The last thing we want to do is articulate our assumptions around what
our products, what our ideas, and our features can look like and how they will
behave. One technique to use for this is Design
Studio. Design Studio is a collaborative sketching
exercise. So essentially, it's not unlike the other exercises that we've
done in this Workshop, but instead of words in this case we are
drawing pictures. We're sketching pictures.
And this is an exercise again for a cross-functional team. It's not just for
designers, or people comfortable with sketching and drawing. It's for engineer's for
product managers, for researchers content. Strategists editorial,
folks. Whoever needs to be a part of the process can participate in this.
And the way that you level the playing field because a lot of people get nervous when you tell
them, hey it's time for us to draw something together.
They get nervous, I can't draw. I haven't drawn anything since since Primary School since elementary school.
The way we level the playing field, is we set the expectation that first
of all, this is sketching. It's not drawing and it's a different activity. And
second, especially when we're talking about software products,
is we reveal the big secret of interaction design
and if you know the big secret of interaction design,
I will share it with you in it and this is the story and many many ux
people may get angry at me for revealing this, but the bottom line is this. If you
can draw a square a circle and a
triangle, you can sketch any interface
currently available and I'm confident that all of you
can sketch. Those three shapes. All of today's interfaces
are made up essentially of squares circles and triangles
And so you should feel confident in your ability to draw primary shapes and to participate
in this exercise. Now Design Studio, helps us
illustrate ideas fit to visually articulate ideas for our
hypotheses, and it comes from architecture
school. I did not attend architecture school and so if you
did and I bastardize, the technique a little bit. I apologize in
advance, but it helps us again to create a lot of ideas. A lot of Divergent
ideas and then to come together.
Quickly as a team around the first thing that we would like
to test as a team. Okay, the first
thing the first step in the process that we need to do is we need to actually
make a 6 up and a 6 up. That's one too
many is
A piece of paper folded into six squares and I'm going to show you how to do that. All of you
should have 11 by 17 paper at your table. So
please grab a sheet of 11 by 17 paper and we're going to make a
6 up together.
Here's how we're going to make.
R6 of okay, you're going to fold the piece of paper, the long way, the long
way this way.
Okay, in half.
And once you've done that you're going to take your six up.
That's folded the long way and on 11 by 17 paper.
And you're going to letter fold in like this. You're going
to do this letter, fold it in like that, okay?
And once you've done that fold, when you
unravel, you should have six.
Squares on your sheet of paper.
You have to fold it into thirds like this.
Now, our goal is to fill each one of
these six boxes, with an idea, an idea that
speaks to the hypotheses that we'd like to work on. Then we've got
three hypotheses on our table that as a team, we've agreed. Or the
first three that we'd like to tackle. And so what we need to do as a
team is we need to think about which hypotheses, we
would like to start.
Designing a solution for sketching a solution for.
Now, we have three and you have six boxes. So you have the
opportunity to take your ideas and to draw them across
multiple boxes or to come up with multiple Solutions, multiple
ways that these ideas could manifest on a
screen in an experience as part of our problem
solving process.
So as you're thinking about our hypotheses would like you to do is think about,
which one's you'd like to work on, you could work on. Just one,
you can pick two or you could work on three.
And what we're going to do is we're going to create
six low, Fidelity sketches using the thin pens or a pencil if you
have it.
And your sketches should illustrate a solution for the hypotheses that
you're working on. Now you can draw anything from an
interface, so what it would actually look like the buttons and the forms and and
and and the workflow, you can draw a flow chart.
You can draw a scene of someone sitting at a computer talking to
somebody else. Anything that you can sketch, that will help
your colleagues understand.
How you envision, the solution taking shape.
And I'd like you to think about three different hypotheses that we have on the table and I'd like you
to create six low, Fidelity sketches. And again,
they can span across the boxes if you need to.
That articulate a solution for the hypotheses that were working on.
And as you do that, I'd like you to consider the personas that were working for as well,
right? So as you're sketching consider, who you're designing for, who you're sketching for,
and what that would look like,
That's a create those six sketches. I'm going to give you six minutes
total and the reason for that is I don't want you to get hung up
on detail. I want you to get big Ideas, roughly
sketched onto the paper as quickly as possible and so the
time box helps us get those ideas out of our heads and onto paper
as fast as possible.
Is everybody clear?
Okay, do you have a sense of which hypotheses you'd like to work on from the ones on the table?
Maybe we could each choose different ones, you could each choose different ones, you could each work on all of
them. But what will ask you to do at the end of this of this
initial round is to talk about which hypothesis you're solving for. So you should have a very
clear sense about which one you're specifically solving for
with each sketch.
Okay, 6 minutes. 6 ideas begin.
Okay, that's time. The next step in our process
is to share our sketches with our teammates. And so what I'd
like, each one of you to do is individually is to hold your six
up up to your colleagues, and present your ideas
to your team. Now, start off with saying, I'm solving for this hypothesis. This is
hypothesis, I'm solving for and here's what, I'm what, how am I
how I'm envisioning the solution?
To take shape. Now your teammates have the
responsibility to provide you with critique and feedback
now critique and feedback does not mean. I like it.
I don't like it. That's stupid. I don't know why you did that, right? The critique
and feedback is clarifying questions questions. Like,
how does this solve?
Grandpa Mike's you know problem with connecting with his
grandkids how does this make Jane's job easier? Not it's not
clear to me. Those are the kinds of clarifying questions. So as teammates
your responsibility is to provide critique and feedback to your colleagues. And
as a presenter, your responsibility is to
narrate the sketches that you've created spend two minutes per
person, going through your sketches and then collecting feedback from
your colleagues.
Legs. Why don't you go first? Hold up, your sketch to your to your colleagues and then
walk them through your thinking.
The first sketch illustrates our first hypothesis, which is
that the one-click calling button will
increase the frequency of calling and
the sketch shows that you want to make the button, really large and
very visible, so that it's extremely
user-friendly, easy to find and people will be able to,
they'll be incentivized to use it. And for people who
might be
More vision-impaired that won't be a problem.
So feedback, what are the speech bubbles coming out of it?
That's showing that you're increasing. Call frequency
and how do you know who you are? Going, press one. Or is that the
name? Or that's a good. That's a really good point.
I was thinking that to initiate a call.
It's ya know it, since we are working very high level, you probably haven't thought of every use
case in this particular situation. So that's good feedback. And something to prevent potentially capture in the
next iteration.
My next.
Sketch is illustrating. The second hypothesis we had,
which is enhanced sound quality and call and
video, quality will make for a better experience for people
make it more enjoyable for people to use the service.
So I'll illustrate that by just
drawing some musical notes and how that's going to convert
to
Larger user base.
So I interpreted this exercise as illustrating the
hypotheses that we laid out and not so much, the features that will enable
us to kind of evaluate our
hypotheses.
And the third one is are addressing the address book
The automation between having your
address book already in the service and I would Envision
them. Just being able to you would
ask them for permission to access your phone book and you'd be
able to just choose maybe which
contacts you want to be imported and which ones you don't want, because you
might not want every single contest.
In your phone to appear in the service
and that's what I came up with.
Okay, so
here's mine.
I started out with the one-click calling. I pictured an address
book, possibly with names and pictures, so you
could see who you're calling. And
I figured it would be easy to use if you're calling your grandkids and you see a picture of him, you don't have to worry about reading
text. So literally
one click going.
The second one would be a prompt. Would you like to sync
with an existing contact list? And I was thinking since this is
online calling you don't necessarily need to have a phone number. So you could you could sink with
Facebook Google+, Twitter,
maybe not Twitter. I'm not sure how you would do that but but I just, I figured or
not at this time. Give the person you know you can come back later and do it.
I was also
Thinking, and this would also probably be part of
the address contact sinks is the way that you could sort your contacts
between work contacts, friends, family. You know, if you're trying
to have a coordinated family call, I figured it would be nice if you
had all of those contacts group together.
I thought a nice feature to have, would be to have a sound volume bar at the bottom
and the option for speaker and headphones, because you might want to have a
lower sound on headphones, but a higher sound on speakers.
So there's little buttons to indicate speaker a headphones. And
I also found another thing for testing sound quality, call
Quality, and video quality, would be to have something that shows
your connection speed. I
Sometimes our wireless at home, slows down for
some reason and we never know why. And and when things are streaming
it all the sudden starts skipping. So I figured, you know, I don't really want people
to blame the service for their bad sound quality, if it's their internet
connection. So I figured that having some sort of monitor like that would would
have. It's your fault cheap
internet provider. How might the the audio controls? I assume
that's to just a hypothesis on
Molly. Yeah, I think just you know the experience of
probably not
Probably it would be more towards the experience quality than
actually improving the sound quality because it's only going to be as good as the speakers
or headset that you're using. So I can see volume playing a role and
experienced quality for sure. But I think having the volume since you are you
know since you are going to be basically most of this is going to be based on
sound having a very obvious volume control instead of going into
settings and, you know, have to drill down to something. I think it's a lot easier.
It's straight up on the user interface make sense.
Terrific. So that's round one in our design studio, and we're going, we have two more rounds. In our second
round is when we start to Pare down. So, we've just generated between the five of you
30 ideas about how to solve these particular business problems. Our
goal now is to start converging, and we're going to do that in two separate steps.
The next step is to Pare down, and what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to work on one eight and a
half by 11 sheet of paper. So you all should have one of the
smaller sheets of paper.
I'd like you to synthesize any critique or feedback that you got on your ideas on the six
ideas that you came up with originally, along with any ideas that you
gleaned from your teammates glean is a fancy word for steel and
that's perfectly. Okay, here, the point is to build this to build a
collaborative product at the end that builds off of each other's
ideas. If you liked and idea that worked from somebody else's on, you can
grab that if it makes sense in your design. But what I'd like you to do is I'd like
you to create
Sketch for a proposed solution, so evaluate your six ideas.
based on the feedback that you received plus, any anything else that you picked up
from your colleagues sketches, and pick
the idea that you feel has the most Merit,
Pare down to one sketch and add it as much
detail as you can. You've got a larger larger space
and one focused idea to work on individually as to how that idea would
manifest in product form. What does that interface look like?
What does that workflow look like? What is the scenario? Look, like the
context of use. Those are the different kinds of things that you can sketch and so, your
drawing should illustrate a solution for at least one of the hypotheses may be
in some
Cases, you successfully marry a sketch that solves for
more than one hypothesis, and that's terrific. And again, your drawings
and your sketches should work for, at least one of our personas or
both, depending on what you're solving for. Now, once again, you're going to
have six minutes to Pare down from six ideas down to one. So you've got a bigger
space more detail and one idea of building off of everything you
just heard.
okay, six minutes begin
Okay, that's time. Our
next round is identical to the previous round. Where once again, you're going to hold up your
sketch, you're going to share with your colleagues, what you improved,
what you added what you focused on and how you think that's going to solve the personas problem.
And once again, your responsibility as colleagues and teammates is to provide critique and feedback
on that idea. Why did you focus on that idea? And what if you
refined, do I go first?
So, I was inspired by the tile idea that many of you
had and I tried to take it a little bit further with cover flow. So
from the, the olden days, the ability to see a single image but then use a
swipe to move back and forth between all the pictures.
I like the idea of maybe the system being smart enough to know who I might be
calling. So it's defaulted to a particular particular
call on this particular. In this case, it's the kids
Because it is Sunday for a conch and the
idea that I think somebody had about being able to tell me
what my current connectivity was. So in the corner, there's a signifier
suggesting that I have strong Wi-Fi connectivity, so it's giving me multiple
options for four types of calls that is supposed to be a phone and a
video audio and video. That's what does those icons
represent?
And then it's does its switch off if the
receptionist too low or it could. Yeah, I mean this could either be a signifier just
saying what's available to me and your call is made just by clicking on the image. So it's one click
or these could actually be buttons that appear disappear depending on what my bandwidth connectivity is.
A hadn't, really thought that through. You're someone I click on the kids, it automatically goes to a
video chat, I think so. I mean I think that as a user I would expect to
click on those images so I think it should do something.
This is specifically for Grandpa. Yeah. Sorry. So I was going
after the grandpa here. Yeah. Okay.
Terrific. So we started by diverging lots of ideas. We're starting to come together. We went
down from 30 down to five ideas. Our last
step is to come together as a team around one
big idea and just like with the personas this is the
idea that we want to test first as a
team. A lot of great ideas on the table, a lot of different ways to implement them.
We need to come together as a team and create one big
sketch.
Or the idea that we'd like to test first. And ultimately you would use
this sketch as the basis of your
initial prototyping efforts. Because these this is the
hypothesis or the set of features that you would like to go after first
as a team. So as a team, what I'd like you to do next and last
is to come together on one big, easel pad size
sketch, this size sketch that takes into account.
The five different sketches that you've got on here, the five different
ideas and converges
around a shared vision for the first
experiment. The first thing you'd like to test together as a team. Now again, remember
just because your idea gets picked or at least added into the mix,
doesn't mean that it's the best idea or if your idea doesn't make it in, doesn't mean it's a bad
idea. It simply says that as a team, we believe that we
Test. This first, this is the riskiest. This is the most complex.
This perhaps has the highest chance for success and if that doesn't work out,
we have a backlog of all of these ideas to fall back on.
And iterate our design forward. So I'd like you to spend the next 15
minutes coming together as a team or on one
idea. And and that will be the idea that as a team you would pursue
first based on the five sketches that you currently have on the table.
Okay, and you'll end up on one of the big easel pad size paper, so somebody will end up having to be
the the artist for the group.
Begin.
So that's time at least for this exercise. What I'd like one of you to do
is just to kind of recap the final
sketch here for the room. So what hypothesis for you solving for
which Persona and what are you going to, what? Essentially,
what are you going to work to prove or to validate first?
So if one of you could take that that would be great.
Might be a bit awkward. But
so we we went for the second type
of this. So we believe that higher
sound and go quality will make the experience for both
Grandpa and gain better.
And
What we want is
that
if a connection is bad, or if the computer is
running on low memory or having poor Hardware,
it's runs an automatic check
and this will
be able to identify specific ideas.
And even before there is a problem,
it could give you tips.
How to improve your settings on your computer to
improve the gold, the gold quality. And
only if you still have extra problems, you can
click through to extra screen and Report
more detail.
The only other thing I think that we mentioned was the possibility of wanting to reach out to
customer support at some step in that process. So people didn't feel like they were completely on
their own as long as one other option. Yeah.
Terrific. Thank you. And so this would be the first idea that you would pursue as a team.
And again, as you learn things about that, you may decide, hey, you know what? We shouldn't pursue this,
but you've got a backlog of ideas that we've been generating through these
series of exercises, that gives you a sense of where to go next and as you
make something and you start to test your assumptions, you'll
learn more, you'll be able to pick a better hypothesis
than next time around. I would contend that if tomorrow was the first day
of the iteration for
This project that builds this feature, that you guys assuming that
we're all in design, product engineering, and so forth.
QA whoever needs to be there, could get to work starting from that
document because you've built up an understanding of what that I'm
not saying, you can go forth and build the entire thing, but you could get started with your
individual roles moving forward from this
artifact.
Because you've created it together as a team, you've built a shared understanding of what those boxes
in those arrows. And those sliders mean and as individual
practitioners, you have a sense of what needs to happen next
from your particular competency and discipline. So, for example, from a design
perspective, we now need to work this into a workflow. We have a sense of what that
workflow is based on this sketch from an engineering perspective.
You have a sense of what the technology needs to do in order to
facilitate this
Well, and so we can all go off in a parallel path.
And begin to take this project forward because we've built that shared understanding by
coming to this conclusion. This consensus together as a
team. Now we don't know yet to your point if this is the
right thing to build or the right workflow to build. But if we had
decided that this is the right thing to build, I would contend that you could get
started Tomorrow based strictly on that artifact and the time spent
in getting to that convergence.