“Why not give it a try?” Ricky, our senior user researcher said.

“Design with people in my parents age without any design backgrounds? In-ter-est-ing……!” I couldn’t believe that he just threw such a crazy idea in our design planning meeting.

Before we go through the whole story, let me give you more context about it. Mozilla Taipei UX team is currently working on a new product exploration for improving the online experience of people between the age of 55~65 in Taiwan. From 2 month, 4 rounds of in-depth interviews we conducted with 34 participants, we understood our target users holistically from their internet behaviors, unmet needs, to their lifestyles. After hosting a 2-day condense version of design sprint in Taipei office for generating brilliant product concepts (more stories, stay tuned :)), we were about to reach the stage of validation.

How do we know if the concepts are solving users’ pain points? What will be the best validation method? We were discussing enthusiastically in the meeting. As designers with age 30+ years younger than our users, we weren’t fully confident with our concepts. Then we realized that participatory workshop might be a good approach especially for such a special segment of the target users.

We have lots of experience on hosting workshops, but most of them are internal. This is our first time hosting a participatory workshop externally, and also our first time having a group of participants who have lots of life experiences but zero for designing. That’s why I felt so anxious when we decided to give it a try. But in the end, we nailed it. We were so satisfied with what we learned from the whole process, and how efficient it is (compared to having individual user interviews).

Here are the tips summarized from our experience.

Set Goals

Starting with clear goals is the key for the entire workshop

Since we can’t accomplish all of what we have in mind in just one 2.5-hrs workshop, we need to make clear goals and scope at the outset to make sure we’re focusing on the right direction. During our planning session, we went through all the hypothesis and product concepts, and discussed about the questions we have for validation.

After the prioritization, the 3 goals we want to achieve through the participatory workshop are: validating the hypothetical scenarios, get users’ feedback for the product concepts, and get more insights from their crazy ideas.