Get Ready For Your First Design Studio at Coplex
Discover the collaborative sketching technique that unifies team members, produces rapid ideation and streamlines development estimates.
Building your first digital product can be as challenging as it is rewarding. It’s easy to pigeonhole yourself to a certain direction, succumb to confirmation bias, or inadvertently waste resources. At Coplex, we utilize the Design Studio method to alleviate these concerns.
What is a Design Studio?
Let’s start off with a basic overview. A Design Studio is a collaborative workshop. It unifies stakeholders through sketching, presenting, and critiquing. The whole team sets an objective and the facilitating team gives participants user research, personas, or assumptions for which to design.
“Co-creation is our mantra here at Coplex. That’s why we encourage everyone to come together and participate.”
The goal here is to create quick sketches — just enough to get the concept across. At the end of the 8 minutes, each person has 3 minutes to present their idea, followed by 2 minutes of critique and feedback from the group. The moderator repeats the process with the groups several times, and the concepts start to become more refined.
The result is a crazy amount of sketches, ideas, and potential solutions for the product build, which would never have been possible without multiple departments providing their perspectives. Post-Design Studio, the UX Designer distills these sketches into sitemaps, wireframes, and mockups.
Now that you have a basic understanding, let’s pause and check out this incredibly informative video by Todd Zaki Warfel. He does a great job explaining the concept and the value behind it.
Why Do a Design Studio?
Innovation Occurs When we Co-create
Co-creation is our mantra here at Coplex. That’s why we encourage everyone to come together and participate. A good design studio includes CEOs, developers, account managers, marketers, content writers, and other roles specific to the startup. Each of these people play a crucial part of your startup, so naturally it makes sense that their input is necessary when designing your product. For the Design Studio, we recommend a minimum of 6 participants from our team and yours.
Time Constraints Force Rapid Ideation
In Todd Zaki’s video, his team was able to produce over 420 unique design concepts in a 6-hour period. The pressure forces participants to quickly flesh out their ideas in a tangible format (i.e. pen and paper).
Save Time and Money with More Accurate Estimates
The Design Studio answers a lot of questions up front. Instead of ball parking an estimate based on a loose idea (and many untested assumptions) of what your product might end up being, we have a clear blueprint — a collection of features that have been reviewed by developers and approved by key players in your company.
How does the Design Studio Process at Coplex Work?
The Design Studio can come into play in two stages. First, after you’ve gone through our Lean Product Workshops, your experiment may be an “Iteration 1 Product Build.” In that case, we’d queue up a Design Studio. Secondly, once we’ve gathered feedback from your users and decide it’s time to iterate, the process starts all over again.
After we’ve determined that the Design Studio is a good fit for your team, your Product Manager will work with you to determine scheduling, length of the studio, and who should be involved from our team and yours. We’ll build a custom agenda based on the needs of your product build and your team’s availability.
We host Design Studios out of our three locations (Phoenix, Seattle and Los Angeles), and remote participants will video conference if needed. Post-Design Studio, our team will reconvene. We create an estimate, outline expectations, and develop a timeline for your product.
This sounds great, can my startup do a Design Studio?
Are you ready to design and build your product the right way? Let’s plan your first Design Studio! Shoot us an email at hello@coplex.com to get started.
