Lessons from Design Thinking Workshop

Jyotsna Chatradhi
Nov 7 · 3 min read

As a developer in my day to day life, moving or completing tasks was my major goals to call it a day that was productive. That’s while being Agile is all about. It’s a different story that my personal life is also scheduled for 2week cycle to make my life easy. Little more about Agile is these tasks are associated with stories which are subsets of a feature and these features are used by customer to solve their problems or enhance their way of living.

An opportunity to hit a pause to this habit was tough but we were lucky to participate in the design thinking workshop and increase our creative/learning side of the brain on how can we excel on what we are doing than just moving the cards from one box to the other for 2 weeks and reseting them.


Start of an Era to add Design to Thinking

We started the session with open ended questions. I know you are really working hard, Are you building what customers want. We said yes.. And the other question that popped up was do you REALLY know what customers want. To understand why the question was more relevant. We discussed little on how invention of new tool in mopping was introduced.

Protractor and gamble hired continuum innovation company to understand if they were market leaders in cleaning floors or do they need better solution than what they have. Below is the link which describes more in detail of evolution of swiffer

This made us think what exactly is UX and how is it different from UI. As this term is interchanged very frequently. UX is the measurement on which customer can be satisfied. UI is more the interface on which user can touch and feel for a given product. Different stages of building a project was discussed and how this cycle goes on till a prototype to a final product was explained pretty clearly. Below pdf explains more in detail of the flow

Important things to practice UX in teams

Diversity is important because people from different backgrounds like developer , project management , UX, tester, sales and marketing add value when product is cycle of building.

Ask Open ended questions . You can sound you are acting like a 5 year old asking why. But a serious of why questions take you to more deep root of a problem that customer is facing.

Introduction to Hills and Playbacks

There’s lots to like in the workshop , but in particular, two out of three principles resonated strongly.

  • Hills (instead of epics/features/stories)
  • Playbacks (instead of showcases)

They’re similar to epics/features and showcases, but different, in important ways.

Here are two provocative generalization:

  • Teams often get blinded by features to build instead of problems to solve.
  • Stakeholders get bored at showcases because giving a demo of a completed feature is largely not very exciting.

A Hill is simply a way of framing the intended outcome of the work being carried out, from the point-of-view of the user and/or business stakeholder with WHO, WHAT and WOW factor.

A Playback is a demonstration of the outcome, generally told as narrative, from the point-of-view of the person who’s problem is being solved (which is typically the ‘customer’ and ‘the business’ simultaneously)

Also the uses to have design workshops with customer in the room is the best way to evaluate. On the final note, I started this story with features being used by customers that flow is completely wrong as the below quote says

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology- not the other way around — Steve Jobs

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