How to Design a Design Challenge
Lessons learned from a running a Student UX Design Challenge
At Klick Health, we have been facilitating healthcare design workshops with clients and their customers for years. However, never before have we opened our doors to the broader design community to share our ideas and learn from the countless talented people we have in our wonderful city of Toronto, Canada.
That was the case until we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to partner with the University of Toronto’s Masters of Information faculty and conduct our very first ever student design challenge workshop in October 2019.
Our intention was to generate a dialogue with our local design community around designing for the healthcare industry, and give students an appreciation for the kind of real-life business problems we solve every day at Klick.
As excited as we were, this presented us with a realisation: designing a design challenge is a design challenge in itself! How do you create an experience for nearly 100 students that is memorable, impactful, and fun?
After much discussion, we decided to have students work on design challenges similar to those we tackle ourselves every day. To that end, we put together a series of briefs explaining the challenges that we wanted the students to solution against in their groups of 5–7. The students collaborated using a design canvas we had provided, and then presented their solutions to the larger audience.
We learned a lot as we underwent the process of putting together these design challenges. We want to share 5 learnings with you in the hope that you can use this to develop your own design challenge workshops.
- Know your audience
We knew designing a workshop for students would be quite different than designing for our typical pharmaceutical company clients. While it’s usually safe to assume our clients will know a great deal about the problems we’ll be solving together, it was more than likely these students wouldn’t have any previous experience in healthcare.
To account for this, the briefs we provided to each participant explained the challenge in plain language and without the usual litany of acronyms that are so pervasive in healthcare. The result was a minimal amount of clarifying questions and more of a “level playing field” for students to jump right in to solving problems.
2. Keep it simple
“Keep it simple” was our mantra throughout the process of designing the workshop. The session itself was only 2 hours and we knew we needed the students to cover a lot of ground quickly. To that end, we agreed we had to simplify anything and everything we could.
For example, we originally wanted the students to evaluate their own ideas through the lense of “typical” agency roles (e.g. account services, project managers, IT, etc.). We quickly realized on the day of the event that almost none of the students had any existing understanding of what these roles were accountable for at an agency. We removed this extra complexity on the fly and were able to streamline the students’ presentations and allow them to better focus on their ideas.
3. First impressions count
One of the mistakes we made had to do with how the students entered our workspace on the day of the event. Without adequate signage or a designated greeter identified, students had trouble knowing where to go once they arrived at our building.
In future events, we agreed we would have better welcoming signage and a registration table set up outside our workspace to ensure students would know where to go and would feel like they were a part of the workshop right away.
4. Think big — but not too big
We were originally planning to host about 100 students to participate in the workshop. Thankfully, only about 75 students were able to be in attendance on the day. It turns out that 100 students would have been too unruly to manage and would have pushed the limits of the number of people we could comfortably fit in our workspace. We’d recommend speaking with others who have run similar events in the workspace you’ll be using and see what worked best for them.
5. Inspire without leading
When briefing the students, we asked them to come up with concepts that could potentially solve real-world problems in healthcare. To provide direction as to the kinds of ideas we were looking for, we cited examples of websites, mobile apps, and VR experiences. While we thought this was helpful direction, most of the ideas presented back to us by the students involved websites, apps, and VR experiences!
While some guidance and direction is required, we resolved to find a better balance of inspiration without leading students when it comes time to host the next design challenge event.
Healthcare design workshops are an engaging and fun way to get a large group collaborating on innovative new solutions. With the learnings above incorporated, we believe it’s possible to create an even better experience for our next healthcare workshop attendees.
Special thanks to Olivier St-Cyr, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Masters of Information program for visiting us at Klick Health and for helping to introduce us to the next generation of healthcare designers.
Special thanks to David Wilson, Allie Hafner, and Michael Melnick for help planning and running the workshop as well as contributing to this blog post.
