Hero flow workshops are an economical and useful format that can quickly yield user-centric design direction. They are typically led by UX designers who collaborate with product and engineering partners.

Choosing this workshop method

You have been here many times: your product and engineering partners have just started thinking about a problem you need to solve together. There are few requirements and an assortment of other known-knowns for your project. There is little knowledge of the users’ needs and team alignment may be uneven or unknown. A deadline may be looming due to the availability of design and engineering resources.

This common scenario is a good place for a hero flow workshop. In a few hours, you and your closest partners can align on your shared knowledge of the problem. Together you’ll create an actionable asset that you can share with others, and from which future requirements and designs can be generated.

What you need:

a workshop deck of 4 slides
A spreadsheet that you can project on a screen
3 hours with your 3-5 closest partners

What you get:

An agreement of what you know, and who you are designing for
A set of high-level requirements that puts the user first
A happy, aligned team that supports you

Running your workshop

Slide 1: your team

Book three hours on a Friday morning with your team of 3-10 partners. I like this time slot because people are more alert in the morning and because Fridays are a lower-stakes day for most schedules.

If you are running the workshop remotely, be sure to state ahead of time how long the workshop will take. I recommend allowing participants to have their cameras turned off, and taking five-minute breaks for each half-hour of conversation. You’ll also want to keep the group small, five or fewer.

The people in the room should be those most knowledgeable, most affected, most passionate or most able to help your project. In a software company, that will often mean the designer, researcher, PM, the main engineers, people from your marketing area such as PMM, someone who helps frustrated customers using the feature (Customer Service), and someone who helps convince customers to use the feature in the first place (Sales).

What will happen next, is that you and your partners will be going through a process to agree on the main points of what should happen with your design.

Slide 2: known knowns

Gather the top level points of what you currently know about the problem you are trying to solve. A good source for this slide is user research, call logs from your customer service team, emails from frustrated sales staff, or a simple visual flow map documenting inconsistencies in the current user workflow.

Start your workshop by presenting these known knows with your group. Be ready to add to or edit the slide while your team discuss it. When your team has nothing more to add, your slide will have become your first document of agreement for your project, one that will inform the rest of your process.

Slide 3. User archetypes

For your design process, you will most often need user archetypes -a representation of a group of users with similar needs. For example, a user archetype can be “an administrator with billing responsibilities at a large company”, or a “junior marketer at a small company”. These two groups will have different needs, and your workshop group can help you form these archetypes with the best knowledge available to you at the time.

Similarly to your known-knowns slide, this information can often be started by you, as chances are you have already thought about this more than anyone else on your team. Simply write down what you think are the most common archetypes that will be using the feature you are working on. What characterizes each type?

Create a slide showcasing your user archetypes and present it to your team. With this slide, as with your known-knowns, you will be seeking agreement from your team on the archetype. When they agree and have nothing to add, you are ready for the next activity.

Spreadsheet: hero flows

This is the activity that you have been waiting for all day: the design artefact that will let you move on your design work with the collected power of your project team behind you!

Your hero flow is simply a description of the main, happy path user flow for each user archetype using your feature. Once you have this flow, the step to creating screens is usually quite short.

Structure:

The spreadsheet will contain as many columns as you have user personas.
The spreadsheet will contain at least nine rows, three for each stage in the journey of the user archetype.

Stages of the user journey:

Consideration: the user is learning about your feature.
Implementation: the user is actively using your feature.
Evaluation: the user has used your feature and is evaluating its impact.

Each stage will have these three rows:

What does a user want?
What does a user see and do?
How does the user feel?

Get your group to fill in each cell of this spreadsheet with you. This is best achieved by you projecting on a screen and filling in what your team agrees on. You will often have a lively conversation at this stage, so you will need to take the role of a taskmaster to ensure that key points are filled in. -Keep asking: “What else? What is next?” so that the process moves along.

At the end of this session, you will have a hero flow for each of your user archetypes and the main points of the users’ workflow will have been agreed on by your entire cross-functional team.

Ideally you'll now have an aligned team, a grateful PM who sees the beginnings of product requirements, and an engineer partner who now has an idea on how to plan their work. Your spreadsheet can also be seen as your first deliverable for your project, so don't be shy about sharing it with a wider group.

Listen to the words people use. A good indication that your workshop has gone well at this point, is if your team is no longer talking about “your design”, but calling it “our design”.

Slide 4: Next steps

Ideally, you now feel elated at having your hero flows in hand, and excited to share out what happened in the workshop. Soon, you will be creating screens directly based on what your team has created together.

Everyone in the room should now agree on next steps: this usually involves:

The designer deciding what is the best output from the workshop. Spreadsheets can be hard for teams to read, so I recommend that the designer or workshop leader writes user stories instead. You can publish them and ask the team to weigh in while you start working on other deliverables. Let everyone know when to expect the stories, flowcharts or wireframe designs that will be generated from the hero flow you designed together
The PM taking the hero flows or user stories and adding them to the product requirements
The engineer partner using your hero flows to begin to anticipate what resources will be needed to complete your project
Your sales and customer service partners reporting back to their teams on how they participated in the design of your feature

Design updates

Send a weekly email out to your workshop team and other core players, updating them on major steps you are taking to make the vision you developed together a reality. This is not only encouraging for your team, but will make them more interested in participating in future workshops with you.

Paying it forward

I have had good luck with this workshop format in my organization, but nothing limits the format to be used by designers only.

Do you have a design or product colleagues who might want to facilitate a workshop the way you did? Tell them how you did it. Be clear about what worked and what didn’t. Your colleague might help you develop the practice, and assist your product teams in becoming more user centric, more collaborative -and have more fun designing together.

With thanks to Tracy Cai