Girls Who Code (Who Also Design)

When Bret Scofield and I were asked to speak at a Girls Who Code event, we immediately said YES. What an honor! These talented, intelligent, ambitious young girls wanted to hear what we had to say? We were flattered.

But then we thought about it for a minute. We don’t… code. I mean sure, we could probably put together a basic webpage if we had a few days and access to some YouTube tutorials to brush up on our CSS. But code is definitely not something we interact with on a day-to-day basis. More often, Bret is spending her time talking to customers and creating research reports while I’m discussing gradients and the best way to scale our design system. So what could we possibly share with these girls that would be worth their time, interesting to hear, or even useful to them?

And then we had an aha moment. We would take them through a design exercise! No one can deny that hands-on is the best way to learn any skill, especially a craft like design. Going through the steps of a mock design project would not only give these girls a realistic glimpse into our day-to-day, but also equip them with some skills and frameworks they could actually use as they venture into the world of building technology.

For some of the girls, this was their first introduction to the field of product design and research, so we started the evening with a presentation which went over the basics:

• What is Product Design? (Turns out this is harder to answer than you’d think!)
• What’s the difference between Product Design, Research, UX Design, UI Design, Interaction Design, Service Design, Visual Design, Experience Design, Motion Design, Prototyping, Content Strategy, the list goes on… (yawn!)
• What’s the typical path to product design? Hint: there is none. We talked about our team for a bit and the backgrounds we come from to illustrate the point that there’s a million different ways to get to where we are.

• What’s a typical day for a UXer? How closely do we work with engineering? Answer: REALLY closely. We provided evidence in the form of the many boomerangs we’ve taken together to show how we’re tied at the hip.

Next, we spoke a bit about the design process and the importance of identifying problems, exploring options, iterating, and validating your solutions. To drive the point home, we walked through the recent Sumo Logic UI redesign as a sample project. We talked through the goals and triggers of this initiative, customer quotes, our design principles, and our personas. We showed some of our “uglies” as well as some of our more polished designs, clips from user testing, and interaction specs.

Then we handed it over to the girls for the design exercise! We had them break into 3 teams and provided them with the prompt of designing an app to help them plan a party for a friend’s birthday. What are some of the challenges with current event planning apps like Facebook? They discussed ideas for features within their teams then presented them to the larger group.

Bret and I were blown away by their ideas. In just a short 5 minutes, each team had come up with concepts for the app that we never would have imagined. Gift registries, playlists, song recommendations and shopping lists emerged as ideas, as well as ways for friends to find a common time and location for the party. When brainstorming, it can be difficult to break away from simply copying what other products do, but that did not seem to be an issue for these girls based on the creativity of their ideas.

We had each team envision a persona as the target user for their app, and again, Bret and I were surprised by how creative the end result was. The personas were incredibly imaginative and specific, going into details like their hobbies, cars, dreams, and average stress level. We also noted that 2 of the 3 groups had personas that were somewhat aspirational, as they were young women in college.

Next we got to the fun part: sketching! (And by fun, we actually mean extremely challenging). We asked the girls to sketch out some screens for the app. Although they tended to focus more on showing key features and less on the overall user flow, it seemed like a piece of cake for them to jump headfirst into designing interfaces. On the other hand, we weren’t surprised to find that they had the same tendency that we do when we sketch: to want to make everything perfect. It’s always a constant struggle to finish our sketches within the allotted time and not to beg for just two more minutes when the timer goes off! But we laid down the law when time was up and made them present their designs whether they were finished or not.

We also very strategically gave them fat sharpies (no pencils or erasers allowed!) to teach the lesson that sketching is about getting your ideas on paper, not creating masterpieces. After presenting their designs within their teams, we had them discuss which of the ideas were the most successful, then go through another round of sketching to merge these ideas into a finished product. They wrapped up the session with a final presentation to the whole group.

At the end of the evening, we had lots of conversations with the girls, ranging from weekend plans to what they should study in college. They were curious about the difference between freelancing and doing agency work, versus working in-house for a technology company like we do. These were terms that Bret and I were hardly familiar with in high school, let alone thinking about in terms of our future. Holy smokes, these girls are ambitious.

All in all, the design exercise seemed to come second nature to them. Maybe this is because being a part of Girls Who Code has given these girls a certain technology-oriented mindset, or maybe it’s just because 14–17 year olds have grown up in the age of the iPhone, and using apps is instinctive. Either way, they’ve got a bright future ahead if they can manage to integrate this level of design thinking into their coding projects. Basically, what we’re trying to say is we’re concerned about our job security. (And we’re only partly joking about that 😅)