Dynamic exercises for online sessions with users
During 2020, we had to adapt user sessions to the online world for obvious reasons. However, online meetings can sometimes feel more uncomfortable and impersonal than in-person ones. To address this issue, it’s very interesting to incorporate a series of exercises or games as icebreakers to help participants relax and feel comfortable during the session.
These dynamics typically involve simple games aimed at breaking the ice, so that later group interviews can be more productive and participants are more willing to share their opinions.
There are two types of games of this nature: warm-up activities and energizers. Below, we will explain some of the games we can propose to our participants, for which we will need an online whiteboard.
Warm-up activities
These activities are designed to help participants get to know each other and feel more comfortable sharing their opinions.
Here are a few useful and easy-to-implement online activities for your sessions:
- Teammate pictionary: In this exercise, assign each participant the name of another person privately and have them draw that person. Once they finish their drawings, they can guess who is who. A recommendation is to play music in the background while drawing to avoid awkward silence.
- Who’s who?: Ask participants to take a photo of their workspaces before the video call and upload it without indicating their names. Then, everyone can guess who each photo belongs to. Another fun variation is to have participants share a childhood photo, and the rest of the participants must guess who is in each photo.
- First job: A warm-up activity that works well is to ask participants to describe their first job and then take turns sharing their stories. This way, all participants get a chance to speak and relax before diving into the main discussion.
- Three wishes: You can ask participants, “If you had three wishes about anything, what would they be?” Then, give each participant a chance to share their wishes, and try to create a conversation around this topic.
- World map: If your session includes participants from different countries, ask them to share where they are located and anything they’d like to share about that place. Alternatively, you can ask participants where they would like to travel and why.
- Company trivia: If the session involves members from the same company, you can prepare a series of questions about the company’s history, such as when it was founded or who has been working there the longest. Starting with these questions can lead to conversations about stories and experiences within the organization, creating a more comfortable atmosphere.
The aim of these activities is to ensure that all participants have a chance to speak and overcome their fear or shyness of talking. As we saw in our User Interview Guide, it is important to establish a trusting relationship with users, and these exercises precisely contribute to that.
Energizing activities
Energizing activities are meant to boost the participants’ mood by encouraging interaction and collaboration among them. They can also be used as a transition from one exercise to another to maintain their interest and motivation.
There are numerous energizing exercises available. Keep in mind that their use will facilitate a smoother transition between different parts of the session, particularly if there is a sudden change in topic. Here are some easy-to-implement and manage examples:
- Find it: In this game, one participant has to state an attribute of an object, and all the other participants have to find something with that attribute and touch it. The last person to find and touch the object will have to state the next attribute.
- Impersonations: Using only the audio of the video call, one participant has to imitate a sound, and the rest have to guess what it is.
- Acrosport: Using the gallery view to see all participants, ask them to collectively create a shape (a triangle, a square, or a heart) using their arms. Once they have formed the shape, you can take a photo for everyone to see the result. This exercise promotes collaboration among participants.
- Mimic: One participant will act out a book, movie, or story, and the rest have to guess what it is. An alternative to charades is to represent the chosen item using only emojis, and the others have to guess it.
- Linked stories: Assign each participant a number. The first person starts writing a story and sends it to the second person, who continues it. The second person then sends only their part of the story to the third person to continue, and so on. Finally, the entire story is read aloud in the order it began.
- GIFs: In this case, the facilitator prepares a phrase and asks the participants to find the GIF that best matches the sentence.
These activities are just a few examples of what can be done in warm-up or energizing exercises. They can be conducted using online tools like MURAL, which is the one we use in the Studio for all ideation processes and is perfect as an online whiteboard.
With these activities, we can create a relaxed atmosphere and provide participants with enough confidence to feel comfortable during the interview, resulting in the best outcomes.
We encourage you to try them in your next remote focus group, both the ones we have presented and any others that you come up with.
If you want to go deeper into the process of product design, you can do so with our Product Design Specialization Program (this training is in Spanish):
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