Ideas for UX workshops?

Question

I've recently been asked to come up with some ideas for workshops or activities that can be used with both internal and external clients to capture ideas and requirements and allow the project stakeholders to provide their input into the project planning at an early stage.

I've not got a huge amount of experience running workshops and had a look around the UX Exchange but couldn't find any information on this so if anyone has any suggestions or links to relevant websites or even some recommended books or reading material it'd really be appreciated!

Answer 1

Three ideas for you to google around:

• Jeff Patton's User Story Mapping
• Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games
• Dave Gray's Gamestorming

Story mapping will get you to a specification of user stories (aka requirements) and give you an overview of the system in a similar form to Todd Warfel's task analysis grid and Indi Young's mental models

The innovation games site (and book) provides a set of formalised workshop facilitation exercises to address particular problems (strategy, envisioning, prioritisation, etc).

Gamestorming provides "A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers" from the people behind vizthink and xplane. Serious stuff...

I love this stuff because it's fun do do, interesting, and challenging in equal measure. But more than that, it's a wonderful opportunity for UX thinking to shape the direction of projects, teams and organisations.

Hope this helps. Have fun!
R

Answer 2

Matt Goddard had a similar question which you may find helpful...

"Top ten lessons you would like web designers/developer to learn about User Experience"

Have you seen this question here? Matt Goddard asked a question about possible topics on how to teach UX Design to developers, etc... Could the answers to his questions prove helpful to you?

(http://bit.ly/bmlDSo)