At Lizard Global, we know that a successful digital solution can only be achieved by fully understanding the needs of the end-user. We use the human-centered approach of Design Thinking to empathize with users and define the problems they’re facing in order to create a digital solution that satisfies the end-user in the best possible way. To help you and your team with conceptualizing the right solution for your customers, we provide Design Thinking Workshops at Lizard Global. This is one of the three different workshops we offer and a great way to start your journey towards the digital transformation of your business and services/products.

The design thinking workshop dives into essential aspects of the conceptualization and ideation process. Together with you and your team, we take a closer look at your end-users and create so-called customer personas to achieve a better understanding of their needs and potential solutions. This blog gives you a peek behind the scenes of our Design Thinking workshop, and the important role they play in the process of partnering up with Lizard Global.

What do I learn at a Design Thinking workshop?

A Design Thinking workshop is a user-centric creative problem-solving process executed in a collaborative manner by applying several practical group exercises, spread over multiple sessions. It follows the same process as the design thinking methodology of applying empathy, ideation, and prototyping. It starts with understanding a problem, the users involved and understanding these users by stepping into their shoes. The second step is to create an ideal picture of the future by describing the desired digital solution. The final step consists of prototyping, during which you team up with our design team and start sketching the potential look and feel of your digital solution. The main goals of our Design Thinking workshops consist of the following:

• Obtaining a comprehensive understanding of your target audience
• Accurately defining the problem(s) experienced by your target audience
• Providing the opportunity to create feasible and user-focused solutions
• Providing an accelerated process of designing digital solutions, reducing costs, and increasing profits
• Improving the problem-solving skills of your team
• Getting early validation for solutions before implementation

What does a Design Thinking workshop look like?

Our workshops are designed to last. That’s why we execute the workshop across multiple weeks in order to provide you with optimal guidance through the process of design thinking. Our Design Thinking workshop consists of approximately 4 sessions each with its own focus related to the Design Thinking approach: empathy, ideation, and prototyping. We finalize the workshop by taking two sessions to focus on the presentation of your solution. The number of sessions of this workshop depends on your choice for a remote or in-person workshop. An in-person session consists of one day of 6 hours, while our remote workshops are split into two sessions of 3.5 hours.

Session 1: Problem definition

In our first workshop session, we get to know each other and your business. This particular session is focused on defining the concrete problem you, your team, and/or your customers face and setting goals to work towards solving this problem. We use this time to align the overall objectives with the problem at hand, and use this as a foundation for the following sessions, which are diving deeper into the conceptualization of an actual solution.

Session 2: Audience analysis

During our second session, we focus on one of the most essential elements of design thinking: understanding your users by empathizing with them. In this session, we help you define and identify with your target audience. Doing this enables you to assess how much demand for your product or service is out there, as well as to modify your product or service to better meet the needs of your end-users and turn it into a design that speaks to the right people. The process of identifying and creating a deeper understanding of a target audience focuses on the methodology of creating so-called customer personas. This methodology helps you to visualize the customer or customer segment as a specific fictional character. By creating these characters, you learn to see a general audience as a group of individuals, and therefore create a deeper bond and understanding of your customers. The activities in our first session include:

• Create a high-level description of your target audience
• List demographics & create customer personas
• List personal motivations & thoughts
• Define the desired experience of the future product or service

Session 3: Solution generation

The third session focuses on the process of defining a solution that is in line with the target audience and the challenges you’ve concretely identified in the previous sessions. Now that you have a complete 360-degree view of your target audience, you have a better understanding of how they experience their problems. This enables you to create more tailored solutions to increase the chances of success. Our third session involves a lot of creativity and input from you and your team. Here we enable and encourage your team to brainstorm on innovative ideas and possibilities.

Session 4: Final presentation

Our fourth session is designed to reflect on what we’ve learned in the previous sessions, and present the solution you and your team have come up with. By now, we should already have a clear image of your final solution. We finalize the workshop by letting you and your team present the final solution. And there you have it: your very own digital solution, ready to be turned into a physical product. Our workshops provide you with the right foundation for your solution. With that foundation, we can go straight into the phase of creating your actual digital solution. Keep an eye on our website or get in touch with us for more information about all our workshops.

What deliverables do you have at the end of this workshop?

At the end of our Design Thinking workshop, you’ll have enough knowledge and tools to take your conceptualized solution to the next level, either by continuing your partnership with Lizard Global or developing the solution with your own in-house team.

All session materials

Comprehensive documentation of the workshop, each individual session, and the outcomes.

Problem blueprint

• A map of the current user journey
• Opportunities within the current journey
• 2-year objectives
• An overview of the challenges to overcome

Audience & industry report

• An overview of your target audience segments
• Competitor analysis
• Customer Personas
• Journey bottlenecks and successes

Solution generation

Innovative concept prototype Validated concept solutions

Who can benefit from our Design Thinking Workshops?

Our Design Thinking Workshops are for all entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who are experiencing a specific problem or challenge in their business or industry, internally or externally. They benefit from the workshop by viewing the challenge from a different perspective. This results in creative solutions through the eyes of the actual group who is experiencing this challenge and validating these solutions by short and effective testing cycles. These problems can be in current digital solutions, like a specific flow in a product that is underperforming. However, it can also apply to a to-be-determined solution, where you would like to provide solutions to end-users regarding a specific problem they are experiencing in the market in general.

In what phase of my project can a Design Thinking workshop be helpful?

Our Design Thinking workshops are designed in such a way that they can be applied to different aspects of your project. If you’re still in the conceptualization phase of your project, our Design Thinking workshops can help turn your high-level concept into a more tangible solution, shaping it towards an actual application. If your product is already on the market, but you would like to optimize a specific flow that’s underperforming, our workshops can guide you to the next step of growth and scaling. In other words, it doesn’t matter where you stand, our Design Thinking workshops are highly beneficial for innovators who want to get a better insight into their product and its possibilities to grow and add value to its end-users.

Who is involved in a Design Thinking Workshop?

Our Design Thinking Workshop team consists of a group of experts specialized in multiple cross-functional fields. They are experienced in helping you create a deeper understanding of your target audience, coordinating you and your team by stimulating creativeness, and creating prototypes that can be tested, validated, and made ready for implementation from a strategic perspective. As you can see, these aspects involve different kinds of perspectives, from commercial to design. Because cross-functionality forms a big part of the work culture at Lizard Global, our workshop teams can provide a full and high-quality package of services during your workshop. Generally, our Design Thinking workshop team consists of the following specialists:

Digital Transformation/Innovation Specialist

The Digital Transformation Specialist makes sure that the overall process of the workshop is well organized and structured. They will be your main point of contact in the overall communication around the workshop and make sure that the end goals are met.

UI/UX Specialist

Our skilled UI/UX designer will help you translate user objectives into the user experience. Our cross-functional UI/UX specialist takes a supporting role in the process of identifying the target audience by creating customer personas, guiding the problem definition process, and visualizing the user journey. As design plays a core part in our third session focused on prototyping, they will take an active role in brainstorming innovative ideas and creating designs that can positively impact the user experience of your digital solution.

Project Manager

The Project Manager makes sure that the meetings and sessions are planned and organized in a streamlined manner. They monitor the timeline and scope of the workshop and report and update on the overall progress.

You and your team

You and your team form the most important participants of the Design Thinking workshop! You and your team are the experts within your industry and already possess a great deal of knowledge regarding the market and the ins and outs of your industry. Therefore, your input forms a crucial element within the process of innovating effective solutions. Combining your industry expertise and our digital solution expertise, our Design Thinking workshop is all about leveraging the power of both sides to achieve the best possible outcomes. All our workshops are based on an interactive nature, which means we both guide you through the workshop and learn from your experience at the same time. In other words: our workshops are designed to establish a fruitful exchange of knowledge from both sides in order to create the best possible solution.

Ready to partner up?

At Lizard Global, we are experienced in providing our clients with the knowledge and tools they need in order to end up with a tailored and successful solution. No matter what stage you are in, our Design Thinking workshops are always available to lend a helping hand. Your workshop can take place during the conceptualization phase of your project, during which you start from a high-level concept and make the solution more concrete. If you already have a product, we help you optimize the aspects that can still use some improvements in order to grow. Our workshops are closely aligned with our Design Thinking & Lean Startup ways of working. For example, the practice of Lean Analytics revolves around making data-driven decisions based on the behavior of your users.

Do you want to know more about our Design Thinking workshop? Or are you interested in diving deeper into your target audience, and optimizing your solution to establish a more stable and scalable position in the market? Get in touch with one of our specialists, and let’s join forces in our Design Thinking workshop!