Group Design Workshops: Jumpstart your product development

A Group Design Workshop is our interactive brainstorming process. It's a great way for your team to share assumptions, share the ideas they already have about design, and transmit a lot of information to the designers quickly. Download a full description of the Group Design Workshop (PDF).

A client said, "The group design session helped uncover new features as well as interesting twists on existing features. Some make market sense now, others may in the future."

This works because people aren't just talking about their ideas, they're doing something: informally sketching interface solutions together. The discussions bring out ideas that get us to requirements more efficiently.

Group Design Workshops are good for hardware and software design

Here are two examples of successful Workshops.

This design led directly to the home page for a redesigned Web site.		Wood microphone mockups led to more realistic prototypes and final designs.

The process

Participants work in small groups. They discuss user tasks from the personas, share their assumptions sketch out solutions to them and share the results with the other groups.

We invite people from tech support, engineering, marketing management – those with information about the product or the users. Everyone has design ideas. This session lets them discuss those ideas and what they've learned about the business, the product and the customers.

A simple example: "There won't be horizontal scrolling... Well, I was assuming that, anyway." Good thing we were all working together so he could tell people what he'd been expecting for so long.

Another participant said, "Enjoyed the process... informal... non-judgmental... free exchange of ideas."

Previous Workshops

We've done workshops for many clients. Follow the links to see the resulting products. Read about Dictaphone, Thomson CompuMark, Authoria, Skillsoft, BuildingGreen, Otter Group, SiteScape, Bit9 and others.

More information: Download the full description of Group Design Workshops and share it with your colleagues (pdf, 53 kb). Contact us to find out about a Workshop for your project.