This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "101 Design Methods" by Vijay Kumar. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is a product workshop? What workshop activities can help you through the innovation process?
According to Vijay Kumar’s book 101 Design Methods, a product workshop can help your business team brainstorm innovative ideas for new products. Workshopping products is a great way of getting the team to work together, while also scouting out users who may be interested in what you’re selling.
Let’s break down the fundamentals of what makes a product workshop effective.
How to Hold Product Workshops
Kumar discusses a number of product workshop activities that can be helpful at various stages of the innovation process:
- Develop a clear idea of what you intend to accomplish
- Define your operating environment
- Understand your stakeholders
- Develop a mental model
- Brainstorm solution elements
- Assemble and evaluate comprehensive solutions
- Plan to implement the solution
In Task 3, where you’re working to understand how your prospective users think and feel about things, Kumar recommends compiling a folder of photographs showing a variety of people and items in different situations. Then, set up a workshop where you ask users to organize the photos thematically or arrange them into a sequence that tells a story. When they’ve finished, have them explain their choices to you. This may reveal feelings or associations they harbor that you would’ve overlooked otherwise.
For example, maybe you ask them to pick out photos they would associate with good customer service versus bad customer service. You might notice that the “good” photos they pick out are all brightly colored, while the “bad” photos tend to show drab, sterile, office settings. This reveals something about how the setting in which their service needs are addressed impacts how they feel about the service.
(Shortform note: Kumar points out that using photos in workshop activities can give you additional insight into how people think and feel about things or associations that they draw between them. In Brain Rules, John Medina observes that vision is your dominant sense, which may explain why photos or other visual aids can help to bring additional insights to the surface: More of your brain is devoted to processing visual information than to any other sense. As such, images often evoke more vivid impressions and associations than other stimuli, like written statements or survey questions.)
Similarly, in Task 3, Kumar suggests designing workshop exercises to incorporate cultural artifacts—things that have social significance in a particular culture. For example, maybe a certain card game is widely popular within a certain culture. So, at a workshop designed to engage users from that culture, you pass out decks of cards and ask them to select a card that expresses how they feel about the purchasing process, the user interface, and other aspects of the product or how they interact with it. Their responses will give you insight into their culture and how it colors the user experience.
(Shortform note: Be careful how you use cultural artifacts so you don’t offend your workshop participants. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo describes ‘cultural appropriation’ as a form of microaggression that people from marginalized races or cultures often face. Cultural appropriation is when someone from one culture (especially a dominant culture) makes use of something that has symbolic significance in another culture (especially a marginalized culture) without properly understanding its significance or giving due credit to the culture that originated it. As such, making use of cultural artifacts in a workshop without fully understanding their origins and symbolic significance runs the risk of offending workshop participants through cultural appropriation.)
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Here's what you'll find in our full 101 Design Methods summary:
- Why many companies don’t understand how to manage innovation
- A systematic approach to innovation management
- Specific tools and techniques you can use on innovation projects
