Preparing for the Meeting

During the website redesign kickoff meeting, we were able to uncover the understanding that many business units within Walden wanted to see their content prioritized on the homepage. Because of this, we proposed the rapid prototyping workshop to get as many thoughts from the wider stakeholder audience while also minimizing the need for time-consuming revisions. Gathering our Materials

• Ensure everyone necessary is invited and can attend
• Facilitator's Toolkit (post-its, sharpies, blank paper, dry-erase markers, etc.)
• Existing site component audit
• Findings from UX discovery, shared in advance to prime the team
• Backup plan in case the team doesn't understand the workshop
• Schedule meetings with all of the facilitators both before and after each workshop.

Getting People to Open Up

We had identified a very large group of interested (and relevant) parties for the homepage workshop, 17 people to be exact. We were initially concerned that it would be particularly hard getting people to buy in to the workshop and actually put forth ideas, because they were all hyper-fixated on their sections of the site. Start by discussing the content and technical requirements. In order to make sure there were no missing pieces of content/functionality accounted for on the homepage, we set up a whiteboard to collect any content and functionality requirements for the page as guidance for the group during the rest of the workshop. Split into diverse teams for prototyping. For the actual prototyping exercise, we divided the group into 3 sections, with each group including one person from each business unit to ensure the thoughts identifed are diverse within each group.

Prioritization & Wrap Up

Once the rapid prototypes were created, each group designated one person to present their prototype to the rest of the attendees to facilitate a conversation about the merits of each prototype, and possible features/content to include in the final wireframes. As we discussed the different options available, we converged on one unified theme that merged the best ideas from each prototype rather naturally, Once the session was over, we sent the notes for the session out to the entire team (including key stakeholders who were unable to attend), and began working on the functional wireframes for the team's review.

Iteration & Refinement

To refine our process and improve over time, we conducted a retrospective post-workshop to find out what worked, what didnt, etc. Since this workshop was such a successful method of condensing multiple opinions and finding consensus quickly, we used this approach for each of the subsequent templates as well. Major improvements included:

• Scheduling to Include Remote Involvement: while most Walden employees involved were local to the Baltimore area and working from a shared office space, there were a few instances where we needed to include participants who were located in other parts of the country for feedback/opinions. To include them, we used an online form to collect requirements before prototyping.
• Component Library sketches: once we started the second set of wireframes, we identified all the relevant components that would be necessary for the site, giving more clear options for the team.
• As we ran the workshop in subsequent sessions, we were able to condense the timeframe from 120 minutes to 90 minutes, running two per day to keep the wireframing process moving along.