Over the last couple of years, design thinking, design sprints, and the workshops that go with both have become increasingly popular in UX design processes. I for one have made workshop facilitation a primary function in my process. There are a lot of articles and content that can be found talking about the benefits of workshops and being able to facilitate workshops with your colleagues and stakeholders.

But is there an argument to be made that workshops are harming the UX design world?

The TLDR answer to this question is yes…. well, sort of.

Like any tool in a tool kit, workshops can be misused and abused in a way that is detrimental to a company’s holistic UX culture, maturity, and process. Here are just a few workshop Mythbusters that could be setting you and your team back when going through your UX processes.

Workshops do not replace proper user research

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I have seen a lot of content posted online that a workshop or a design sprint is all you need to kickstart and launch a product, website, etc. and that you don’t need much if any pre-workshop research. Could you make the argument that the best kind of testing or research is on a live and launched product or experience? Yes of course! That being said I believe the best workshops and sprints are built on a foundation of great user research. I am lucky enough to work with an amazing user research team and we work together to create both qualitative and quantitative research into any design sprint we are doing for our projects. Real and well-executed user research pays dividends when you are trying to frame and discover problems for a workshop and they guide workshop participants to creating better solutions that more accurately serve the user and the business.

Solution: This is one is easy, make sure your users have a voice in a workshop! If you are the UX professional in the room that’s your job. If you aren’t, coordinate with your UX team in making sure that there is a real understanding of user needs before starting a workshop.

Workshops do not “democratize design”

I am usually the first one to use the lines “everyone can be a designer” and “UX is a team sport”. While there is truth in both statements, it’s not an excuse to cut actual designers out of your workshops or worse, out of your decision-making process. Workshops are great at unlocking the creativity within participants who don’t use creativity often. They’re even better at surfacing and organizing ideas and solutions from all the participants including the UX designers and researchers. Simple sketches and post-it notes from a workshop shouldn’t replace an entire design process and they shouldn’t even be its most important part. What workshops can and should do is help inform and guide designers to create their best ideas and solutions. What we should be saying is that “everyone can think like a designer” or even better “everyone can empathize with and think of great solutions for users”.

Solution: Make designers (not to mention researchers, engineers, marketers, etc.) actual participants in your workshops. Make sure they have a voice and that all participants are ready to rely on their expertise. Make sure the results of the workshop act merely as a strong guide for designers rather than a stifling set of instructions.

Workshops are not the answer to every problem

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One of my long-term missions is to turn any meeting I am a part of into some form of a workshop. I believe in them that much. That being said workshops won’t solve all of your problems, in fact, from my experience, they are much better at discovering problems than they are at solving them. Of course, a large part of most workshops is coming up with a ton of solutions or ideas to solve a problem but it doesn’t replace the actual execution that is needed to really get the work done. As I alluded to earlier in this article, you still need people great, qualified, and experienced at what they do to do what they do best to bring your workshop results to life. All the efforts and attention needed to run a great workshop become irrelevant if you don’t have great people working with you to not only contribute their best ideas but to help you bring those ideas to life. Furthermore, you can easily walk a fine line with workshop fatigue if you are looking to workshop with your clients, colleagues, or stakeholders so often that they end up loathing workshops more than they do meetings!

Solution: Choose just a few key milestones in your holistic process to incorporate a workshop or design sprint. Avoid the temptation of workshopping every phase of your project. My process involves 2–3 workshops per project at the most, that’s including the workshop that would come with a design sprint.

Hopefully, you still want to run UX workshops after reading this. I promise that I have far more to say in the promotion of workshops than I do against them. I plan to be a workshopologist for a long time to come because I do believe in their power to align teams in discovering problems and creating solutions for those problems. However, it’s important to not abuse the power of workshops, use them responsibly, and don’t let them replace the wonderful and valuable people you work with, don’t let them bog down or distort proper UX processes and workshop ideas will never replace the voices of actual users.

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