows to business process diagrams or detailed user journeys. You miss a level of detail and maturity missing in a workshop with a bunch of participants with varying levels of experience.
What you trade for depth and detail, you get in speed and alignment. The question I had to answer for my product manager was: what was this trade off? How do we know if it’s worth doing 25 separate interviews instead of a single discovery workshop?
How do we know if it’s worth doing 25 separate interviews instead of a single discovery workshop?
Double the investment for 10 times the quality: interviews over workshops
For this client, the product manager prioritized the quality of the discovery over the time to gather it. It was better to invest more time for better discovery than to save time for less detailed discovery. That equation made sense, but what surprised me was how much better the outcomes were.
Interviews required twice as much time as a workshop, and discovery was 10 times better. Twice the time invested returned an order of magnitude better discovery.
A discovery workshop with 25 stakeholders requires about 3 hours from each stakeholder with an additional 3 hours for the four members of the facilitation team. That totals 87 hours.
Individual interviews required one hour for each stakeholder and six hours for the facilitation team for 25 separate interviews. That totals to about 175 hours.
Similarly, calendar time for a workshop was one day while conducting 25 intervews and followups required three weeks.
Individual stakeholder interviews require twice as much time as a discovery workshop.
However, while both a workshop and the interviews cover the same breadth of information, the interviews allowed the team to go deep 25 separate times. If you counted stickies, each interview generated the same number of sticky notes as a single discovery workshop.
Interviews required twice as much time as a workshop, and discovery was 10 times better.
Choosing the best way to ‘design think’
Some discovery methods are better than others. In “Why run workshops”, I compare interviews, workshops, and six additional discovery methods, and I highlight how interviews and workshops generate both breadth and depth. However, I missed a significant nuance.
In exchange for the additional calendar time that interviews need, the interviews offer the team both breadth and depth across an entire area of focus. At best, discovery workshops can offer breadth and—maybe—dives into depth into one or two your problem areas. The advantage workshops have in time limits the depth they can explore.
Your team knows what's most important to them. Sometimes surface-level discovery is enough, so you only need a few workshop hours. Other times, the level of complexity of the product or the cultural and political environment need more than a workshop can reliably provide.
When you structure and plan design thinking for your next project, remove workshops from the table and focus on your outcomes. You don't have to fence design thinking into what you can accomplish in a workshop.
Structure your design methods to get the outcomes you need, and use workshops when you need a tactic that allows breadth in a limited amount of time or to help align multiple perspectives. But don’t make workshops your default. That was my mistake, a heuristic rut.
Workshops are a way you can practice design thinking. They’re not the only way. And they’re rarely the best way. When you help your team best optimize the work for the outcomes, you set the product up for better success within your organization.
When you help your team best optimize the work for the outcomes, you set the product up for better success
