
Workshops - Internal
Between March to May 2024, the BookTrust Digital team, led by myself, delivered a series of UX Workshops designed to help better understand our users in preparation for the upcoming Digital Transformation project.
Project Outline
Four workshops were run, on the subjects of;
- Vulnerable Children
- EYTO and Primary Schools
- Partnerships
- Income and Profile
Over the workshops we ran a series of activities that built to an outcome detailing potential user journeys for end users.
Those activities included;
- Value Proposition/User Stories
- Five Why’s
- Prototype Personas
- ‘The Worst Possible Idea’ (Reverse Brainstorming)
- User Journey’s
- Rapid 8’s
Out of those 6 activities we ran a variety of them per workshop – adapting to suit the needs and the attendees of the workshop.
Learning from previous workshops and being dynamic throughout.
The overall aim of the workshops being to better understand the charities end-users ready for an upcoming Digital Transformation project.
Initial Steps
To kick start the workshops the first steps was to understand what we wanted to discover. BookTrust has a huge number of end users and we needed to work out who would be the priorities for ongoing and future projects.
Next was assembling the groups for each workshop. This was a case of liaising with a variety department leads to understand who would be the the most suitable people to join each workshop, ensuring we were able to use the collective knowledge from within the charity to reach the required outcomes.
Research
The research stage of the workshops was more focused on understanding what groups of people we wanted to bring together and what activities would be suitable from a POV of content and required outcomes.
Design Process
We decided early on when outlining the workshops that we wanted a mixed set of people in each workshop. This was designed this way so that people weren't blinkered and new ideas, thoughts and directions could flourish.
The activities chosen we done so with the concept of building a story in mind. Each activity built on the last, and armed every participant with new skills and knowledge to help develop the final outcomes in each and every workshop.
It was also a consideration for all participants to be able to lead conversations within the workshop as it would allow for further idea generation overall.
Stoppers
The only stoppers within the workshops was the work to get all the right people in the room together. We wanted people from a mix of departments from within the charity, but also enough subject experts to help guide conversation at the same time.
This led to a number of rearrangements and delays in the running of a couple of the workshops, however all the intended workshops did happen and the outcomes were beneficial to supporting the upcoming project.
Outcome
Overall the series of workshops were extremely successful.
Combined, they delivered 14 user journey's, highlighted a variety of wants, needs and opportunities, as well as a number of pain points to be resolved.
Following the conclusion of the four workshops there was a number of potential actions and ideas that could be taken forward into the development of the new website.
Below are a handful of points that resonated across the workshops that require consideration moving forward;
- Clearer journeys and clear identification of ‘where’ users are
- Personalisation
- Easier ‘sign up’ and donation capabilities
- Downloadable and interactive resources
- Clearer showing of information (benefits and actions)
- ‘Purchase’ capabilities (books via 3rd party and programmes)