Organising my first design workshop
Today, I ran my first design workshop for students at the Summer of Tech graduate program in Auckland, New Zealand.
The theme of my workshop was “How to design with developers”. This is a particularly important skill designers need nowadays who want to enter the UI/UX, Web and Interaction design space as working with developers is key to making successful products that make a memorable impact today.
What inspired my workshop:
In my current job as a Junior Designer in Auckland at Pushpay, my design team lead introduced me and the team to a book called Lean UX. The book covers a lot of interesting design techniques, important advice when it comes to working in product teams, how to make the UX process more collaborative and how to get better results out faster in collaboration with developers, designers, product managers and analysts.
A section in this book that caught my interest was the chapter on “Collaboration Design”. This caught my eye as it talked about getting developers involved early on in the UX process and participating in discussions, wireframming and designing. I found this is an awesome technique to follow if the project you’re working on is unclear to you what is possible to create in the time frame given and what will be more technically harder to build and be unmaintainable for the longer future.
And for these students, the idea of applying Collaboration Design principles was just perfect as they have a short time frame to build a product and need to work with a team that is mostly developer focused. This would mean bringing them onboard in the design and experience early is essential to ensure a worthy product is built and is something developers will be comfortable to build and understand why they are doing it.
How I ran this event:
The workshop was with a small group of designers as the developers were in another talk. To begin the workshop, I introduced the process that we would follow:
- I introduced the topic they would be focusing on: “Data as visuals”. This helps to keep everyone designing on the same focus.
- Next the students were instructed to mock up and wireframe 6 designs with sharpies on paper to get their ideas down quickly with a time limit of 10 min to create, draw and think.
- Once the time was up, the students introduced their ideas one at a time and talked about what their thoughts were in the designing/wireframming process.
- To avoid people being swamped with too much feedback at one time and losing some of the important feedback, the students would walk around and see the designs presented. They would place their thoughts on post it notes for the designer to take on board.
- Once the feedback was given, the designers would take theese ideas along with their original sketches and produce a final design from other peoples thoughts as well as their own initiatives.
The Outcome:
The idea of “Collaboration Design” was successful. Students were given confidence in what they presented as everyone was on the same topic with no visuals that outdid one another. The feedback was great with all the students taking onboard what they were given and a lot of excellent improvements made to their design ideas, thinking and concepts in a small timeframe.
It also had a positive vibe from the students who said they learnt a lot and gained new found insight on how to design better in groups and get their minds thinking more about how to design with other ideas that are not just their own and make a concept that at its core is much better thought out.
What I took away:
Overall I also learnt a lot from the students about how to be organised, making me think about whenI was in their shoes as a student and looking at how to improve the design collaboration process for a better UX.
Next year I would love to organise another one of these events with a mix of designers, developers, analysts and product managers because as said in Lean UX “Design is a team sport” and it is important to do continuous collaboration for better results.
