Co-design

A co-design workshop usually lasts between half a day (3 to 4 hours) and a full day. Rarely less on paper, but everyone’s availability means you adapt constantly. The length varies with the complexity of the problem to tackle, the number of participants and the activities planned. Bear in mind that remotely, on dedicated tools such as Miro, FigJam or Klaxoon, you quickly lose the attention of participants and a workshop that runs too long will be counterproductive.

User testing and co-design do not take place at the same point in the process. In the first case, the user reacts to a solution submitted by the team. In the second, they help build it. The two are complementary: co-design generates ideas anchored in real needs, user testing checks that the solutions designed do meet those needs.

The workshop relies on activities that allow non-designer participants to contribute without mastering design tools. Co-sketching, reworking user journeys or building usage scenarios are accessible to everyone. The principle remains the same: one phase to generate ideas, another to select them. The workshop is facilitated by the designer in charge of the project, often a UX practitioner supported by a lead, who balances contributions when the workshop brings together people at very different levels of seniority, such as decision-makers, users and technical experts.

Co-design and expert design are not mutually exclusive, but they answer different needs. Co-design brings all the stakeholders together to draw on everyone’s expertise and vision, and to prioritise together the areas for exploration that will address the various needs. Expert design (us) gives shape to those solutions by fitting them consistently into a system. What we often do is combine the two: co-design upstream to understand what is really at stake, then hand the execution to experts (still us) to produce a coherent solution on those foundations.

For most projects, we still find it worthwhile to take a little time to think through solutions together. At worst, it lets everyone get aligned, identify the risks, prioritise the next steps and quite simply talk about the direction to take.