What’s it like doing work experience in a Product Design team?
I’ll give you a clue, it involves a lot of Sharpies.
One sunny week in the middle of July, with the promise of 6 weeks of summer holidays, ice creams, and long lie ins almost within reach, Year 10 student Ben came to Firefly Learning do a week of work experience. He spent time with different departments throughout the week, and on Thursday and Friday he did a project with the Design team to see what it was like to create new features.
We gathered a some pens and paper and started chatting about what it’s like at his school. It wasn’t long until we started talking about every student’s favourite subject, homework. I had heard that students have a lot of homework these days, so Ben showed me how he manages all his homework using the Firefly app on his phone. Ben is very conscientious, he’s up to date on all his work (well done, Ben!), but we agreed that not every student is so organised.
We thought it’d be a great idea to try and solve this problem for other students, asking the question, ‘how might we help students to keep track of their homework?’
First I suggested the ‘Crazy 8’ exercise to generate some ideas. You do this by folding a piece of A4 paper into 8 segments, grabbing some Sharpies and writing, drawing or scribbling 8 different ideas into each segment as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are silly, just get ideas out. Using thick pens like Sharpies mean you don’t get distracted thinking about the details, you remain in the quick thinking mindset.
When the paper was full, I asked him to talk me through the ideas. They were all really insightful, but there was one which stood out as his favourite. We worked on some full sized pieces of paper for this next round, discussing how we could build his favourite idea into a feature.
Prompted by questions such as “what might happen when you click here?” and “how might you input the information?” he came up with a workflow for helping students to stay organised with their homework.
I explained how at this stage in the design process we often find it helpful to do some user testing to find out if people would find it useful and how we can improve it.
I printed out a load of iPhone templates and he confidently drew up the screen flow step by step. Ben was really thoughtful, he showed a confirmation at the end of the flow to reassure the student that their actions were successful, and considered scenarios like how to delete the action if it was no longer necessary.
We transferred the sketches onto my laptop and I showed him how to make a clickable prototype in Invision, so that the experience would be more realistic for user testing. Ben expertly demoed his idea to some people around the office. Everyone was super impressed with his idea and how well thought through it was. A couple of people made some suggestions, “have you thought of…?” and “what about when…?”, which sparked Ben to have a few ideas of how to improve the design. He went back, did some more sketches, and updated the prototype.
By the Friday afternoon, the rest of the Design Team were keen to see what Ben had been up to. We explained the design process we used, before he presented the final design to the team. He experienced a typical design review as the designers asked, “why did you choose to focus on this screen?” and “how did you use feedback to improve the design?”.
I was so impressed with how well he embraced the design review. He was gave carefully considered answers to questions, and was open to feedback, better than I’ve seen some designers handle reviews!
This made me reflect on about how the method we used to develop the idea was so successful. Working in quick iterations help you to accept that the ideas aren’t going to be perfect straight away, nor do you have to think of everything up front. It’s also a very mindful way to work. Understanding that design is collaborative; with other designers, with other people in the business, and with the real people who will use your design, can help to take some of the pressure off yourself. Use the people around you to help trigger ideas, you don’t have to do this alone!
