Co-Creation and Design Workshops

Co-creation Workshops and Design Workshops are closely related to focus groups, but also differ from them in important ways. In co-creation workshops, participants not only share their perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs, but are actively involved in the development process through various co-design methods (e.g., idea generation and brainstorming sessions with Post-Its or quick visualization of ideas with paper or Lego prototypes). The goal of co-development with end users and relevant stakeholders is to find creative solutions for products and services that lead to high trust and acceptance, especially through systematic empathy, early involvement and co-determination.

Particularly suited for:

• Both at the beginning and later in the development and innovation process (e.g. to get iterative feedback on a product concept or prototype
• Empathy with the user perspective and accounting for diverse user requirements

Setting:

• Group setting
• In the lab at rapid user feedback or via video connection

Personas Workshops

A persona is a fictional representation of users that stands for a group of real users. As fictional profiles, personas serve to clearly represent the wishes, goals, and tasks of this group of users, especially for developers and designers who do not come into direct contact with users in their work. A persona has an assigned personality and a concrete usage behavior. It is given all the attributes of a real person (name, habits, family, friends, hobbies, age, gender, etc.). Personas thus help to make different user groups more “tangible” and to focus specifically on the wishes and requirements of the users during development. The goal of a personas workshop is to create several representative personas.

Particularly suitable for:

• Communication within a project team
• For developers: better empathic understanding of users, their real needs and the context of use

Setting:

• Group session with 4-8 persons
• In the lab with rapid user feedback or via video connection