Why we think discovery workshops are really important and how we do them

Written by

Tash Hockey

Discovery workshops are an excellent way to demonstrate how we work to new clients and to provide the chance for them to really articulate what they need. It’s also the perfect opportunity for us as the service provider to gain all the knowledge we need to build the best possible product we can.

TLDR: To best understand your needs, and ultimately save you time and money, we like to hold discovery workshops to help onboard you as our clients so you can get to know us and let us know what you need.

What are discovery workshops and why do we run them?

Discovery workshops are an integral part of every project we lead. They provide an opportunity to bring all the key stakeholders from your teams together in a room – usually a virtual one, as we work remotely – to discuss your needs for the project and the outcomes you wish to achieve. We’ll also take you through the process, demonstrating how a project will run and highlighting the important milestones. This allows everyone’s voices to be heard on an equal level.

We think it’s imperative to run sessions like these for a number of reasons:

To define a minimum viable product that we can build upon, either as the project progresses, or later, depending on a client’s budget.
They help to set a clear, actionable plan with key milestones and checkpoints for you.
They allow you to budget more effectively and stick to them, rather than costs spiralling out of control because of last minute additions.
They allow us to mitigate any obstacles that may have arisen had we not run a discovery workshop.
Us as the service provider can build a relationship with you, as our clients, from the beginning – these workshops are designed to help you feel like you’re working in collaboration with us, rather than in isolation.

Discovery workshop in progress with our client, InCommon

What makes our workshops different?

Sometimes, organisations can come to a stand still when making decisions for their website, particularly if they want to design a product or service from scratch. We’re ready and on hand to guide you through a bespoke workshop that’s set up to get the best out of the session. We keep our workshops capped at 2 hours so people remain engaged and bring their individual energies. If that means we need to have multiple sessions to get the answers we need, that’s okay. It’s worth it to set the right direction for the project.

It’s easy for agencies to request a brief from a client and just get straight into designing the product, but that’s not how we do things. It’s important to us to dive deeper to gain a better understanding of your organisation, who your users are, and what your goals are, both now and in the future. We’re not afraid to challenge assumptions teams have made. During these workshops, we’re able to ask the questions that might be uncomfortable to answer, but ultimately, help us to get to the crux of an issue to create the best result.

Having this open environment for each person to discuss the things they want to talk about is a great opportunity for those who are a little quieter to say their piece. We often find it’s those that don’t feel the most confident about speaking up that come up with the best ideas. The workshops also bring a variety of perspectives, as the integral stakeholders are all present, and may come from different departments within an organisation, all with varying requirements.

We think it’s really important to allow everyone a chance to speak their mind; otherwise, some of the most useful, salient points might never be heard!

“The Idea Bureau’s discovery workshop provided a really useful structure for an honest appraisal of our online platform, allowing a critical eye to the positives and negatives, and bringing an external perspective to how we shape it going forward. It really helped us to prioritise the key areas for improvement and start to form a plan for transformation.”

Harriet Warden

Partnerships Lead at InCommon

A screenshot of an ice breaker activity where participants have each drawn a digital animal in a red box. — **Screenshot of an icebreaker activity from a discovery workshop for our human rights client**

How we run our discovery workshops

Before the workshop

In the days before a workshop takes place, we’ll send over a video that summarises what we’ll go through in the session. We’ve found this an incredibly useful step, as it gives people a heads up about what we’ll be discussing, helping to put people at ease who may be a bit out of their comfort zone in this type of environment.
Typically, we suggest including 5-10 people per workshop. Any more than that and it becomes difficult to guide the session in the most productive way. Quite often, we end up running many sessions to enable us to work more closely with the various departments within an organisation.
- Example: We’re currently working with a human rights organisation based in the US called WITNESS – we held 6 discovery workshops with the different teams, including Marketing & Communications, Learning & Sharing, and the Senior Leadership team.

On the day of the workshop:

We begin every workshop with an activity to break the ice: this allows everyone present to get to know each other and also to become familiar with the software we use for our virtual workshops, called Figjam.
- Everyone seems to love these icebreaker activities – they could be anything from a drawing activity to using emojis to describe what you did on the weekend.
- The idea is to have a bit of fun to lighten up the session, settling any nerves attendees may have, and also do some introductions.
After the icebreaker activity, we’ll give a quick summary of what’ll take place during the workshop – although we’ve already sent over the pre-workshop video, we don’t want to assume that everyone’s seen it, so it’s good to have a recap here.
No two workshops are the same, as each one we run is bespoke – that means the activities will be different for each of them, as well. That being said, these are the areas we generally like to cover:
- Understanding the goals the teams we’re working with have for their new website, product or service.
- A ‘sailboat’ activity to review how their current website works for them (e.g. the positive aspects) and how it holds them back (the negative aspects).
- Activities that focus on getting to know their different audiences and user types.
- Spending some time exploring the high-level requirements for the new website.
Each of the activities has a mixture of independent work and bringing everyone’s ideas together to have open discussions and vote on them. The type of output will depend on the activity itself.
We also have a section of the workshop where everybody writes tasks on post-it notes and brings them together for the group to vote on – this makes it a fair way to prioritise solutions and ideas. Any tasks that aren’t chosen are put in an ‘icebox’ or phase 2 area to look back on later.

After the workshop:

We’ll spend some time summarising the outcomes into a notebook-style document that clearly outlines the direction we’ll be working towards. Using the tasks chosen in the ‘noting and voting’ exercise, we’ll use the outcome to prioritise features and pages.
We don’t create user personas during the sessions, like some organisations do during discovery workshops – this is because we prefer to take them from our user research we do post-workshop that allows us to learn from the users directly. However, we do ask for the variety and types of users – such as funders, journalists, researchers etc – to discover what their goal in coming to the website is as a foundation to begin our own research.
- Performing this user research ourselves gives us the chance to validate any assumptions our clients’ teams may have made, and to learn new things.
We also use this time to sit down internally and look at what can be achieved within the timeframes and budget available.
There are usually some follow up discussions that need to be had to do a deep dive into areas that were highlighted in the workshops.

A large whiteboard with lot of multicoloured post-it notes on it, each with little descriptions. — ***Post-its from a discovery workshop on a whiteboard***

Conclusion

We really love this part of a project. It’s exciting to bring together everyone’s ideas to start shaping what the project will be. Discovery workshops definitely help create a smoother journey for the project, getting the teams aligned on expectations and outcomes. We like to offer this space for clients to share ideas and bring them on board – judging from the feedback we’ve received, our clients are enjoying it, too!