After a recent Facilitating UX Workshops course at one of our live online UX training events, an attendee asked how to run workshops focused on existing user research: Should workshop participants engage directly with the research, and what activities are effective? Many UX teams struggle to make research accessible. This article shares practical ways to “workshop research” with hands-on activities that help stakeholders understand, empathize, and achieve better results.

What Is a UX Research Workshop?

When valuable research is merely described (sometimes through email in a static document) instead of experienced, stakeholders rarely internalize the findings. Research workshops can bring people into the research.

Research workshops aim to help participants internalize and apply UX research. The goal is to transition from research outputs (data, findings, reports) to a shared understanding (insight, empathy, alignment).

Three broad categories of research workshops fit this description:

• Research-alignment workshops: Structured sessions to educate others about research insights and interpret existing findings together.
• Empathy workshops: Experiences that help participants connect with users through activities grounded in user research.
• Research-application workshops: Collaboratively applying insights in structured ways to influence scope, roadmaps, or design direction.

In some cases, you may want to run a hybrid workshop that combines two or more of these workshop types.

Research-Alignment Workshops

Goal: Build a shared understanding of user research

When: After research has been conducted and findings are ready to share

When the research team has already done substantial work, these sessions help others digest and make sense of what’s been learned in a far more engaging way than reading a PDF.

This type of workshop can create shared ownership and personal investment in insights. Instead of passively consuming findings, participants interpret and connect them, leading to more substantial alignment, belief, and recall.

Here are three example activities for a research alignment workshop: interactive gallery walk, insight discovery, and assumption comparison.

Interactive Gallery Walk

Imagine walking into a room where every wall is covered with printed-out user research evidence (think: direct quotes, findings, existing artifacts like journey maps and personas, and photos from fieldwork). Stakeholders move through the space like visitors in an exhibit, jotting notes on sticky pads or responding to prompts placed near key artifacts (e.g., “What surprises you?” or “What questions does this raise?”).

After about 20–30 minutes of exploration, participants gather at a central table. The facilitator leads a discussion to capture takeaways, unexpected patterns, and remaining questions in a shared space. As themes emerge, they can be grouped and labeled.

This process transforms a static readout into an immersive, collaborative experience that sparks curiosity, fosters shared reflection, and opens up new lines of inquiry.

Insight Discovery

In this activity, participants work directly with user data (such as quotes and observations from usability testing or direct observation) to surface the themes together.

Participants work with short statements on cards or sticky notes (around 50–60 total). Together, they cluster similar items through an affinity-diagramming exercise, discussing overlaps and merging related ideas. Once patterns emerge, they label each cluster with a short phrase that captures its essence (e.g., “uncertainty during onboarding,” or “relying on workarounds to stay in control”).

The facilitator can guide the reflection by asking questions such as, “What connects these?” or “Which themes seem most significant?” Through this process, stakeholders discover insights for themselves rather than being told the conclusions, thereby deepening their understanding and trust in the research.

Assumption Comparison

Before presenting findings, the facilitator invites participants to surface what they think they already know about users by asking questions such as, “What do you think our users care most about?” or “Where do they struggle or get frustrated?”

The facilitator documents assumptions (e.g., “Users care most about speed” or “People don’t trust recommendations”) and the group discusses emerging themes, differences in perspectives, and the origins of certain beliefs. After actual research insights are shared, the group revisits the assumptions and discusses which ones are validated, contradicted, or incomplete.

This reflective activity helps teams recognize bias, build curiosity, and approach the research with an open mindset. It promotes active learning that shapes how they think about users.

Empathy Workshops

Goal: Help participants create an emotional connection with users

When: After user research has been shared with participants

User researchers naturally build empathy through direct interaction with users. When we watch users struggle to complete a task or get lost in an interface, we feel their frustration and urgency. But much of that emotional context can be lost when those moments are translated into reports or presentations.

These sessions use experiential methods that make research human. They encourage active participation and remind people that behind every data point is a real person with goals, frustrations, and emotions.

Here are 3 example activities for an empathy workshop: persona walkthrough, journey mapping, and empathy mapping.

Persona Walkthrough

This session is essentially a light role-playing activity that invites participants to “wear the hat” of a user persona and experience the product or service as that person would.

Participants are divided into small groups, and each group is assigned a persona (ideally one based on actual user research). After familiarizing themselves with the persona’s context and goals, each group walks through a task scenario, user flow, or design concept in character. As they do, groups discuss and capture their reactions, frustrations, and motivations as that persona (e.g., “I’m confused by this option” or “I’m relieved this information is here”).

Afterward, groups share what their persona experienced and discuss key pain points and emotions. The facilitator captures recurring themes, feelings, and contradictions in a shared space.

By stepping into users’ shoes, participants gain a first-hand sense of their frustrations and needs, helping them connect emotionally to real human experiences.

Journey Mapping

Journey-mapping workshops help teams visualize the end-to-end experience (i.e., the customer journey) from the user’s perspective, identifying highs, lows, needs, and pain points, and bringing these moments together into a single, cohesive narrative.

Participants are provided with key research insights and touchpoints for each stage of the journey. (Alternatively, and with more resources, users can be brought into the workshop themselves.) As a group, participants fill in what users are doing, thinking, and feeling at each step of a preselected journey to reveal what it’s like to live the experience as the user.

Once the journey is mapped, the facilitator leads a discussion around the most significant emotional dips, areas of unmet needs, and opportunities. Teams can use color-coding or symbols to identify pain points and prioritize areas that require the most focus.

Often, stakeholders struggle to emotionally connect with a user’s experience because their work touches only one small slice of it, such as a single channel, feature, or phase, like “onboarding.” Journey mapping helps break down those silos by showing how everyone’s work affects the broader experience and contributes to the user’s emotional journey.

Empathy Mapping

Empathy mapping is a simple but powerful tool for capturing what users say, think, do, and feel in a single visual. It helps people who weren’t directly involved in the research better understand and connect with users, and, as a result, be more ready to advocate for and prioritize user needs in discussions and decision making.

Empathy maps can focus on an individual user (to explore a single person’s perspective) or represent an aggregated view compiled from multiple participants, capturing patterns within a user type or persona.

Working in small groups, participants use research excerpts, quotes, or observations to populate each quadrant of an empathy map (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels). Once the map is complete, the group identifies patterns and discusses how those insights might influence the user’s perspective, motivations, and actions.

Unlike synthesis activities, the goal here is to widen perspective and deepen emotional understanding. Seeing a user’s inner world in one snapshot helps teams connect emotionally and cognitively, reinforcing empathy and human context behind the data.

Research-Application Workshops

Goal: Translate research into ideas, concepts, and actionable priorities

When: After participants have built a shared understanding of the research and connected emotionally with users

Once workshop participants are aligned on the research and emotionally connected to the users behind it, the next step is to transform those insights into concrete design directions or strategies. These sessions often blend ideation activities and prioritization activities, guiding the group from generating ideas or potential directions to identifying which of these have the most  impact.

Here are 3 example activities for a research-application workshop: opportunity mapping, “How Might We” ideation, and design-studio sketching.

Opportunity Mapping

Opportunity mapping helps teams identify where research insights reveal the most significant chances to improve the experience. This exercise bridges the gap between understanding research and generating ideas by highlighting where to focus creative energy before deciding how to solve problems.

Imagine you’ve just completed a journey-mapping or empathy-mapping workshop and uncovered several key themes (e.g., “Users abandon setup because it feels too complex” or “Most users don’t know how pricing works”). Participants work in small groups to discuss each theme and reframe it into a design-agnostic opportunity area: a statement about where to focus effort, such as “Simplify account setup for new users” or “Clarify pricing expectations early in the journey.”

Once these opportunity areas are defined, the group can map them onto a simple framework, such as a 2×2 prioritization matrix (e.g., user value vs. business impact), to identify where the most meaningful opportunities lie.

By the end, participants have a shared, prioritized set of opportunity areas that form the foundation for ideation. These become the natural inputs for “How might we…” questions or other creative exploration activities in subsequent sessions.

“How Might We” Ideation

“How might we” workshops are structured ideation sessions that turn research insights into creative prompts. They help teams think expansively about solving user problems without jumping prematurely to specific solutions.

The facilitator begins by reviewing insights or challenges from research, then works with participants to reframe each one into an open-ended “How might we…” question. For example, the insight, “Users feel uncertain during onboarding,” might become “How might we help users feel confident as they get started?”

Participants brainstorm answers to these prompts individually or in small groups, generating as many ideas as possible before sharing and building on each other’s thinking.

This method channels creativity through the lens of objective user evidence, helping teams generate a wide range of ideas that stay anchored to genuine needs and opportunities.

Design-Studio Sketching

Design-studio workshops use structured, timeboxed sketching rounds to help participants translate research-driven problem statements and opportunity areas into early design directions. The format encourages creativity, collaboration, and constructive critique.

The facilitator introduces a focused design challenge (often framed by one or more “How might we” questions or opportunities). Participants individually sketch extremely low-fidelity solutions within short, time-limited rounds (e.g., 3 rounds of 5 minutes), building on their ideas with each round. Participants then share their ideas with the group in structured rounds of presentation and critique.

The facilitator uses open-ended questions to tie group feedback back to the original problem statement (e.g., “How does this idea address users’ frustrations related to pricing transparency?” or “How could this concept better support the need for trust and clarity identified in research?”).

By the end of the session, the team has a set of grounded, user-informed design directions that can be developed further and shared ownership of the next steps.

Combining Goals and Activities

While these three goals — understanding research, building empathy, and turning insights into action — can each justify their own dedicated workshop, they don’t have to exist in isolation. In practice, most teams blend activities across these goals depending on their time, audience, and objectives.

For example, a single workshop might begin with a gallery walk to ground everyone in the research, move into an empathy exercise to humanize those insights, and end with a prioritization or ideation activity that connects understanding to decisions.

The right blend and balance depend on where your team is starting:

• If workshop participants are new to the research or to UX thinking, begin with activities that foster shared understanding before progressing to creative problem-solving.
• If the group already knows the findings but hasn’t internalized what they mean, use empathy-building activities to create an emotional connection.
• If the team is aligned and ready to act, focus on research-application methods that turn insights into design direction or strategy.

In short: treat these goals as building blocks, not separate workshops. These are just examples — there are countless ways to combine or remix activities based on your goals, organizational culture, and the time available. The most effective facilitators adapt their structure to the context, creating sessions that engage people cognitively, emotionally, and practically, leading to a deeper understanding and more user-centered decisions.