Outcomes workshop

written by @meiqimichelle and @coreycaitlin

Here's roughly what we did:

First, a presentation on user research and reminder of scope (i.e. "we are talking about this website")

Outcomes exercises, drawn from a combo of these two methods: KJ method + Metrics definition

1. Warm-up exercise: Say you're going to a new restaurant tonight. What are your hopes and dreams for this meal? Take 1 minute to write down a few of each, one per post-it note.
2. Real exercise: Say we built a website. What are your hopes and dreams for what could happen because of this website? Take 5 minutes to write them on post-it notes.
3. Have each person go up to the wall/whiteboard and put up their post-it notes. This gives them a chance to clarify or explain. Once a few are up, encourage people to put their post-its near other similar ones.
4. If possible, add post-its for what users' hopes and fears (or results from a successful visit) might be. Once all the post-its are up, spend a moment clarifying the groupings and naming the groups. (Don't overthink this! It's okay to have outliers.)
5. Outcomes definition! Return to your example to show the format you'll be using: We believe that eating at McDonald's will result in a full belly without spending too much money. We will know we are right when we feel satisfied AND have spent less than $12.
6. Create space on the whiteboard for each prompt (we believe that..., will result in..., and We will know we are right when...) and start working to sort each grouping from the earlier exercise into these areas. This can be tricky, so you may not get to perfect sentences with everyone in the room, but it should help you get far enough to polish the outcomes afterward.

The other thing that was SUPER HELPFUL was setting some ground rules at the beginning, which included having an "open questions" (parking lot) area to put issues that arose but were out-of-scope for this workshop (for example, ongoing governance questions; which subcommittee should be approving web priorities; etc).

Here are the slides we used. This workshop is covered by parts 1, 2, and 3. (Part 4 was something our teammates from Deloitte organized around a specific draft visualization.)