HOW-TO-GUIDE ON CONDUCTING A VIRTUAL IDEATION WORKSHOP

This is a starting place for anyone who is in the throes of planning a virtual ideation workshop (aka. virtual design workshop).

Co-Authors Tiff Napolitano & Jess Primavera

In early 2021, my co-worker and I designed and led a 3-day virtual ideation workshop. Working remotely during COVID has introduced a whole slew of obstacles to collaborative working. We both had held in-person ideation sessions based on design thinking principles, yet we had never held a virtual one. In the early planning, I remember thinking:

“How do we do this virtually while making it fun, collaborative, productive, and engaging to bring out the best ideas?”

I discovered there wasn’t much on the interwebs in terms of a playbook, how-tos, tips, or plans to aid planning ideation workshops. So, it became my goal to help others do this successfully and have fun. It’s all about creating an exceptional experience for your participants (and isn’t this what we aim to do for our users in creating products for them too!)

This article will help you define workshop goals, create a plan and agenda, inspire inclusive collaboration and expand the minds of participants.

Workshop background

Our team is an internal incubator, designing the future of travel. We are developing a Vision (aka North Star) along with Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) as part of the Design Thinking and Product Lifecycle. The 3-day workshop was part of our Hypothesize and Define phase. It is modeled after many other ideation workshops and design sprints used in mobile and web development.

Where to Start

Every great workshop starts with an end-goal in mind. Some questions we asked ourselves included:

“How do we want participants to contribute?” “What do we hope to accomplish?”

Our goal was to collect participant ideas! This workshop was specifically focused on brainstorming and idea-generation.​ We let our participants know that we would set direction, but would prioritize ideas over decisions. ​ We were specific about our principal workshop goals so participants would know how to contribute and to achieve our desired output.

Additional considerations when determining where to start

We chose idea-generation as our goal since we were early in our Vision and MLP concepts. From here we created a theme per day to give focus and structure for each day of the workshop. Below are starting points to consider when designing a virtual ideation workshop.

• Idea-generation: If most participants are thinking about the problem for the first time, start here. When your Vision & MLP are in the conceptual stage, hold an ideation brainstorming session with no expectation that a final direction will be set.
• Decision–making: Start here when your Vision & MLP concepts are some-what defined. The goal for this session is to create a working session where ideas can be pitched, and participants can vote.
• Buy-in: Start here when Vision & MLP concepts are already known. The goal for this session is to share concepts in an effort to evangelize the work, create energy, and excitement. Outputs include the discovery of innovative ideas and approaches in technical feasibility and implementation. If you’re at this point in the ideation cycle, you may even want to explore leveraging a hackathon.

Virtual Ideation Workshop Agenda

Agenda details

Our workshop goals helped define our plan to guide our participant workshop experience. We created a detailed agenda with goals and outputs for each session and discussed as a team how prior sessions would be inputs into the succeeding sessions. We reached out in our networks and searched the web for these kinds of plans and realized they were NOT widely shared. We’ve done the hard work and created a template for you to use.

• Day 1 — Understanding users & prioritizing their problems
• Day 2 — Ideating solutions to solve users’ problems
• Day 3 — Understanding our technology & hypothesizing our Vision Statement & Metric

Agenda flow & refining

Each session flowed together or was built from one session to the next. Adopting an agile principle, we revised our plan continuously based on ideas from the core team. Trusting our process, even when we felt uncomfortable or unsure if we’d get the desired output, helped us avoid agenda-planning fatigue. Due to time constraints, we had to make quick decisions in the workshop to create the best experience for our participants. We took a refine as we go approach and scheduled scrum time at the beginning and end of the days as well as after key-sessions. This allowed us to make minor changes for each session as we learned. Our plan was fluid and flexible and successfully guided us to create the best experience for our virtual participants.

Key Learning | Tighten & Align Your Agenda With Your Workshop Goals

Our biggest learning when refining our agenda was to increase our time in brainstorming sessions and remove work we could do post-workshop (View what we removed here; rows 144–151). This provided time-flexibility to let the ideas flow. We came to this conclusion by sharing our agenda with key-stakeholders and gathering their feedback before the workshop. This created early stakeholder buy-in. Since our drafted agenda takes this learning into account, this agenda is ready–to–roll for your virtual ideation workshop.

Workshop Collaboration Tools

A way to virtually and inclusively share ideas and collaborate

Traditionally, an ideation workshop physical experience takes place face-to-face in a conference space with physical mediums for working together in whiteboards & walls with sticky notes and markers. With many working from home, we created a virtual experience of a conference center in an 8-hour video call.

Our virtual medium for sharing and collaborating was mostly done with a digital workspace for visual collaboration service called Mural. Our UX team is currently testing another white-boarding service called Miro which has many of the same features and appears to be another promising possibility. Mural has by far been my favorite way to “put imagination to work”, and I’ve used it as a personal working space to collect my own ideas and organize them.

“Put imagination to work.” — Tiff Napolitano

This virtual white-boarding tool made our experience better than a physical experience in these ways.

Virtual white-boarding products will help you work efficiently and collaboratively before, during, and after the workshop. It helped us create a virtual, more inclusive participant experience in our solo and group brainstorming sessions.

• Mural has a robust library of templates to quickly create assets for your sessions and inspire your workshop ideas. This reduced our asset creation time by editing titles, sections, and verbiage tailored for each mural. Here is a template we used and edited to fit each ideation session.
• Mural is easy to use which is important when you are newly introducing a tool as your core means for workshop collaboration. Before the workshop, we created an icebreaker board so participants could pre-learn the tool and we gave a quick 1–2 min tutorial at the start of the workshop to aid the learning curve.
• The voting feature is aaa-mazing. As a Mural admin, you can set requirements like votes per participant and length of voting session (with voting timer). During the voting session, you get a pulse on vote progress with stats like the number of votes placed and the number of votes left by participants. This makes it easier to guide the voting process. My favorite requirement about the voting feature is you can’t see how others are voting until the voting session has ended. This feature is excellent because it reduces voting bias during and after the session with anonymous voting results.
• Mural is accessible to participants at every moment, spurring inclusion with real-time equal opportunity for sharing and collaboration. Without the physical limitation of being in one group, room, space, or a participant walking from one part of the room to the whiteboard, participants could share and collaborate at the same time. Session details and mural spaces were instantly accessible by pinching and zooming.
• Murals boards become living assets. In the workshop, spell check was all of our friends. No deciphering necessary to understand handwriting. After the workshop, no documentation was necessary in taking pictures or transferring thoughts from physical whiteboards to paper. In post-workshop work and presentations, we easily transferred words and phrases with copy and paste to summarize thoughts and theme ideas.

How to Make Your Workshop Fun & Fruitful

Productive brainstorms create space for fresh and generative thinking through guidelines and an open and collaborative environment. The most enjoyable and fruitful ideation sessions create a free flow of thought where ideas build on one another. You’ll see brainstorm guidelines we add to our mural as reminders on how we do this together. As shared previously, the physical movement and personal space limitations were removed making it easier to create this expansive-mind environment within our workshop experience. However, the virtual video meetings for 8 hours a day and the inability to connect one-on-one in-the-moment were taxing.

Moments we took to energize, engage, and expand our minds to do our best thinking

• We opened our workshop with an icebreaker to share who we are, what we do and what happy or painful moments we’ve had as users in our problem space. This helped us connect with one another and to the problem space by sharing our experiences.
• We started every workshop day with a moment of inspiration. These were related problem space videos focused on our goal and the work we had a plan for the day. We used these to get the ideas flowing and help participants focus on our work.
• There is a ton of data and science on how our minds need breakaway moments to energize and process information. Getting outdoors is a wonderful way to do this. We planned many breaks and made sure there was a long break mid-workshop day while encouraging people to get outside in between our working sessions.
• That 2/3 of the workshop time of day when we felt our mind floating away was when we took a break to move our bodies. Again, there is science showing how movement helps process thoughts and so much more. Around this time, we’d set a timer for 30 sec and everyone could just move how they wanted. Some danced, others did sit-ups, push-ups, squats and other calisthenics to get the blood flowing. It was a fun moment to see us all being a bit silly too. The laugher and movement got us to our next working session energized to ideate and collaborate for a few more hours.
• We had reflect–and–learn moments to expand our thinking and make our workshop experience better. At the end of every workshop day, we sent out a pulse survey asking participants to score their day and give suggestions to make our next day better. We listened to this feedback and made changes. At the close of our workshop, we had a high-low white-boarding session where participants shared their “high” or what went well and their “lows” or what could have been better. We plan to use their feedback at our next workshop.

Go forth in our new virtual world

I hope this article gives you a head start in planning your next virtual or in-person ideation workshop. You can do it and do it with success. Remember to focus on creating an exceptional experience for your participants. Define your goals, create your plan and inspire others to inclusively collaborate & expand their minds.

If you have any questions or other ideas in leading ideation workshops, please reach out to me & Jess. We’d 💙 to help and learn from you too. 🙌