I arrived at the away day with a set of slides I would present that would take everyone in the room through the basics of user centred design - why it's important, how it benefits everyone, some common tools and techniques, and so on. But I realised when I arrived that it was the wrong tack, and I needed something waaaaay more interactive.
So I quickly dived into my slides and deleted most of them. I decided to run a super practical session with minimal talking. It was really easy to run, and people seemed super engaged, so I thought I'd share it so you can run it too!
There were three introductory slides to begin with. One was the title slide - over which I just chatted briefly about the benefits of user centred design. I then explained what we would be doing - using two design approaches to help us identify ways we could improve a process, service, or product. These approaches were to be personas and empathy maps. I chose these because they are simple and effective, but also it's possible for people to have some fun with them.
Next two slides gave an overview of personas and empathy maps - nice and simple. I spoke through them, then got straight onto the exercise steps.
Step 1 - make your persona. On their tables, I asked everyone to use pen and paper to come up with their personas. They could be external to the Council (residents, communities, businesses etc) or internal (colleagues, councillors, and so forth). I gave them a list of characteristics to note down, but encouraged people to add their own to flesh out their characters, and to draw a picture if they wanted. After 10 minutes, I asked a couple of tables to feedback on their personas, which raised a few laughs.
Step 2 - identify a thing for them to do. This is a super short element, where the tables were asked to give a task to their persona. A slide gave some examples, but they were encouraged to come up with their own.
Step 3 - produce an empathy map for their persona doing that thing. This was the longest section of the exercise. I put up a slide to remind everyone of the thinks/says/feels/does elements of an empathy map, and let the tables get on with creating them for their personas attempting the thing they identified for them. At the end, different tables spoke about their maps.
Step 4 - create actionable insight. Finally, I asked the tables to come up with practical ideas for improving that user's experience, given their new found understanding of their situation. A slide suggested changes to communications, content and interaction design, process tweaks, and so on. Again, feedback at this stage helps embed and validate the learning.
Finally I presented a slide summarising everything, which really centred on two main messages:
your users are not horrible people - they don't deliberately set out to annoy you and do the wrong thing. They are people with a lot going on in their lives - just like you! Try and be more understanding and make it easier for them to do the right things.
this didn't take very long, so you have no excuses! - the whole exercise was done and dusted in less that 45 minutes. For me this really emphasised the point that time is no impediment to user centred design - you just need the will to do it, some paper and pens, and colleagues to join in with you.
You can download some slides I have recreated from the session if you would like to run this exercise with your teams. If you leave the Localise logo somewhere on them for a bit of credit, that would be nice.
