Welcome to Design Thinking: UX designers and Bay Area teens dive into the ins and outs of UX design
The week of June 24, 35 high-school sophomores from around the Bay Area descended on Salesforce HQ. Their mission: spend an immersive week soaking up all things Salesforce, learning about careers in tech, and developing their “professional brands.” During this time, the Salesforce UX team partnered with Salesforce.Org to host a fast-paced workshop introducing UX and design thinking, with content designed and refined by multiple Salesforce UX designers and researchers over the past year. Let’s find out what the students walked away with — and how you can bring this workshop to your organization.
An Afternoon of Design Thinking
As part of Salesforce Summer, the Salesforce Experience team led participants in a 2.5-hour workshop on design thinking and UX principles. That’s not much time to cover a lot of ground, so we started by considering what knowledge and skills we wanted students to walk away with. We came up with five important takeaways:
- A basic understanding of the design thinking process
- A snapshot of typical UX processes
- New tools for approaching and thinking about problems
- The satisfaction of combining individual ideas to create a shared design
- The fun of learning while having a good time
But a workshop is as much about the details as the big picture. After stocking up on sticky notes, sketch paper, pens, and flip charts, we spent some time prepping the Salesforce UX designers who would serve as facilitators. Facilitators work within each group to clarify steps (“Do you know what you need to do here?”), prompt thinking (“What if you…”), and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard (“What do you think?”). They’re supported by a dedicated timekeeper, who keeps everyone moving quickly throughout the presentations and activities, or helps make up for lost time elsewhere in the workshop.
Kicking Off the Workshop
We started by welcoming the students and describing our shared goal: Design a paper app prototype and walk through the UX journey together.
We split into teams of three to five students and a facilitator — a mix big enough to generate a range of ideas, but small enough that individual voices won’t get lost. Next is an icebreaker: “On a sticky note, sketch out your answer: If you were an animal, what animal would you be?” The goal here was to help students to get comfortable with the materials, and with sketching and sharing their thoughts.
Once teams had gotten a taste of working together, we stepped back for a high-level overview — the definition of user experience and a snapshot of the design thinking process. We broke the UX process down into five steps — Discover, Define, Design, Refine, and Deliver — noting both divergent and convergent thinking at each point.
Starting with Discover
This phase of the process starts by exploring the discovery process through four steps:
- Be presented with a problem
- Brainstorm solutions
- Sketch out a paper prototype
- Test your designs
In our work as designers, we’re usually presented with a set of problem constraints. It was no different for the students, who received a creative brief — which did double duty as a set of guardrails designed to support students who may feel paralyzed when asked to develop ideas from scratch.
The brief defined the desired product — an app that connects mobile device users with city resources. Each team then chose a focus for its app, making space in the process for both guidance and choice.
Moving into Define
Next, we moved into the fastest-paced activity of the day — uncovering the users and their needs.
We started with team brainstorming: What are some aspects of the main problem? For example, a team working on a “Rubbish” app might call out problems such as sorting recyclable and compostable material from landfill, finding the closest waste receptacle, or increasing awareness around recyclable materials. Next, who do these subproblems affect? The students themselves? Residents of the Bay Area? Our sanitation companies? Who else?
We then moved into storyboarding, introduced with a quote from Smashing Magazine:
A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user’s experience with a product. It can help UX designers understand the flow of people’s interaction with a product… giving the designers a clear sense of what’s really important for users.
With this guidance, each student was asked to create an individual storyboard, using printed storyboard templates and leveraging ideas pulled from the previous brainstorming section.
At this point, we encouraged the students to pursue their own ideas, then come back together to present to the group and decide together on a single user profile and subproblem. And with that, each team has defined its use case.
The next step is to define the app’s features, as defined by Aha! Labs:
Characteristics of your product that describe its appearance, components, and capabilities…. Features should be added based on quantifiable ways that will add value for the product’s end users.
We again diverged, with each student taking a few minutes to write out key features that apply to their team’s use cases, writing down one feature per sticky note, and handing the notes to the table facilitator, who gathered the flurry of notes and sorted them into groups by feature type.
As the facilitator read out the groups, students voted for their favorites using three dot stickers. When the dust settled, the three groupings with the most votes became the top features for the group’s app.
Primed for Design
The students again diverged, each sketching out screens representing the team’s three chosen features. After 10 minutes (it’s a fast paced workshop!), the students shared their screens with one another, walking through their flows. At this point, we also highlighted characteristics of good feedback (I Like, I Wish, I Wonder). Students again used the dot-voting system to rank their top screens, then merged their ideas into one master sketch on the large sketch paper, representing the teams’ best ideas (converge!).
Refine Time
As we moved into the refinement stage, we introduced the concept of user research and testing: What is usability testing and why we do it? How should we plan it, and how can we get the most out of it? This led into the next activity, in which each group decided on three questions for its usability study. This ensured that we were creating actionable tasks, and not leading questions or clues. Questions groups came up with included “What do you think this app does?” and “What actions are available to you on the home screen?”
At this point, one student from each group took on the role of “participant,” moving to a different table, with the goal of giving that team a fresh perspective on its work.
After 10 minutes for the usability study, the original teams reformed and talked through their findings. This was their chance to tweak their final designs in response to feedback.
Delivering the Goods
At the conclusion of the workshop, each team presented its app idea to the group, using this presentation checklist:
- The name of the app
- The problem being solving
- Which user is targeted
- The solution or big idea
In this particular Salesforce Summer session, we didn’t have time for every team to present. Instead, we took a fun team photo of each group showing off its amazing app designs.
Wrapping Up
After two and a half hours, to help students review what they’ve learned, we circled back to design thinking, showing how each of the day’s activities maps to the process:
- Discover: Problem is presented
- Define: Storyboarding, use cases, feature creation
- Design: Sketching
- Refine: User testing
- Deliver: Presentations and photos
Finally, we took a moment to describe the wide range of UX roles, noting how all the students got to wear multiple hats throughout the day’s activities.
Looking Back — and Ahead
We’ve just described one workshop in particular, while in actuality this is the fifth UX Workshop the Salesforce UX team has hosted at HQ. Although the goals and the main flow stay the same from workshop to workshop, we tweak content and total class time to fit each group, then use each iteration to learn, change, and improve.
This time, after working with our youngest group to date, we realized that we should have eased back on the jargon (use case, features) and focused more deeply on foundational principles. From now on, we’ll adjust the course slightly to fit each group’s ages and level of design knowledge.
Even as we continue to refine the workshop, we’re gratified to see students of all ages and backgrounds finding so much value and pride in seeing their ideas come to life — proof that user experience training has value for anyone willing to dive in and explore.
Learn more about the organizations we’ve hosted UX workshops with:
Thank you to the many Salesforce UX designers and researchers who helped staff this workshop, and all past workshops. Special thanks to Anna Poznyakov, Julia Wolinsky, Ben Holland-Arlen, Amy Lee, and Callie Deardorff for supporting the creation of the first workshop back in Spring 2018; Ali Ivmark, for her design thinking additions and sharp photography; Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet for blog post edits; Katie Marazita for continuous timekeeping prowess; and John Calhoun and Jason Kriese for creating space for projects like this.
Interested in learning more about Salesforce UX?
Read our other Medium posts, follow us on Twitter (@SalesforceUX), and contact uxcareers@salesforce.com for job opportunities.
