Although the technique described below is very specific, you should feel comfortable to run less or more formal Design Studios as your situation and timing warrants. The specifics of the ritual are not the end goal: instead, you should be aiming to solve problems with your colleagues and clients.
Process
Design Studio follows this path:
1. Problem definition and constraints 2. Individual idea generation (diverge) 3. Presentation and critique
4. Iterate and refine (emerge) 5. Team idea generation (converge)
Supplies
Here’s what you’ll need:
• Pencils
• Pens
• Permanent markers (multiple colors/thicknesses)
• Highlighters (multiple colors)
• Sketching templates (you can use preprinted 1-up and 6-up templates or you can use blank sheets of 11"×17" paper divided into six boxes)
• 25"×30.5" self-stick easel pads
• Drafting dots (or any kind of small stickers)
The process works best for a team of five to eight people. If you have more people, create more teams and have the teams compare output at the end of the process.
Problem definition and constraints (15–45 minutes)
The first step in Design Studio is to ensure that everyone is aware of the problem you are trying to solve, the assumptions you’ve declared (including personas, as explained elsewhere in this chapter), the hypotheses you’ve generated, and the constraints within which you are working. This step can be anything from a formal presentation with slides to a group discussion, based on the team’s level of comfort.
Individual idea generation (10 minutes)
You’ll be working individually in this step. Give each member of the team a 6-up template—a sheet of paper with six empty boxes on it (Figure 4-3).
You can make one by folding a blank sheet of 11"×17" paper (or you can use a preprinted template).
Figure 4-3. A 6-up template.
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Optional: sometimes, people find they have hard time facing a blank page.
If that’s the case, try the following step (5 minutes): ask each person to label each box of his or her sheet with one of your personas and the specific pain point or problem he will be addressing for that persona. Write the persona’s name and pain point at the top of each of the six boxes. Team members can write the same persona/pain point pair as many times as they have solutions for that problem, or they can write a different persona/pain point combination for each box. Any combination works.
Next, with your blank (or optionally labeled) 6-up sheets in front of you, give everyone five minutes to generate six low-fidelity sketches of solutions for each persona/pain point pair on their 6-up. These should be visual articulations (UI sketches, workflows, diagrams, etc.), not written words.
Encourage your team by revealing the dirty secret of interaction design to level the playing field: if you can draw a circle, a square, and a triangle, you can draw every interface. I’m confident that everyone on your team can draw those shapes.
Presentation and critique (3 minutes per person)
When time is up, share and critique what you’ve done so far (see Figure 4-4). Going around the table, give each participant three minutes to hold up his or her sketches and present them to the team. Presenters should explicitly state for whom they were solving a problem (persona), which pain point they were addressing (hypothesis), then explain the sketch. Each member of the team should provide critique and feedback to the presenter.
Critique should focus on clarifying the presenter’s intentions. Questions such as “How does this feature address the persona’s specific problem?” are very helpful. Comments such as “I don’t like that idea” provide little value and don’t give the presenter concrete ideas for iterating.
Make sure that every team member presents and receives critique.
Figure 4-4. Example of typical Design Studio output.
Iterate and refine (5–10 minutes)
Now ask everyone to work individually once more. Ask each participant to take his or her original six ideas and, using the critique they just received, to refine their thinking into one big idea on a single sheet of 11"×17" paper.
The goal here is to pick the idea that has the most merit and develop a more evolved version of that idea.
Once time is up, ask the team to go through the present and critique process again.
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team idea generation (45 minutes)
Now that everyone on the team has feedback on his or her individual idea, the team must converge on one idea. In this step, the team is trying to converge on the idea they feel has the biggest chance for success. This idea will serve as the basis for the next step in the Lean UX process: creating an MVP and running experiments (both covered in the next chapter).
Ask the team to use a large 2'×3' self-stick easel pad or a whiteboard to sketch the components and workflow for their idea. There will be a lot of compromise and wrangling at this stage; to get to consensus, the team will need to prioritize and pare back features. Encourage the team to create a
“parking lot” for good ideas that don’t make the cut, which will make it easier to let go of ideas.
If you have multiple teams in the design studio, ask each team to present their final idea to the room when they are finished for one final round of critique and feedback.
The artifacts created in the design studio are now used to create refined wireframes, prototypes, and early code that will drive the team forward in proving their hypotheses.