D4Me: A Product Prototyping/Sketching Game to Teach User Experience (UX) Concepts

Do you like playing sketching games like Telestrations or Pictionary?

I do. I often try to apply mechanics from these games in my work.

A sketch of Vikings in a Telestrations Game

I am often invited to conduct user experience talks & workshops. Participants would ask me how UX & Agile work. Before I go on explaining details on design thinking or agile methodologies, I’ve found it useful to start with a game as a warm-up activity.

This is one of the activities I’ve used.

For lack of a better name and branding, let’s just call this game Design for me and shorten it to D4ME.

D4ME seems easier to remember.

What you will need

• Markers, Pens or Sharpies in 3 colors (red, blue & green).
• Post it notes. I like using the rectangular ones.
• A list of customer ‘likes’. Often I print this document on a 180 GSM (or higher) paper and cut these out. I then buy some card sleeves (used in Magic the Gathering cards) and insert the list of customer likes. Please note that the first page are the easiest challenges, the second page are medium difficulty challenges and the third page are the most difficult to guess. I use different colored card sleeves for each set of cards. For instance, I would use green card sleeves for the easy deck, blue for medium & red for hard.
• (Optional) Red, Gren & Blue card boards. If you want participants to do more, you can also prepare cardboard materials in 3 different colors for an physical prototyping activity.

You can get a sample card list from the link above.

Again you can get the initial card list here.

How the game is played

The object of the game is to identify the rules or patterns that a customer likes. Later on, we can use the rules/patterns we learn to build a product for that customer.

The facilitator will hand out post-it notes with pens in red, blue and green colors. The players can draw up to 3 shapes with 3 different colors.

In my first iteration of the game I just used a circle, a triangle and a square.

If there are a lot of participants (like 30 or more), I let them form 5–6 groups of at least 4 people. I’ll have them work together for the game.

Basic Mechanics of the Game

The facilitator draws a card from the customer likes deck. He then sketches, on 2 different sticky notes, what he likes & doesn’t like. These are based on the rules on the card he drew.

The facilitator draws in two sticky notes. One pattern he likes and another he doesn’t like.

Participants then sketch two different versions of the design pattern — one they think the customer will like and another that the customer won’t like. If this is done by a group, they will have to decide the two patterns that they will show to the facilitator.

I normally give participants 2–3 minutes to discuss what pattern they will show me.

The players (normally in teams) discuss and guess together what they think the customer likes and dislikes.

The customer (or facilitator) then validates the guess whether they got it or not.

In a workshop, I would go around the different tables and mark their sticky notes correctly or not.

How To Score the Game

The facilitator gives participants three chances to sketch & validate the rule/pattern. After the three chances, they will say their final guess. If they guess it correctly, they get a point.

Example:

Participant: I/we think the customer likes red, blue & green.

Facilitator: Correct you get one point!

Sometimes I end the workshop here and then jump directly to discussions on prototyping and design research. This exercise can be done in 20–30mins. Great for a warm up exercise.

In one workshop, I ended the game here just to introduce the concept of user research & prototyping.

The entire basic mechanics of the game can be used to introduce the concept of understanding users & testing design concepts.

Iterations of the game

This game can be tweaked for longer workshops. This what I do:

1. Teach the core game mechanic above to selected co-facilitators.
2. Distribute the co-facilitators in each group where they would act as the customers.
3. Tell the participants there are 3 difficulty modes with the cards. Instruct them to inform their customer (co-facilitator), what mode will they play. If they get the guesses right, they get points. Easy guesses are worth 1 point, mediums are 2 points & hard guesses are 3 points.

We add this section is to emphasize the idea of focusing or defining a problem or design pattern.

In a previous workshop, I gave them 3 modes: Easy, Medium & Hard. They would the corresponding point if they guessed correctly.

I initially used this for a Product Development workshop. At that workshop I told the participants they would need to prototype a house based on the patterns that the customer likes. That was my step 4:

For example: A customer liked green triangles on top. They should prototype a house with green triangles.

Prototype a house with Red Triangles on Top

In another workshop, instead of using triangles, squares & circles, I had the participants use familiar web design patterns.

Using web design patterns for the D4ME game

Note that there is no deck or list of customer likes for this yet. I’ll make one when I have time (or feel free to contribute some ideas!).

The facilitator show 2 web designs

For example:

Customer likes buttons on upper right corner.

Sketch 2 Versions of a design.

Tying it up to User Experience Design & Agile Methodologies

I made D4Me when I wanted to teach basic ideas from the Design Sprint Process.

1. Understand by guessing customers likes & dislikes
2. Ideate and test different ideas (showing & validating design concepts to the customer)
3. Deciding on focus (easy, medium or hard challenge?)
4. Making a prototype (with cardboard materials)

Use this game freely!

D4ME is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. That means you can use, remix, and share the game for free, but you can’t sell it without permission. So go ahead and try it in your next workshop.

If you do use this game, do me a favor and tell me how it goes and what improvements you’ve done. Tag this article if you write about it.