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Design Thinking & UX Workshop Templates

12 Workshop template examples for UX design and product discovery

If you’ve ever struggled to keep the room engaged, provide enough gravitas, structure, and guidance – you need your own set of UX workshop templates.

I created these templates to provide a basic framework for designers of all levels to facilitate workshops successfully: guide the audience to an outcome, keep them focussed on the right issues (opportunities, journeys, empathy, etc.) and surface valuable insights and themes. More often than not, I design my own sessions (discovery and ideation workshops in particular) each time, but these templates provide a good starting point.

Watch my video for a quick run-through of these templates and how to use them, or keep reading for more info:

A run-through of all the UX workshop templates and how I use them

  • Stakeholder mapping template, or what I call a player roster. When you’re new to a project or you’re leading it from the UX POV, you need to map out the key players: who are your gatekeepers and in what areas versus whom it’s enough to just keep informed of how the project is going. This template gives you a framework to do exactly that.
  • First engagement opportunity template, which helps you map out problem areas, existing customer segments, mapping opportunities and next steps.
  • First engagement user outline template, which is similar to the above but it’s more focussed on the end user and mapping touchpoints in the user journey as it is currently. In any project, the stakeholders often already know (or they think they know) who the end user is and what the user journey is like—in such situations this template can serve as your hypothesis (filled with their assumptions) which you will then validate further as you kick off the project.
  • A reverse SWOT analysis template because it’s usually easier to extract the bad stuff first—it’s what people cling to. So weaknesses and threats are outlined first in this template. This way you also end on the workshop on a positive note with strengths and opportunities.
  • Empathy map template to help you empathise with the end user.
  • V1 experience map template, which is a very basic template I use when I don’t know what I’m getting into. For example, I might only have a very broad idea of stages in the journey. This template leaves the journey quite open for me to then flesh out further with end-users or stakeholders.
  • V2 experience map template, which I use when I know the user journey a bit better. It asks for a more detailed breakdown of key insights, including breaking out pain points and opportunities.
  • V3 experience map template, which is the same as above except it doesn’t include end-users’ emotional states throughout the journey.
  • Experience mapping day-to-day scenarios template, which I use to map everyday tasks and scenarios that end-users go through. This is very helpful when your end-user has the same (e.g. daily) workflow but it has many touchpoints, because it helps you see where exactly you can make improvements or combine touchpoints in the user journey.
  • Proto-persona template, which allows you to map out those initial insights you get about the end-user from stakeholders, such as marketing teams, for further validation as you undertake user research.
  • A template for mapping multiple proto-personas, because you rarely ever have just one. (And if you do, it might be because you’re looking too narrow!)
  • Design your worst competitor template, which again leans into people’s bias to focus on what the company is not doing well. This template gets your workshop participants to map out everything they fear a strong competitor might do, thereby generating useful insights for their own roadmap.
  • KANO prioritisation model template, which helps you prioritise all those insights from your ideation workshop. This is great to use in the workshop itself to prioritise ideas with stakeholders very quickly.
  • Storyboarding canvas template. Let’s say you’ve done your UX process, you’ve diverged and converged into a few features that you could build. This template helps you map out those features using insights from your research in 3 acts. You can do this together with stakeholders to get their buy-in immediately, or even your end-user.
UX workshop templates preview

Download these 12 ready-to-use templates

You’ll receive access to 12 UX, design thinking and discovery workshop templates I use in almost every project.

All templates come as .JPG at reasonable dimensions to be printed as wide-format posters: A3, A2, A1, A0… you get the drill. No access to a printer? You can also always draw these out on a whiteboard for a workshop.

Additionally, you’ll get a twice-monthly Experience Designed newsletter. 

📌 Feel free to hack, update and otherwise change these UX workshop templates as you see fit. Attribution is appreciated but not necessary.

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