A not-so weekly newsletter, — Issue #1
Wrote this long ago on medium, my first ever article. Take a peak at my thought process
How our product design team went crazy using the crazy 8s — bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash
Doodles. Sketches. Crazy 8s. Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi Prototypes and even a documentation in 4 days!
We did it!
My product design team of four at Genesys was provided with a Case Study which aims at helping pregnant mothers access proper antenatal care. Thecument contains detailed information about the research goals, how the research was carried out, and high-level perspective of the insights gained from the research which includes personas, their emotions, and motivations.
Throughout our time in trying to understand the case study, we took an expedited approach to the Design Charette process. This method allowed us to focus on answering critical questions through design in 4 days. We also had to customize the charette exercise due to our limited time.
It was a crazy period mixed with rapid learning and fun.
OUR GOAL
We aimed at developing 3 solutions to some identified pain points from the case study and presenting them in the following deliverables;
- A document that details our process and the techniques we used in arriving at our results.
- Every sketch that contributed to our final solutions
- Lo Fi Mockups of our final solutions, and
- Hi Fi Mockups of our final solutions
OUR IDEATION PROCESS
Before getting started, we established some basic details and structures that would guide our discussion — like using one of the personas name, Adanna throughout the process, which we did to condition our minds and empathise better with our users:
Adanna, — a 25-year-old senior software developer, married and pregnant with her first child.
We identified the Pain Points (10 mins)
We began by individually going through the case study again to understand our users and their frustrations during pregnancies — to review the problem. My team members were able to identify up to 13 pain points. We streamlined this process to just 3 painpoints to work within our task requirements.
We were able to understand that first-time pregnant mothers;
- had limited knowledge about pregnancies, the stages of baby development due to lack of reliable sources for information and proper antenatal education.
- were faced with anxiety, confusion and uncertainty coupled with clueless husbands. And we understood that Adanna might need someone to talk with.
- had challenges with easy access to health centres
We used these as guides into our exploration into what it could mean to transform the experiences of pregnant women and first-time mothers.
We generated HMWs Questions (10 mins)
With the pain points now in mind, we suggesed about 30 how might we (HMW) questions. Like earlier, we streamlined it to 10 questions to work faster while keeping the goal of the process in mind.
Yunno,…the amazing thing is, we had all this ideation session over group calls and messages on WhatsApp 😊
Our Ideation Session (3 hours)
The lead started this session by asking each HMWs question, while everyone attempted to answer each question in order to generate ideas to solve Adanna’s challenges — you remember, right, the name we gave to our persona for this process. We generated a lot of awesome and even futuristic ideas for each unique HMW question that we answered. At the end of the process, we summed our ideas to over 50 unique ideas and possible solutions.
After gathering our thoughts, we decided on the ‘best’ 3 ideas out of the pool that was feasible, has high impact and takes low effort to implement, within the time limit that we had; to make up our Feature list;
- An in-built, AI-powered voice chat feature named Natalie that Adanna can talk to anytime, about anything and most particularly during postpartum depressions.
- A step-by-step walk through process that details the baby development stages and milestones, with images.
- A map feature that shows available health centres and health experts with details on how to reach them.
Then, we rested.
Of course na, we took a break. I told everyone to take some time off, take a nap, get a snack, take a walk, watch some funny videos, stretch their fingers — we were typing all the time, anything to take their mind off, for a while.
Our ideation session was the most tiring, but the most creative part of our ideation exercise.
Doodles (10 mins)
We got our hands dirty after about an hour’s break. With ambitious ideas now in mind, we started bringing our ideas to life through an initial rough sketch for each of the 3 features we listed above;
Crazy 8s (8 mins)
After our initial sketches, we went straight into the rapid iterative sketching process. It was our first time!
For some of us, this activity was fun and the most thrilling part of our process.
We shared each feature among ourselves. It allowed us to individually generate eight different interactions for the same idea within an 8-minute time frame. Within 1-minute each, we were forced to ignore perfection and focus on getting ideas into paper. The ideas were shared as snapshots via WhatsApp.
I was particularly fascinated at how good solutions were springing up, even in such short time frames, we felt our creative juices flowing — literally, or literarily, not sure which one 🤭.
Solution Sketch (30 mins)
After thinking about the pain points again and the potential solutions, we began solution-sketching individually by further developing the details of each sketch we came up with during the crazy 8s. Each member started with blank sheets of paper and spent a few minutes putting all their ideas together in sketches.
We all went through each sketch during a silent critiquing period, going over the features and solutions, focusing only on the positives. We started discussing all the solutions and doing a team critique in more detail. Team members asked questions and clarification on aspects that were not so clear. More ideas and patterns became more prominent as discussions continued.
Prototyping (24 hours)
Each member was tasked with developing the Lo-fi for one feature
We proceeded to creating high fidelity prototypes that completed each solution step. This involved
- Choosing a name that portrays our design thoughts — Natalie
- Generating a Style Guide suitable for Adanna: Colour Styles — Melon (#FFBEBA) and Blueberry (#1D4068); Typeface — Inter
- Creating a Logo — We applied some basic principles of design and the golden ratio.
- Harmonizing the solutions to ensure consistency, alignment, good contrast and spacing, etc.
Finally, we documented our process (1 hour)
Although, we began our documentation from the start of the process, decisions and results were added to the document as more team conclusions were made. The document was re-written and structured properly at the end of the whole process for presentation.
CONCLUSION
At the end of our Design Charet, we had generated a number of ideas and prototyped solutions that should help first-time mothers reduce the anxiety and uncertainties that are associated with pregnancy and deliveries. The Design charet helped us to be open-minded which allowed us develop and communicate solutions.
Next Steps
We will continue to flesh out more ideas surrounding the product.
That’s it!
We had another intense sprint the following week tho 😴
Contributors
Mentor
Watch this space!
How does your team work together through an ideation phase? I would love to learn from your process through comments below
How our product design team went crazy using the crazy 8s was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
