Design Jams! How to run creative sessions with the people who use your product.

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Design Jams!
Problem-solving with the people
who use your product

Session Survey: http://www.uxpa2016.org/sessionsurvey?
sessionid=110 www.uxpa2016.o
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Melinda Campbell
@melindahouse
melinda@puppet.com
• where do you work? what do you do?

• we are hiring!

• not puppets

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“Brainstorms among equals are ENFP’s forte…”
ENFP-A (empathetic • intuitive • feeling • prospecting •
assertive)
I recently did a personality test…

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• For the past almost 4 years at Puppet…

• Today I’m going to focus on designing with users and talk about the things that make that diﬀerent than designing with your team internally

•

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• what is a design jam?

• mini creative session

• take these design-thinking principles, this classic UX process

• “jam” it into a 2-hour, problem-solving workshop

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Google Ventures: Design Sprints
http://www.gv.com/sprint/
• Inspired by google ventures 5-day sprint

• These sprints are great for kicking oﬀ a project and mapping out the whole problem space…

• But sometimes you don’t have 5 days…

• And 2 focused hours can be really valuable

• gv.com/sprint is a great resource, lots of helpful stuﬀ

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Google Ventures: Sprint book

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Stanford d.school: Crash Course
http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/
• describe d.school crash course, intended to teach design thinking

• mix tapes for conducting 1/2 day sessions on understand, experiment, and ideate

The Stanford d.school’s crash course in design thinking is also a great format for planning a short design session. This is a quick 90 minute session that you can use to teach this process to others. They also oﬀer some ‘mixtapes’ they call them for facilitating 3 half
day sessions each around understand, experiment, and ideate.

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Puppet: Design Jams
discover and deﬁne brainstorm choose prototype and test
• What does our version of this look like?

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• So doing this with users is much diﬀerent than doing it with your internal teams

• and you have to be careful…

• as we know, we are not supposed to ask our users what they want us to build…

• Turns out we are not great at predicting what we will want in the future.

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Customers said they liked it.
They said they would drink it.
They didn’t.
New Coke.
There have been a few famous examples of this where doing what our users told us to do led us astray.

Here’s one:

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“If you asked
people what they
wanted 200 years
ago they would
have said faster
horses…”
- Not Henry Ford
• And we’ve all probably heard this quote…

• But this is conundrum in UX

• How do we get input on design for something our users don’t have the context for?

• How do we innovate and validate new concepts and ideas

• A knob

• At Puppet we came up with our own term for this…

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The conversation with my coworker went like this:

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#spacepants
So that’s how it happened. Space pants. It comes up quite a bit. You’ll probably start noticing it where you work too. And now you know what to call it. ‘Space pants’ is the new faster horses.

So, back to the issue before - when you are in a spacepants situation and you can’t just ask users what they want. What do you do?

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My answer is - invite them to a design jam!

- Instead of asking them what they want

- Give them these essential design thinking skills

- they can turn that into real innovative thinking, and actually have some pretty great contributions.

- perfect innovation potluck -

- they bring the domain knowledge and real user stories and we provide the design thinking structure and principles.

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User prototype
• even then you’re not going to BUILD the things your users design

• this is all really a research engagement in disguise

• it’s discovery research

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Outcomes
• User stories
• Story maps
• Current user workﬂows
• Hacks and workarounds
• Integrations with other
tools
• Insight about competitors
• Design expectations
• User capabilities
• Product ideas
• What you WILL get is…

• a gold mine of knowledge and artifacts to interpret and inform your own internal design process.

• Here’s what you can expect to collect…

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Beneﬁts
• An empathetic product team
• Clear product direction
• Adoring users
And on top of that Design Jams results in -

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How to Jam
Plan Jam! Unpack
So let’s talk about how to jam with users

I’ll walk through what to do before, during, and after the design jam with users

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Plan: The “how might we…”
question
Picking the right design problem to solve
• Sets the stage for the whole design jam

• jumping oﬀ point and the end goal

• no pressure!

• You want to make sure you get the right scope of a problem…

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Too broad
When your design problem is too broad, you quickly realize that nobody knows where to start.

Blank stares, too many jumping oﬀ points

Example of too broad - How might we design pants for being in space?

This is ok and not the worst situation

Story-mapping

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Too narrow
When the problem is too narrow, people kind of already know the answer, or they think they do.

This is worse than too broad, hard to zoom out

But you can zoom out and pivot your design problem…maybe you draw out a workﬂow and ask about other things that come before or after the design problem and see if there is something else worth
digging into. But this is tricky.

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Just right
Just right - How might we design space pants that keep your legs comfortable when floating in space?

This last one has some constraints - the pants must be comfortable - but it still gives some room for innovation and lets the user define the requirements of the design problem - what does comfort mean?
What could be uncomfortable about floating in space?

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Plan: your team
Here’s who I like to have on my team:

A facilitator.

- What does facilitator do?

- kindergarten teacher

A topic expert or 2.

Why have a topic expert?

I work on a technical product…

What is their job?

Engineers (and others)

- valuable for other members

- connect with users

- get ﬁred up about building tools

- What can they do?

Keep the participants to 20 people or less
- Why do you want less than 20?

- sharing in groups

- casual conversation

-

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Plan: your team
the facilitator
A facilitator.

- What does facilitator do?

- kindergarten teacher




What is their job?





- What can they do?


- sharing in groups


-

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Plan: your team
the facilitator the expert



What is their job?


- sharing in groups


-

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Plan: your team
the facilitator the expert the engineers




- What can they do?

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Plan: your team
the facilitator the expert the engineers
users

- sharing in groups


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Schedule meetings
Planning meeting
2-3 weeks
Check-in Run-through Set up
Design jam!
Unpack
1 week 2-3 days 1 hour 1 day after
- talk through the meetings

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Where?
Where in the world?
What venue?
• whiteboards
• tables
• chairs for 20+
• where are your users?
• would you travel? would they travel?
• Virtual?
• Largely depends…

• Where your users are

• Budget

• You need a space that has…

When and where you hold your design jam will depend largely on your budget. In general I try to make these pretty lightweight, so it doesn’t become a huge to-do.

I like to do right after work at our oﬃce and serve pizza and beer. Start at 5:30pm and be done by 7:30pm.

If it’s the end of the week, people will be tired after work and more likely to bail.

I suggest mid-week.

Where?

do you have to reserve a space or can you host it at your company? You’ll need a projector and a whiteboard. Seating for small groups of 4.

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Virtual
Group video call
+
Online group collaboration

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When?
What day?
What time?
• would they miss work?
• 5:30-7:30pm with pizza and beer
• weekday
• early, mid week
• other events you can piggy back on? (ie. conference, meetup, etc)
• other events that conﬂict?
• Largely depends…

• Where your users are

• Budget

• You need a space that has…

When and where you hold your design jam will depend largely on your budget. In general I try to make these pretty lightweight, so it doesn’t become a huge to-do.

I like to do right after work at our oﬃce and serve pizza and beer. Start at 5:30pm and be done by 7:30pm.

If it’s the end of the week, people will be tired after work and more likely to bail.

I suggest mid-week.

Where?

do you have to reserve a space or can you host it at your company? You’ll need a projector and a whiteboard. Seating for small groups of 4.

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sessionid=110
Recruiting users
• Website prompt
• Sales contacts
• Customer advisory board
• Professional communities
• Social media
Building a user database who you can reach out for research is a conference talk in itself, but if you don’t already have that channel, here are a few ways:

If you have a web tool - put an interception question on the site. (ask Mari about this)

Talk to your sales or other customer-facing teams, are there any customers they’ve spoken with lately that would relate to this design problem?

Are you users part of a professional community? Post on their meetup boards or slack channels.

Tweet, facebook, blog, etc.

I created an Eventbrite invite with details about the event and included that in every tweet, post, and blog.

You may want to screen participants when they register.

Watch out for recruiters. They sometimes see this as an opportunity to meet people in certain fields and offer their services.

if the design problem you are wanting to address requires a certain profile of user (like technical know-how or size of company or something) you may want to ask some questions in your registration to give
you that information.

Will you offer swag for participating? (we do, but in most cases people seem very excited to just be a part of it)

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Inviting users
• Create an invite with an online event
service
• Create registration questions
• Screen registrants
• Swag?
I created an Eventbrite invite with details about the event and included that in every tweet, post, and blog.

You may want to screen participants when they register.

Watch out for recruiters. They sometimes see this as an opportunity to meet people in certain fields and offer their services.

if the design problem you are wanting to address requires a certain profile of user (like technical know-how or size of company or something) you may want to ask some questions in your registration to give
you that information.

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The planning
document

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Time Timer
This is a nifty, simple tool that works well during the jam - the Time Timer. Jake Knapp recommended this to me 3 years ago and there are 2 whole pages dedicated to it in his new book. So, i guess it’s still
the standard!

It has one job, count down time. People can glance at the clock and see how much time is left. They feel the heat. Just don’t forget some backup batteries!

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Gather supplies

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Worksheet
s
All information © 2009 ZURB, inc. All rights reserved.
http://zurb.com/playground/zurb-sketchsheets
Zurb Studios
Create worksheets and templates for empathy exercises and prototypes

(show examples of worksheets and templates)

There are all sorts of guides out there for storyboards, workﬂows, mobile devices, etc.

I found some worksheets on ZURB that I printed out.

I like to provide give people a range of materials to play with. If they just want to use a huge piece of paper and sketch it all out that’s ﬁne. But they might feel like they need a little more structure.

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The set up

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Intro
I’m me.  
Those are those guys.
Who are you?  
Why did you come?
What’s a design jam? 
What’s design thinking? 
What’s the goal today?
the facilitator

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Discover
So, let’s talk about space
and pants.  
 
First, tell me some things
about your pants...
the expert
users
This is where you (or a topic expert) presents the user problem you’ve identiﬁed and that you’re trying to solve. This is a good time to get the participants to volunteer some stories. Can they relate with the
problem?

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Deﬁne
Insights
How might we…
Make a list with them on the whiteboard. so In the case of spacepants, you could ask - has anyone here been to space? What do you know about humans in space? Nothing? Ok, what do you know about
pants? What do you like about pants? (make a list on a whiteboard) Things that can inform their ideas later.

Try to keep solution talk out of this section. That will come next.

Restate the design problem. Make sure everyone is clear about it. This will be the jumping oﬀ point for ideas.

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Ideas
• Show example
• One idea per sticky note
• Quantity over quality
• Require 1 ridiculous idea
Show examples. 1 idea per card, quick thought. “Leg heaters” “sweat absorption” “gravity cuﬀs”. Points for most ideas. Points for craziest ideas. Minimum 4 ideas each, even if that 4th idea is something silly
like ‘live cats in your pants’...you have to write it down.

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Share ideas
• share their ideas with team
• group similar concepts
• eliminate less useful ideas
Participants…
• listen to conversations
• ask questions
• take notes
You…
Each group shares their solutions. They chunk together similar solutions and explain their thinking behind them. This is where very interesting conversations come up.

*Have a note taker at each table or a mic on each table

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Choose ideas
difﬁcult  
to  
build
value to the user
vote with dots plot on graph
Groups must choose 1-2 ideas to prototype (depending on size of group and how many winning ideas were picked)

You can give people tools to help decide which ideas to choose -

Voting dots

Plot on a graph of user value vs. diﬃculty

A group of 4 could break up into 2 and each prototype an idea

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difﬁcult  
to  
build
value to the user

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Prototype
This is where in pairs or small groups of 2-3, your participants will sketch out their solution in more detail.

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Prototype
• How does the user interact with your tool to accomplish theirgoal?
• What does success look like?
Show examples -
• workﬂows
• interactions
• comic strip
• single UI screen
I like to present a few questions to help them think through the idea and what to produce. -

Write a quick scenario - what is the user trying to accomplish with your tool?

What is the workﬂow of using the tool?

What does success look like for the user?

How does it work?

Show a few screens

Make a comic strip

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Prototype

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Prototype
• listen to conversations
• ask questions
• take notes
You…

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Present and get feedback
• Revisit the “HMW”
question
• How does this design
solve that for the user?
• Who would use it?
• Why or why not?

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Jam complete!
• Thank your participants
• Collect email addresses
• Keep everything

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Unpack
• Share key findings
• Go through notes, stickies, whiteboards, prototypes,recordings
• Look for user stories and design requirements
• Turn stories into tickets or story maps
• Distribute relevant content to project files, tickets, docs, etc.
• Write up a summary
The next day, meet with your team and bring all the paper and notes you gathered from the design jam. It’s important that all the stuff floating your head and all the insight hidden in sketches, notes, and index
cards make their way to the right places, so they can inform your product roadmap and your design.

Spread it all out, read through your notes

What were the biggest takeaways?

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Unpack
Stories Story map

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Unpack
Prototypes • Design requirements
• Stories
User should be able
to…

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And there you have it…

running design jams with your users is super rewarding, fun and valuable.

Please feel free to contact me if you need any guidance, or even if you have a funny story.

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and remember…

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#spacepants

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Questions?
@melindahouse
melinda@puppet.com

Design Jams! How to run creative sessions with the people who use your product.

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