Designer toolbox: Design exercises for not only design teams, part 1.
After we grow our product design team at foodora, we had more chance to incorporate a collection of creative, design-related exercises and games to boost up creative power and keep design energy flowing through in our team. As many of designers, we have our ups and downs. Those have helped us come up with our own tools and processes that we will be sharing with.
My favorite comedian — John Cleese — once said:
“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.”
Context
Every Monday morning, the Product Design Chapter from foodora gathers together for Monday Breakfast. After the merge of 2 food delivery companies and merge of 2 design teams we decided to kick off this initiative to get better together and to have room for improvement and tighten the bond between us. And to have fun. And to eat (at the end we are food company).
So the biggest part (apart from the yummy breakfast, of course) is space for creative exercise. So we thought sharing our experience could help other teams.
How to
When: It matters. Do it regularly. We decided to have in the form of a breakfast. It brings casualty and a relaxed atmosphere. If you want to release creativity you need to feel comfortable and not to be afraid to fail.
How: Every week, one designer from the team is responsible for preparing both — breakfast and design exercises.
What you usually need
- Pen
- A4 paper
- Sticky notes
- Person who will moderate exercise, can participate as well — but needs to keep an eye on the clock and explain the rules
- Timer
With some exercises we got inspired by Jon Steinback from foursquare. Big kudos for foursquare guys, they are doing a great job! Here is the link to their article about exercises.
Apart from Jon Steinback’s article, it was difficult to find a good list of exercises so we came up with our own.
foodora Product Design team exercise list
- Draw — write (interpretation)
- Apple
- User body
- Truth and lies
- Collective story
- Forced connection
- Transform
- Marshmallow challenge
- Design decision
1. Draw-write interpretation
This exercise will help you to see how interpretation plays an important role in product design. Your UI intentions might differ very much from what the user understands. This also applies to design-development and product management-design communication. Try it with your Product Managers :)
What you need
- 4+ people
- A4 paper for each participant
- Timer set up for 1 min for each round
- Moderator
Preparation
Each person holds A4 paper horizontally and folds it in 4 so the folding creates 4 different sections.
- On first section, draw any object or scene you imagine within 1min. Pass it to the team member sitting on the left in the circle.
- Next person writes down what she/he sees on the drawing then folds it inside so the fist image cannot be seen. Pass it to the team member on your left.
- Repeat drawing — writing rounds till you make full circle.
- Unfold all and laugh. Talk a bit about outcomes.
We have few funny interpretations — started with Godzilla and ended up with with man in helicopter screaming “Pie!” or started with hand watch and ended up with old school watch you carry inside inner pocket.
I hope interpretation of our UI is less creative ;)
2. Apple
Quite often designers go with first idea they have, but we should actually work on our ideas a bit more and explore multiple ways. The aim of this exercise is to force creativity and not stop after first “A-ha!” moment.
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- No limit for number of participants
- Timer set up for 8 mins for whole exercise
- Moderator
Preparation
Each participant holds A4 paper and draws 3 vertical and 3 horizontal lines that divide paper into 16 equal squares.
Set timer to 8 mins and draw as many different apples as you can imagine during that time. You can also modify the rules — drawing more apples, having more time — depending how detailed you want drawings to be.
3. User body
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- 4–6 participants
- Timer set up for 1 mins for each round
- Moderator
Preparation (5 people)
- Each person holds A4 paper vertically and folds into 5 equal sections.
- Imagine whole character/user that you will draw.
- 1st round: On first section draw first part of the body within 1 min. Go beyond to second section with your lines so next person have a starting point. Fold it the way next participant cannot see what you drew. Pass it to next person.
- Repeat on new paper you received still drawing your character you imagined at the beginning.
- Repeat the round until the whole body is drawn.
4. Truth and lies
This exercise is supposed to bring people together and help get to know each other better.
What you need
- 3–5 small papers for each participant (same color and size)
- No limit for number of participants but above 6 team mates it gets too long
- Moderator — person who will collect all truths and lies and read them out loud.
Preparation
Each participant writes down one sentence about himself/herself that the team doesn’t know. It might be the truth or lie but each person shoudl write at least one truth and one lie. After that, participants pass all the papers to the moderator.
Moderator shuffles the papers and then reads them one by one. The others try to guess who wrote what and whether it’s the truth or lie.
5. Collective story
Design industry already came to a stage where designers should be able to code or at least understanding how the processes in coding work. Now, designers should be able to write more than ever. So, we started training! The aim of this exercise is to able to work with constrains (time, budget and inherited processes in content strategy) and to still come up with something that makes sense (or not).
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- No limit for number of participants
- Timer set up for 1 mins for each round
- Moderator
Preparation
Each participant has 1 paper. Write down 1 sentence that has exactly 6 words within 1 minute on your paper. Pass the paper to person on your left. Read last sentence and repeat from the beginning.
You can repeat how many times you want — the story will be longer. We figured out that for 5 people team we do 2 circles. And this is what we got.
6. Forced connection
This exercise supposed to help you connect things that normally you wouldn’t and build on top of each other work.
What you need
- A4 paper or 6+3 post-its/small papers for each participant
- No limit for number of participants
- Timer set up for 1 mins for each round
- Moderator
Preparation
- Place the paper vertically in front of you.
- Draw lines to divide paper into 2 small and 1 big columns and 3 rows (take a looks at picture).
- Between small rectangles draw + sign. Those will be elements that you are connecting.
- Before the bigger rectangles draw = sign. This will be outcome from forced connections.
- At the end, you are supposed to have 6 small and 3 big rectangles.
- Each round takes 1 min.
- Each participant draws 1 object or scene in 1 of the small squares and then pass the paper clockwise and repeats
- Once all the small squares are filled it’s time for forced connection.
- Pass it for the last time after last object was drawn and start drawing all 3 forced connections.
You can proceed also with post-its instead. Distribute first 6 post-its to each participant for drawing objects, collect sticky notes, shuffle and distribute back to the team. Distribute another 3 post-its for drawing connections.
7. Transform
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- 5 team members is a good number, but works also with more/less
- Moderator
Preparation
Put a paper horizontally and draw an object in the left top corner. Pass it to person next to you, who draws another object to the another corner of the page. Once all corners are filled, pass the papers along it for the final round. Take a look what other drawings you have on your paper and whether there are any commonalities any possible way to combine all 4 objects into one item or a composition. Then draw that object to the center of the page and provide a couple of phases before they transform from the initial concept to the object in the middle.
Our team took 2 approaches. One was morphing the shapes and second was more conceptual. Both work fine though! And that’s how we ended up with keyboard cat that has noodle cooker on his body and has digital displays as eyes, and sushi, cup, screw and bone transformed into a space rocket.
8. Letters
Do you remember this game from childhood when you were given a letter and you needed to find country, city and other things starting with that letter? That’s it. This is just an adaptation of the same game where you can play with your team in your workplace.
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- Small papers with alphabet letters on them (each letter on one post-it)
- No limit for the team
- Moderator
- Timer set up for 1min for each letter
Preparation
Each participant divides paper into 1 narrow column and 3 bigger equal columns (or more, if you wish). 1st column stands for the letter, 2nd for country name. In our case 3rd was for dish name and 4th for description of foodora user. You can come up with your own categories. At the end what matters is to learn how to work it out with time limitations.
Papers with the letters put between the participants with the letter facing the table. One team member pulls the paper with letter and reads out loud, time starts — you have 1 min to fill all the columns and then next team members pull the next letter.
9. Free drawing
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- No limit for the team
- Moderator
- Timer set up for 1 min for each round
Draw an object or shape on your paper in 1 min. Pass it clockwise to another team member. Draw on top of the drawing you received again within 1min. Repeat several times.
10. Word stack
What you need
- A4 paper for each participant
- No limit for number of participants
- Moderator
- 3 small papers per participant
Preparation
Distribute small papers between team members. On the first paper, write an adjective and fold it so that no one can see. On second paper, write a noun and fold. On the third paper, write a verb in -ing form (e.g. walking, smiling, coding, etc.). Shuffle each papers within their own group (nouns, verbs and adjectives) and let the participants choose one from each pile. Combine them in the order of adjective, noun and verb to form a phrase. Then draw that phrase you end up with! (e.g. Grumpy computer chilling)
We ended up having hilarious combinations:
- Intelligent pumpkin rocking
- Annoying horse sailing
- Spiritual telephone watching
- Glorious thunderstorm jumping
- Small actress swinging
11. Marshmallow challenge
What you need
- 3–6 people (multiple teams allowed)
- 20 spaghetti sticks
- Sticky tape
- 1 meter long string
- 1 marshmallow
- Scissors
- Measuring tape
- Timer set up for 18 min
- Moderator
Participants
In 18 minutes team needs to build the highest freestanding structure that will hold whole marshmallow on top. You can use how many spaghetti sticks you want, how much tape and string you need. You can break, cut, fold. You cannot suspend your structure from any other structure like lamp or table.
If you are moderator of the exercise — make sure everyone understands the rules. Also remind every 2 mins about time passing by.
Fun fact about this exercise — right after architects kinder garden kids perform the best, much better than managers or students… Here is also the link to more in-detail description for the challenge.
12. Design decision
This exercise was founded by Google Ventures. Quite often teams are caught up in endless discussions that leads to nowhere. This exercise will help make decisions, prioritize problems and find actionable insights much faster.
Dorothy Lei, one of our team members at foodora Product Design — wrote post about our experience with that methodology.
I hope you enjoy it. It’s first from article series about design exercises. As we will keep doing them regularly we will share our ideas with you in next posts. Big thumbs up to Dilara Cumhur, Dorothy Lei, Simon Gussing and Patrick Funk for all the nice ideas and effort to make this happen :) :*
Special thanks go to Alexia Iordanoglou for putting all missing articles ;)
