Step 2: Prepare for the Workshop

Apart from the practical arrangements for the workshop, you will want to ensure a good location for it, with lots of room and tools to enhance creativity. You can do the preparations yourself, and perhaps learn quite a lot about your lead users in the process, or you can have, for example, a user experience practitioner do the work for you.

When inviting users, you do not want them to feel overwhelmed, so do not invite the entire company of 100 people to meet with 2 lead users. A good distribution is around 50 percent lead users and 50 percent people from your company.

If you are planning a workshop that will run for two or more days, one idea is to have the colleagues who are not participating in the workshop be on standby for some evening work. You can ask these colleagues to create demos or prototypes of the ideas that came up during the lead user workshop. These ideas can then be presented and discussed on the following day. This will speed up the innovation process, and you will get instant feedback on your ideas. And it will surely impress your lead users.

You also want the lead users to prepare for the meeting. You can for instance ask the lead users to prepare for presenting five specific needs that they have, five of their most prominent core tasks, and five pain points. To make it easier for them, you can prepare templates that describe each of the terms and provide spaces for the users to list their answers (e.g., as shown in Figure 13-2).

Figure 13-2. Template for lead users to prepare before the workshop