A Practical Guide to Designing a Design Challenge
A curriculum to teach the design process in just 4 weeks
They say the best way to learn is to teach someone else. So when my colleagues approached me to see if I would be interested in creating and moderating a design challenge for non-designers, I leapt at the chance.
I’ve been working as a UX professional for over eight years now and, like anyone deeply invested in the design field, I’m constantly seeking out opportunities to hone my craft and learn as much as I can. Creating a design challenge was a great opportunity for me to gain more confidence in facilitating workshops, to network more within the company, and to break down silos. It would also teach me to create a topic-specific curriculum from scratch and to come up with fresh and new interaction patterns.
So, how does one go about designing a design challenge? And what did I learn along the way? I’d like to take you through my journey and share some helpful tips along the way.
Defining the challenge and setting goals
First off, I would be remiss not to mention my wonderful colleagues Marcus Holger Erb, Design Education Evangelist, and Susann Graeff, UX Design Manager, who are the sponsors of this initiative, as well as Nadezhda Moreva, Senior User Experience Researcher at SAP SuccessFactors, who helped to co-moderate and upskill the team on user research. In the words of H.E. Luccok, “No one can whistle a symphony — it takes a whole orchestra to play it.” Together, we put our heads together to create a curriculum that would educate non-designers on the design process while working together to solve a challenge.
As we thought about putting the challenge together, we had a couple of broader goals in mind: We wanted to give participants the freedom to experience a creative approach to UX design and to learn new methods they could apply to their daily work. We were also curious to test out the Think Tank method and to see if one collective mind working on the same problem could help us come up with new design patterns and interaction paradigms. To set the tone, we used the motto “Breaking free, unlock your creative potential”.
For the challenge, we gave our participants a 4-week time window to design a product relating to SAP SuccessFactors, our human capital management software. During the given timeframe, we asked them to focus on the ideation and design phases of the design sprint using different creative methods. In the end, they were expected to have a finished mockup for their use case, which they would then test out with a group of end users.
When designing your own challenge, there are many useful websites that provide interesting problem statements and prompts to choose from that are also company-agnostic. Even if you do end up using a challenge related to your own company, it’s still helpful to check these examples out to see how they are written and structured. Check out these sites for inspiration: UXchallenge, Sharpen Design, Designercize, and Memorisely Design Challenge.
Getting to know the participants
Once you’ve identified the challenge, I recommend doing a quick background check to see where your participants are in terms of skill levels. Also, keep in mind the time zones to ensure that people can work together as seamlessly as possible. Our participant team was made up of eight colleagues — User Assistants, Scrum Masters, Product Managers and Web Designers — all stemming from across the globe. One participant had moderate knowledge of design, while the rest were mostly novices.
We also invested some time in the beginning to ensure that the participants got to know one another as they would be spending the next 4 weeks working together on a project with a tight schedule. Apart from the typical background questions, we played the improv theatre game “Yes, and”. In enterprise software, we sometimes tend to limit the number of ideas we generate in the beginning due to our tight development schedules. This can lead to an environment where we end up ideating less and less. Our goal with the warm-up was to push participants out of their comfort zone, and this game was a great way to show them that their creativity could indeed run free.
Communicating the problem statement
To explain the challenge, we mapped out the event program and timeline so that participants were informed of what they would face in the next few weeks and what this meant for their workload.
Once we discussed the brief, we looked at the Persona and their motivation statement, which included brief background information and some needs and pain points in their daily work life. Understanding the problem space is the heavy lifting part of the design challenge, so we kept things simple and digestible, and pre-filled areas of the journey map such as the scenario and current state. Our goal here was to teach the team how to write a user journey and how they could get from user goals and problems to user actions, sentiments, and eventually to an opportunity and ideas space.
Moderating the ideation phase
Once we worked through the problem statement, we moved on to the ideation phase. To get a better feeling for what delightful UX design might look like, we asked the participants to create and share a mood board with their favorite applications, websites, and overall digital experiences. This was a great way to get some inspiration, learn new concepts, and find similarities between the team members.
At the end of this day, we asked the team to write down some very loose notes about what they understood in terms of the problem to be solved, and how this could be done. We used these notes the next day to scribble out their ideas using the Crazy 8s technique where everyone folds a sheet of paper into eight parts and scribbles a new idea in every section. With eight new ideas in eight minutes, the pressure was on, but it’s always a fun experience for the facilitator to observe. You can watch how the energy and tension rises and falls when they cross the finish line.
Next, it was time for the 3-part sketch, where participants took their best idea to create a final coherent solution with a small flow showing how the user would interact with it. Here we emphasized giving their solution a catchy name. It’s not only fun, but also a helpful communication tool if you have discussion rounds, so that people can refer to the concept names easily and increase their familiarity with the solution.
Finally, we split the teams into three small working groups and asked each to work on designing a specific solution based on the results from the 3-part sketch. At the end of the day, we provided a condensed boot camp on User Research to prepare them for the design phase. This included how to organize a moderated study, how write a questionnaire, and how to collect the insights into a handy one-pager.
Moderating the design phase
Next we provided a short Figma tutorial session to ensure the participants had the tools they needed to build a low-fidelity prototype. The teams were now ready to start designing. A few teams actually used the user journey map framework to write a new scenario and used it to build a storyboard for their wireframes. It was nice to see that they leveraged the tools we’d showed them the previous week.
With the wireframes ready, the teams moved on to testing out their prototypes with five SAP-internal end users in a moderated study. We then discussed their findings to see how they felt following the interview sessions. Some participants mentioned feeling disappointed that the end users didn’t understand their concept or didn’t need a certain feature. The truth is, every designer falls in love with their designs and doesn’t see their blind spots, which is exactly why we need to do user research. We don’t build software for ourselves, but for specific users and their problems and needs. I think this is a major lesson for anyone working on a product. To be a great UX designer, you need to be a creative problem solver, but also be ready to fail and try again.
“We don’t build software for ourselves, but for specific users and their problems and needs.”
Once the research was done and presented, it was time to redesign and polish up the prototype to bring it from a wireframe to a high-fidelity mockup in Figma using the new SAP Fiori Horizon stencils. Because of the short timeframe for this challenge, the teams needed to prioritize which requirements they would focus on. To help them do this, we planned on using the sail boat method for problem solving, but we ran out of time. Time management is a common challenge when running a curriculum for the first time; you never know how long certain exercises will take. Instead, we allowed them to come up with new ideas for problems that came up during the research phase and to group them into either “best idea ever” and “not worth it”. Unfortunately, this led to too many “best” ideas and not enough focus.
In retrospect, a useful method would have been the ideas on fire exercise from Nick Eagelton’s Creative Thinking 101. Here, the participants have one minute to save the best idea from a sudden fire. This would have been a quick and fun way to get rid of all but the very best ideas. A learning for us for the next time!
Presenting the solutions
At the end of this challenge, we wanted to give the participants the opportunity to present their solution to a round of UX design experts. Apart from conducting user research, presenting your ideas and concept to an audience, stakeholders, or developers constitutes a major part of being a UX designer. Initially we planned to have final event with everybody. But due to time zone issues and unexpected sick leaves, we ended up asking the participants to record their pitch as a 10-minute video. The teams really took the video idea and ran with it, using music and creative editing to highlight the best parts of their projects, taking us through the problem statement and proposed solutions.
Our judging panel rated the challenge according to the following categories: visual appeal, user focus, innovation, feasibility, and presentation. We wanted the ratings to provide our participants an idea of what they could improve upon, but also reflect what an amazing job they did. We also hosted a closing call with two of the judges with each team to discuss their results and their learning journey. In the end, we asked all participants to leave feedback so we could build on our curriculum for the future. What did they most appreciate? The openness and the creative freedom of the design challenge. Now that’s a mission accomplished!
Final thoughts on designing a design challenge
In the words of one participant, this challenge would not have been possible without the team’s open-mindedness and their will to just try new things out. I hope our journey designing a design challenge inspires you to take the next steps to develop your own challenge.
While there were many small things we can improve upon the next time, the fun we had teaching UX Design was the most rewarding thing about it.
Sandra Schulz is a Senior User Experience Designer at SAP and a doctoral student in Media Science at the University of Tübingen.
Experience matters. Follow our journey as we transform the way we build products for enterprise on www.sap.com/design.
