Ideate With Crazy 8’s
Going to the Google Design office had been on my calendar for about a month and it was coming up this coming Friday. It was time to make plans to head to Silicon Valley, so I started making arrangements. As I was arranging things, I realized this meeting wasn’t in the South Bay it was in San Francisco? Google has design offices at Spear Street and the teams appear to range across various products. I highly recommend visiting, the view they have of the bay is stunning!
Our instructions were to bring a project along with us we were working on and our laptop, but I wasn’t sure exactly what we would be doing. I walked into the office and made my way through the clean glass walled rooms and concrete floors to the back conference room. A UX designer and former student of CCA, Kai Haley was hosting our group. As it turned out, our day was a walk through on the design process at Google, the myriad of tools they have built to support that process, and a hands on walk through of the Google Design Sprint framework.
I was really excited to get an opportunity to see everything they were presenting for two reasons. First, working at Google has been a goal since I started in this interaction design program. I deeply respect a great deal of the products that have been created at Google from ATAP projects, to the hardware, and most recently in the VR. Most of the thought leaders in design, business, and engineering who I respect most are all there. The second reason is I had previously read the Sprint book, but I hadn’t gotten to participate in a guided sprint by a master sprinter and today was that day!
The sprint process is five parts: understand, sketch, decide, prototype, and validate. It was good to get a refresher on what I read about.
In the sketch part of the process there was a method I didn’t remember reading about. It is called crazy 8’s. The idea is that you make 8 sketches of different product ideas in 8 minutes. You first quickly jot down all of your ideas and follow them up by expressing them in images. Each person has three minutes to explain their ideas and then the team has 10 minutes to vote on them. This seems simple enough, but there is something to the freedom of this method and the hive mind of voting. I was focused on developing my Stair Aware project in the sprint format. Over the previous 3 weeks I had been deep in secondary research, where I explored the behavior change in stairs use from a ton of different angles. Gamification as an intervention technique for stairs is something that really caught my attention during my research and I had been thinking about opportunities for this as I was writing my literature review.
I used the crazy 8’s exercise to flesh some of those ideas out quickly and get them out of my head and out into the world. Time boxing and idea boxing myself was beyond useful. In 8 minutes I finally had put names on all of these ideas that had been swimming around in my head and they were formed enough that I could walk people through them. I plan to use at least half of what I came up with that day and I am completely impressed by the framework. I really valued what I was able to glean from the recesses of my mind that day and it really inspired me even more to work at Google.
My partner is a Google marketer and I asked her later on that day if she had been through a Google Design Sprint. It turns out she hadn’t and it was really fun to be able to share with her everything I had learned about the process that day. Since the walk through, I have found that a lot of the technique work we explored really stuck with me and I find myself pulling from that tool kit almost everyday!
