Co-design in UX research

An unexpectedly influential article about collaborative UX

When I was in full-on learning-and-experimenting mode with Domain7, I was intuiting my way into the world of workshops for UX. Heck, the idea of "UX" being the common moniker for the process of making digital things wasn't even all that common; and the notion of collaborative design workshops also wasn't easy to find conversation about.

What my problem was, was this: to be a strategist was to help create concepts and directions for a digital design. But then? It needs to be socialized, shared and improved: with the client, to make sure it passes muster. With the design and dev teams, to get it moved through production. It's no good to just "throw it over the wall." There are too many tweaks required, misunderstandings that occur, and besides: if we can just take the time to co-create the concept itself, we'll win. We'll catch the bad ideas, find better ones, production staff will be more equipped to build things meaningfully...everything improves.

I wrote about this on Medium, in a piece called...

The Co-Design Workshop: The Facilitator’s Pocket Guide

(A three-hour design sprint for digital product design)

I documented one approach that I had been finding was a way-in to experimenting with this. Take a compressed time period, apply some design thinking parameters, and you've got a tiny itsy-bitsy design sprint.

And since then...I've discovered it's been referenced in: 

• The Co-Create Handbook, co-funded by the European Union’s ERASMUS+ Programme
• The Government of Victoria, Australia’s Human-Centered Design Playbook 
• Human-Centred Systems Design program, at the University of Wollongong, Australia 
• User Experience Engineering curriculum in the Technical University of Denmark
• User Research: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Products & Services, Stephanie Marsh