Design Thinking Workshop

Designing a Collaborative Session 🔖

Drawing from our experience in UX research and innovation, we have hosted numerous workshops, where participants collaborate to brainstorm and prioritize ideas, address problems, and co-create solutions. Here’s our general guide on how to conduct a workshop.

Steps to Conduct a Workshop

The ways to design and conduct a collaborative session can vary greatly. Here’s our approach to a general framework for conducting a collaborative workshop. You can adapt it based on the specific goals and nature of your project.

🧶 The general steps can be outlined as follows:

• Ice-breaker
• Main Activities
  • Empathy Mapping
  • Journey Mapping
  • Brainstorming
  • Rapid Prototyping
  • …
• Prioritization
  • Dot Voting
  • KANO Model
  • …
• Action Planning
  • How Might We?
  • Defining Opportunities
  • Defining Action Items
  • …

So, here’s an example.
We conducted a stakeholder workshop to generate ideas for potential end-users of MapleStory Worlds.

1. Ice-breakers

Ice-breakers are activities or exercises designed to help participants get to know each other, feel more comfortable, and create a positive and open atmosphere at the beginning of a workshop.

2. Introduction (+ Pre-Workshop Survey Results)

We have included the introduction in the slides to share the results of a pre-workshop survey we previously conducted. This survey was aimed at raising participants’ interest and understanding their expectations for the workshop.

3. Understanding Personas

We also incorporated the session titled ‘Understanding Personas’ to facilitate a comprehensive exploration, enabling stakeholders to effectively empathize with the experiences and perspectives of end-users.

• Intro

• Activity

4. Empathy Mapping

Going further from understanding personas, we added a collaborative exercise: ‘Empathy Mapping’. It involves creating a visual representation or map of a user’s experiences, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in the context of MapleStory Worlds.

• Intro

• Activity

5. Prioritization

To prioritize the findings from previous activities, various prioritization activities can be employed in the workshop. The choice depends on the specific goals, context, and preferences of the participants. In our case, we used the KANO Model.

• Intro

• Activity

6. How Might We?

The “How might we” (HMW) technique is typically used to transform challenges or problems into opportunities for creative solutions. In our case, participants are encouraged to define their own, enabling them to carry these perspectives into their work.

• Intro

• Activity

7. Ending (+ Exit Survey)

After the workshop, we distributed an exit survey link to collect feedback from participants about the session. The results were encouraging, with 91% expressing a desire to participate again.

My Role

In the beginning, MapleStory Worlds was merely an idea. I took the lead in research, identifying key needs and opportunities, laying the groundwork for its early stages, and fostering long-term collaboration with stakeholders.

1️⃣ Leading Strategic · Tactical Research

I managed a small team of researchers over a two-year collaboration with the product team. Our efforts encompassed diverse areas, including gameplay experience, content creation, and publishing, utilizing generative research and co-creation methodologies.

2️⃣ Uncovering Needs and Opportunities

In the early stages, we explored user needs and opportunities in first-mover metaverse and social platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and TikTok. As the project evolved, we expanded our focus to include diverse user types—regular players, creators, and streamers.

Conclusion

📌 Early Stage · Long-Term Collaboration: How it all went

Wrapping up this long-term collaboration, I gave a speech at MCI22 (MapleStory Worlds’ Creators Invitational 2022) on the topic of ‘Co-Creating MapleStory Worlds with the User’. I highlighted our extensive co-creation and collaboration with diverse stakeholders and users, sharing various studies and insights gained from them.

Research Impact

📌 Cultural Impact

Initiated during the ideation phase, the early stage collaboration defined target users through personas, uncovering their needs and opportunity areas. This collaborative design thinking process, involving designers, developers, and users—including creators and streamers—helped shape the product’s go-to-market strategy.

📌 Product Impact

This approach demonstrated how early collaboration can drive long-term product success. MapleStory World achieved a successful launch and has since become a beloved service, now with 60K+ active players, continuing to thrive.

At the conclusion of the collaboration, user needs-based heuristics were provided as a lasting KPI for the product team.

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