AD POV: Why we workshop

As a digital agency, we often work on large projects which span over multiple months and involve different departments. To ensure we’re prepared for this, we like to run workshops. Workshops are interactive sessions where our team works together with the client to solve issues and define what we need to deliver a successful, finished project. For us, workshops are an essential part of our process. So, in this blog we’re taking you through the importance of a workshop and what a team of digital professionals gets up to during one.

What happens at a workshop?

There are endless approaches to workshopping, and the style partly depends on what you need to get out of the project. Sometimes we find that projects are best started by planning back from your end goal. If you clearly define your desired outputs, it can help to inform your approach. 

Ideally, in-person workshops are best as they reduce a lot of the barriers to creativity that online workshops can struggle with. It removes the awkward “Sorry I didn’t mean to speak over you”, “my internet’s lagging” and the “no, you go first” that no virtual meeting is complete without. Instead, it gives everyone the space and confidence to challenge themselves and each other. You can think in new ways, come up with different ideas, and let multiple conversations happen simultaneously. 

Another benefit of in-person workshops is that team members can switch off their notifications and eliminate the noise of being online – meaning no pings and dings to distract!

We like to start with a blank wall and lots of post-it notes. These physical prompts help us to root  users in the here and now. The post-it notes allow us to move our thoughts and ideas around in a visual way which is often most beneficial when brainstorming.

However, when we can’t meet in person, we’ve found that Miro is a great way to maintain the same process digitally. Using this digital whiteboard, we can workshop online with clients or refer back to work from our remote locations (read: home offices). 

All in all, during a preferred in-person workshop, we talk a lot and have space to move around. Copious amounts of caffeine and sugary snacks are optional, but encouraged.

Why are workshops necessary?

Workshopping is often the quickest way to understand and fully explore the needs and assumptions of your audience. Both you and your client are encouraged to vocalise everything and ensure everything is backed with that all important proof. 

We often find that whilst a client may perceive something as an issue, and request a specific solution — it doesn’t guarantee that this is the only issue, or even the most prominent. What’s more, it doesn’t mean that the client’s preconceived solution is suitable. Workshopping gives your team and your clients the freedom to ask big questions and push for out of the box thinking. Often some of the best ideas come from sessions like this. 

Is a workshop essential to a project?

The short answer is, yes, they are. But every project is different, and as a result any workshops for a project should be tweaked to ensure maximum efficiency and success.

Here at After Digital we run workshops for various reasons, at different stages in the project lifecycle. For example, during  a Discovery workshop we like to meet with as many members of the organisation as possible. If we can be a fly on the wall of the organisation for a few days, then run the workshops, that’s what we do! Meeting with different departments allows us to truly feel and understand the organisation's culture, and how they work. This helps us to identify the key pain points of the project. And while you may not think teams who are ‘unrelated’ to the project will have much to think about it, often they provide a new and interesting perspective.

Once we’ve been able to meet with as many departments as possible, we’ll focus on the information architecture. This relates to content on the site and the pages on which it will sit. 

In projects which feature our ticketing solution, Skyway, we’ll spend time with the client’s ticketing team to understand the weird and wonderful ways that their organisation sells tickets. We can ask questions about all the one-off and edge-cases we may need to account for, which minimises problems down the road. 

Essentially, a workshop is a big information gathering exercise. We continue as needed until we feel ready to burst with new information that will help our development of a project.

Want to see our team in action during a workshop? Check out our collaboration with Peppered. Our Designer, Julia, talks through the process of being the design partner across Europe for De Doelen. To keep up to date with our other projects, view our work or follow us on Linkedin and Twitter.