TAASA Ideation Workshop
A remote-friendly workplace is more inclusive for everyone.
Our 4-person team led a design thinking workshop at a non-profit to make their office more inclusive for remote workers to boost morale and retention.
Role: UX designer, Photographer
Type: Design workshop, Strategy, Facilitation, Service Design, User research
Timeline: 12-day sprint
We placed runner-up out of 9 teams during the 12-day Design-a-thon.
The Challenge
Our team collaborated with TAASA, the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. Our goals:
Expand user-centered design in the organization
Improve support launching new initiatives, since they tended to fizzle out
Lift morale, resulting in higher retention and lower absenteeism
Results
The workshop empowered TAASA to help new initiatives flourish by:
Fostering an environment to brainstorm freely
Creating an action plan to support new ideas
Introducing them to a framework for testing and piloting
For an extended write-up of this piece, I wrote a Medium article on my Design-a-thon experience.
Defining the Problem
Employee Interviews
We (including myself) interviewed a variety of roles
Affinity mapping identified themes across interviews
Key Takeaways
“We’re kind of like cats, all doing our own thing.”
From the interviews, we observed the following:
- Lack of protocol: In all 6 interviews, employees expressed frustration about continually reinventing the wheel.
- Growing pains: TAASA hadn't updated its processes after growing from 8 to 40 employees, which left remote workers out of the loop and caused frustration and isolation.
Based on our findings, we decided to focus on adding structure and protocol to make TAASA more inclusive for remote workers.
Ideation Workshop
We hosted a workshop on generating ideas to help new initiatives succeed while fostering buy-in to design thinking and building trust.
Workshop curriculum:
2x2 matrix (proposed by myself) - narrowed down a shortlist with stakeholders identifying impactful, low-effort ideas to pilot
Empathy map - got TAASA into the headspace of a remote worker
Success criteria exercise - the team created a rollout & support plan for the feedback system
Getting Feedback
We asked if TAASA if the workshop was helpful. The verdict? Yes!
Yes! This was fun.
It was rushed timing-wise, but yes.
Yes, please. Help us!
Members were excited to have us do a subsequent workshop with them, and we observed a high level of engagement with the team contributing ideas.
Design-a-thon Details
About Design-a-thon & TAASA:
Shoutout to my awesome team members: Kristina, Sunakshi, and JJ!