How to Build a Participant List for UX Workshops

When well facilitated, UX workshops can be an effective and efficient strategy for solving complex problems collaboratively. Unlike meetings, where the purpose is to disseminate knowledge or share status updates, often about work that has been completed prior to the meeting, workshops are a setting where collaborative work happens in real time. Therefore, it is absolutely critical to have the right people in the room: a workshop is only as valuable as the people that attend them.

The Risk of Not Planning a Participant List

To illustrate the importance of strategically considering and planning who attends a UX workshop, consider the following examples, based on actual workshops.

A Vetoing VP

A software company conducted a product-roadmapping workshop. Workshop participants analyzed series of user interviews and concluded that the features they had previously considered were not aligned with user needs. They came up with a revised product direction and set of associated features to match what they had discovered. However, when they shared it with the senior vice president responsible for the product, she immediately dismissed it. “This isn’t the direction we’ve discussed previously,” she explained. “I don’t see evidence to justify this change in direction.”

The evidence that the SVP was looking for had actually been gathered by researchers and had been synthesized by the workshop participants. Unfortunately, this SVP, who had total veto power over the entire project, hadn’t been in the room and was only read a few short user quotes and anecdotes in the report. These were insufficient to support the workgroup’s claim that a pivot was warranted.

A Disremembered Developer

A financial-services company held a workshop to find a design solution addressing the increasing number of support tickets related to a particular step in the user journey. When the workshop participants shared the flow that they had developed with the development team, they were told that the proposed solution was not feasible. It relied on capabilities that the company’s current API did not support and would be cost prohibitive to build. Additionally, when the research team members heard about the proposed solution, they claimed that it wouldn’t solve the users’ problem anyway because it did not address the larger user needs that led users to make that mistake in the first place (i.e., the “why”).

In this case, both developers and researchers should have been included in the workshop. Developers would have quickly known that the proposed solution was not possible and could have redirected discussion towards other more feasible ideas. Researchers could have looked at the workshop invitation and proposed conducting some supporting research prior to the workshop to better understand the problem.

These real-life examples demonstrate the importance of considering who is in the room — actual or virtual — for a UX workshop. Too often, attendee lists are based on convenience (e.g., “Who has availability on their calendar the week we want to meet?”) or the path of least resistance (e.g., “Let’s not include Alex; no need to introduce unnecessary conflict.”). Instead, workshop organizers should consider a mix of participants whose skillsets and experience complement each other in a way best suited for the objectives of the workshop.

Creating a Participant List: Best Practices

While who should attend the workshop is highly contingent upon the goals and context of the workshop, the culture of the organization, and the timeline and budget limitations that might constrain your abilities to gather the right group, the following best practices generally apply to most workshops. Use these as ideals and tailor them based on your constraints and contexts.

Keep Group Size Manageable

While many factors determine the appropriate number of workshop attendees, a manageable group size typically falls in the range of 6–12 participants. This range tends to be large enough to catalyze engagement and interaction, while not being so large that facilitation and maintaining focus become unmanageable.Of course, this is a guideline, not a rule, and there are times when it should not be followed. For example, if a project has more than 12 coequal stakeholders, they should probably all be included regardless. Additionally, certain types of workshops lend themselves better to different group sizes. For example, certain activities in a prioritization workshop often benefit from having a larger group of stakeholders to contribute votes.

As more participants join a workshop, the job of the facilitator becomes more difficult. In person, large groups can lead to hard-to-manage, off-topic conversations. Remotely, you have the opposite problem: large groups can lead to a lack of engagement, where participants hide in the virtual back row, hoping not to be noticed. Aim to prioritize a group size that maximizes value and diversity, while maintaining manageability.

Prioritize Diversity

Because workshops are often so costly to organize, they are typically reserved for the highest-impact initiatives, projects with many multiple parts that touch many parts of an organization. In these cases, the purpose of a workshop is to bring together diverse perspectives in order to include these impacted parties and optimize outcomes. Therefore, it is important to consider the ways in which diversity should be prioritized when building a workshop-participant list. There are many forms of diversity to consider, including the following.

Departmental Diversity

If you look around the table at a UX workshop and see only the people on your team, it’s a good indication that something is not optimal. Workshops are a rare opportunity to bring together teams and departments that might otherwise not have a chance to work together.

On the other hand, as noted above, you want to keep your participant list on the smaller side, so it’s often wise to avoid inviting too many people from a single department. Rather, use the opportunity to pick one or two representatives from each department that might touch or be impacted by the project, to get as many perspectives as possible in the room.

Domain-Knowledge Diversity

On any given project, there are undoubtedly several knowledge domains that should be accounted for during the workshop. Consider some of the most specialized areas of knowledge that should be accounted for and that other attendees might lack and invite subject-matter experts (SME) to fill in those gaps.

That being said, not everyone in the room should necessarily be an expert. If everyone thinks they already know everything there is to know about a subject, you increase the chances that decisions will be based on preexisting assumptions and outside knowledge, rather than on research and knowledge generated in the workshop. Additionally, novices can be highly valuable. Sometimes it takes someone asking a “stupid question” to make progress and force the group to see things in a different light.

Ideally, you can “double dip” some of these positions (e.g., a SME who can also represent the design team). To keep the workshop small and focused, in some cases, you may also include a specific SME for only part of the workshop. For example, if you must include subject-matter expertise on a certain vendor relationship and the sole person with that knowledge is available only for a limited portion of the day or has limited additional expertise to offer to the group, you could invite them for a half hour early in the day to give a brief presentation or to host a Q & A session with other participants.

Seniority Diversity

Some workshop organizers default to filling the workshop with the most senior-level roles who are available to participate. Others assume senior leaders will be unavailable or unwilling to attend and instead default to inviting only very junior roles. Still others falsely assume that everyone in a workshop should be on roughly the same level, in order to assume an equal playing field.

In fact, a diversity of seniority levels is ideal. Inviting decision makers helps build buy-in for ideas generated during workshop activities. At the same time, including independent contributors (e.g., those people not in management or leadership positions) ensures that both feasibility of ideas and their potential impact are considered.

During the workshop, make space for junior-level participants to voice their ideas. The facilitator should consider structuring activities and conversations in a way that encourages equal contribution and avoids situations where junior roles aren’t intimidated or steamrolled by those with greater authority in the room.

Prioritize Users

At any user-experience workshop, the user should, of course, be represented in some capacity. In some cases, it’s useful to bring the users themselves into the workshop. For example, in an empathy workshop, representative users can share their perspectives directly. (What can build empathy faster than actual facetime with a user?) In a prioritization workshop, users can give input on which features or issues are most pressing to them.

But in some cases, it is not optimal or not possible to include users directly. It’s often a good idea to spend part of the workshop watching raw footage of user interviews to familiarize participants with users and their needs. Additionally, there may be other potential participants that can further prioritize the users’ perspective in the workshop:

User Proxies

A user proxy is someone with deep knowledge of users that can speak to their needs and concerns. A commonly accessible type of user proxy is a customer-support representative (CSR). These people spend their entire day talking to users and helping them to solve problems. They may know more about user needs than anyone else in the company and are an invaluable contribution to almost any UX workshop. One word of advice from experience: often times, companies would rather send a customer-support manager, rather than a CSR, to a workshop. Their thinking is:

1. They’d rather avoid the costly expense of pulling a CSR off the phone for a full day.
2. They assume that a manager is more knowledgeable and better equipped to participate in a workshop than a CSR.

Typically, claim #2 is false. CSRs are tremendously knowledgeable and very well equipped to offer insights directly in a workshop setting. Usually, it is more useful to include user proxies who have the most direct user interaction (e.g., the CSR as opposed to the manager).

UX Researchers

Researchers have presumably conducted a great deal of user research previously and, therefore, are also reasonably well equipped to represent the perspective of the user in discussion.

Participant Roles to Consider

There are two roles that should be considered carefully for UX workshops:

Facilitator

Ideally, the facilitator should be designated to that role alone and should not serve the dual function of facilitator and workshop participant. This not only allows the facilitator to focus solely on the job of facilitation (a very challenging job all on its own!), but also prevents the facilitator from biasing workshop activities.

In some cases, however, it is not possible to have a facilitator who is not a workshop participant. In those situations, avoid picking someone who is particularly invested in a particular view or wields a great deal of role power.

Decider

Any workshop that involves making big critical decisions should include a designated “decider.” The inclusion of a decider, a role popularized by Jake Knapp’s Sprint, acknowledges the reality that, in almost all cases, there is a single person with the overwhelming power to either greenlight or veto an entire project. It can be tempting to specifically exclude this person from a workshop. Maybe you’re worried about them throwing too many curve balls or that their schedule is very busy. Resist this temptation and include this person in order to give them enough context to make the right decision.

Other Crossfunctional Roles to Consider

The following are some other general categories of participants to consider when assembling a participant list. Ultimately, the type of workshop and its goals will dictate if all or any of these should be included.

Tailor to Your Goals

Ultimately, there is no magic formula for building the perfect participant list for any UX workshop. Every workshop is unique, as are its goals and desired outcomes. Use these guidelines within the context of your workshop goals to assemble the best dream team your shared-calendar availability can muster:

1. Maintain a strategic group size of 6–12 participants to maximize engagement and manageability.
2. Prioritize the inclusion of diversity in all its forms.
3. Maintain the centrality of the voice and perspective of the user.

References

Jake Knapp. 2016. Sprint. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.