Confessions From a Team of One
Long ago, when I first started working as user experience designer, my process went something like this:
During this time, I had a dirty secret. I didn't necessarily believe that the designs I was proposing where the best solution to the problem. They were simply the best that I had come up with. And so, to compensate, I focused on shoring up my arguments in the event that someone should question me.
I realize now that what I was experiencing was a common pitfall of designing in isolation. People who work on teams with other designers benefit from the natural exchange and evolution of ideas that happens when you put more than one mind on a problem, and I was missing that.
When I joined the team at Adaptive path, that all changed. Here, I saw designers working together, sketching rapidly and roughly, generating lots of ideas quickly and then mixing and matching them to produce cohesive solution. I soon learned that this way of working has a proud history in design thinking. I also saw that the more I knew about it, the more it changed how I approached creative problem-solving when I was working on my own, without other designers to brainstorm with. Did this mean you can bring the creative benefits of team thinking to a practice of one?
I believe so, and I'd like to share with you some tips and techniques that you can apply easily on your own. These are lightweight tools that anyone can employ in fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour.
TOOLS FOR BRAINSTORMING
The goal of any brainstorming activity is to generate a wide variety of ideas, but I find that I brainstorm most effectively when I'm guided by meaningful constraints. The following activities provide just enough structure to focus brainstorming while keeping options open ended.
Pen and paper (the most important tools you'll ever have): You'll find that the ability to draw a quick sketch of what you're thinking is key to much of what follows. Yes, I know. Sketching can be daunting. When I started at Adaptive Path, I would never have described myself as someone who could sketch. But I saw right away by working with people who could sketch that it brings tremendous benefits. It makes it possible to iterate ideas much more quickly than on a computer. And people really respond to sketches. There's something about the rawness of the form that seems to signal that this is the time for brainstorming and having fun, which makes sketching a dynamic facilitation tool.
Conceptual models: Conceptual models come in many shapes and sizes. Whatever their form, they can provide a useful structure within which to generate ideas. The key to using conceptual models effectively is to pick a structure that has inherent constraints built in, and then to brainstorm within those constraints. Some examples of conceptual models with good constraints are spectrums, two-by-twos, and the grids. You can see specific examples of these conceptual models and how they're used in this presentation from the 2008 IA Summit.
Inspiration libraries: No doubt many UX professionals already keep an inspiration library, but I included it here anyway because it is such an essential part of the practice. Inspiration libraries can take many forms. Some people just keep a list of bookmarks. Information Architect Peter Morville stores his collection of search pattern screenshots on Flickr. For my own inspiration library, I take screenshots of interesting examples as I find them (using the invaluable Firefox plugin ScreenGrab), and then store the images in iPhoto. I always start a new project with a meander through my inspiration library in search of interesting patterns that might apply.
TOOLS FOR WORKING WITH AD HOC TEAMS
You may be the sole representative of user experience in your organization, but you're probably surrounded by people who work in other capacities, and whatever their title, you can enlist their help for group brainstorming and feedback.
Sketchboards: Sketchboards are a simple concept. Starting with a big piece of butcher paper, you tape all your sketches to it, as well as sources of inspiration, and notes about requirements and strategy. Cluster the material into related groupings where possible. The real power of sketchboards becomes apparent once you put them on the wall and share them with others. You'll find that they give you a way to talk through a lot of different options and even discuss aspects of flow across different parts of the system. Prompted by the sketches in front of them, people become engaged and articulate in talking about the benefits and tradeoffs in various ideas. See Brandon Schauer's article on sketchboarding for more information.
Open design sessions: Open design sessions are an informal invitation for everyone to come brainstorm and sketch — from your product manager to your senior technologist. No ideas are rejected. The goal is to leverage all the minds in the room to bring different ideas to a problem. Surprising and inventive solutions often come from people who aren't UX professionals. Your role in the open design session is to be the facilitator, walking around, piping in with feedback or extra ideas when somebody seems stuck, and asking enough questions when people present their ideas for them to be tangible and real enough for you to develop further.
Template based workshops: When you're working with a group of people who aren't experienced with free form brainstorming, you can run a template-based workshop with basically the same structure and in the same amount of time as an open design session. Simply come armed with templates that give a little shape and guidance to how to think about the problem. Below are three templates that work well.
· The concept sheet is the most free form template. It simply gives participants space to draw a picture and describe the idea in as much or as little detail as they'd like.
· The design the box template asks participants to design the external packaging as if your entire product offering were to ship in a box. It's a valuable exercise for articulating the basic "aboutness" of what you are designing – what it is, how you'd promote it, what makes it special. This exercise helps everyone on the team think about what would inspire a buyer to pick it up off the shelf (which is in effect what they're doing when they visit your site or try out your software).
· The design the experience template is a language-oriented approach to describing the user experience that you'd like for your product. It asks participants to list nouns, verbs, and adjectives for the experience, which then map nicely to objects, functionality, and less tangible experiential qualities that would form the basis of the experience strategy and perhaps connect to brand strategy.
TOOLS FOR PICKING THE BEST IDEAS
Once you've done all this brainstorming, and you've enlisted the help of the rest of your team, how do you identify which ideas best address the problem at hand? The key is to anchor yourself to a handful of specific, meaningful objectives that this product or release should accomplish, and then to constantly gauge your progress against them. At Adaptive Path, we do this with design criteria, which Sarah Nelson has written about in previous issues of this newsletter. You can read Sarah's complete essay on design criteria here.
Designs that are based on design criteria and built upon well explored ideas help you craft a product with tangible benefits and a little bit or personality for the people who use it — and they it make it easier for you to do it with confidence and conviction. Whether you work on your own or with a big team, that ultimately is what it's all about.
A longer version of this article will appear in the forthcoming special information architecture issue of the ASIST Bulletin, to be published in August.
