A two part workshop series using service design and design thinking methods to facilitate a user-centered content creation process for reaching and serving audiences better.
This process was born from my firm conviction in that when content originates from real user needs, it's more meaningful and serves audiences better. I believe social media desperately needs more meaningful content which aims at improving human lives and the world, instead of twisting the self-images of our youth and replacing true connection with digital illusions. I'm on a mission to bring the light of meaning into the mindless darkness of social media, replacing its destructive anxiety-inducing doomscrolling with messages of hope.
During my many years of user-experience research and service design, I've learned that the best businesses always solve real user problems and serve real user needs. Bad businesses on the other hand just focus on things that they made up themselves and push them to their audiences. The most fruitful enterprise is one where user needs and business needs are married in a harmonious loving relationship. Throw in the betterment of society and you have a goal worth working for.
I created a simple cyclical user-centered content creation process to guide the work of content teams, ensuring created content is always relevant and impactful. The heart of the process is audience research for building empathy with real users to discover their real problems and needs. Then, the team uses suitable ideation methods to come up with ideas which solve real user problems. Ideas are produced into content, which is served to the audience. Finally, the team spends time engaging with the audience, encouraging discussion, and answering and asking questions. This way the team keeps building empathy with the people and gathers insights throughout the relationship-centered process.
Mixing workshop participants into cross-disciplinary teams is an important aspect of service design. Mixed design teams have more diverse perspectives, and when organizational silos are broken down people can often express their thoughts more easily. But being grouped with unfamiliar people, we need some warming up first before our creativity can flow freely.
One of my favorite warm-up and teambuilding activities to stimulate creativity is Group Photos. It's very fun for everyone, and it suits perfectly a content creation workshop. The idea is to give each group a theme, give them a short time to perform a scene based on it and take a photo of it. Themes can be anything from famous movie scenes to hilarious real-life incidents.
1. Choose a theme for the scene in the photo
2. Plan as a group how to perform the scene. Use items in your environment.
3. Perform the scene & take a photo
4. Gather together to laugh at the group photos
Before the workshop, I asked participants to send me the best social media videos they've come across that also had a lot of views. The first task in the workshop was to systematically analyze these high-performing videos to try to find out what makes them so successful.
For this activity, we used the digital whiteboard tool Miro where I had prepared a set of criteria with guiding questions for the teams to use in their video analysis. This criteria consisted of 6 attributes of a video, including things like the opening hook, value offer / message, emotional connection, sound, etc. Each attribute was to be rated on a likert scale from good to bad and commented on verbally.
This assignment helps content teams think about their creation process more analytically and learn a more systematical approach. It reduces guesswork and increases learning. Through this kind of analytical benchmarking process, performance drivers can be identified and replicated.
The Empathy Map Canvas is a powerful visual tool originally developed by Dave Gray. It's used in service design to gain a deeper understanding of a target user. Its primary purpose is to build profound empathy by stepping into the user's shoes and visualizing their world, challenges, and desires.
The canvas guides design teams to think about the user through seven key questions relating to what the user experiences, thinks, feels, hears, says, and does in their daily life. I consider the Empathy Map Canvas superior to simple persona canvas because it offers a deeper, more dynamic, and actionable understanding of the user's immediate experience and psychological landscape. The canvas is a good starting point for more in-depth user research, such as interviews, observations, and surveys, which validate the prevalence and severity of the identified user problems.
I facilitated the work on the canvas as a time pressured exercise, and I asked each team to produce one user persona with the canvas. I had prepared the most common target user groups beforehand, and the teams could choose one which they felt most familiar with. As the user groups, we had 19-25 year old university students, male and female separately, teenage boys and girls, and low education young men and women.
Each team presented their person at the end, introducing everyone else to the person they empathized with. The main purpose of the exercise was to get at the problems and needs each person has in their life, so we listed them in order of prevalence and severity.
The workshop was divided between two days, so it was proper to kickstart the second day with another fun warm-up activity. This time the activity was designed to prepare participants into creative storytelling, drawing, and sharing something about themselves, so it also works as a fun teambuilding practice.
The exercise is called Trading Cards, and I originally found it in a book by Dave Gray et al. called "Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers". I've spiced it up a little by instructing participants to make a superhero card of themselves. To do this, they are to find a positive feature of themselves and make it into their superpower. They draw a picture and describe their superhero on a paper, and ultimately present their trading card to everyone.
Ideation can be very difficult. Many of us are way too critical and have a habit of aborting ideas which could have potential if we only let them live a little longer. Design thinking encourages structured ideation, which starts with rapid ideation focusing on quantity over quality, and only afterwards are the many ideas reviewed, ranked, and built further.
Crazy 8's is a rapid ideation method which gained popularity as a core exercise within the Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology. It challenges participants to generate eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. Each participant takes single sheet of paper and folds it into eight sections. A timer is set for eight minutes, and for each minute, the participant sketches into one of the sections a different idea that solves a real problem the user has.
After the time is up, teams go through each member's ideas, give and receive feedback, and vote for the best ideas in the team. Here, ideas can also be combined, borrowing the best parts of different ideas into one. The best idea(s) will be used to create storyboards for a video in the next exercise.
Here, the teams can finally bring their best ideas to life. Where the Crazy 8's was fast sketching, a storyboard is a carefully drawn series of panels that illustrate the key moments, actions, transitions, and even sounds in the video. It takes a rough concept and breaks it down into a clear, sequential flow, making the abstract idea tangible. Think of it as a visual script the video producer can follow in creating the video.
Storyboarding encourages the team to identify the critical scenes, transitions, and calls to action, ensuring the core message is conveyed effectively. By visually mapping out the video, teams can spot potential issues with the message, pacing, logic, or production feasibility before investing time and money in the actual production. This saves significant time and cost, as unfeasible ideas can be discarded early.
Each team created one storyboard from the idea they voted best in their team. After the 30 minute creation time was up, teams presented their storyboards to everyone. We used dot voting to choose the best storyboards: each participant had 3 dot stickers, which they could place freely on any storyboard except their own.
