Only ‘The Designer’ should design
In the world of IT is it only ‘the designers’ by their job role can do the designing tasks? And should the rest of the team be kept out from the job??
Well, in a product company all most all the employees working with the product at least has the slightest knowledge on the domain, and how users might be using it. Throughout the development phase, naturally the whole team tries to put themselves in the shoes of system users.
So why should not everybody including developers, testers, team leads be involved in designing?
But do all the members have time to design, and know what to design , when to and how to design?
Hmmm, looks like we have a problem there. So that’s where I, who work as a Business Analyst and a product designer by the role, played a facilitator role and got the team to design on a certain task. And this is what I have tried out.
Getting inspired by the famous book The Design Sprint by Jake I ran a sprint with my development team. And I did customization to the steps in the book. Time span is a major difference as I limited our entire sprint into 2 hours. And also to built empathy, as followed in Institute of Design at Stanford’s Design Thinking process, personas were created and let the team get familiarized with them.
Of course it’s bit tough, but with the sprint question and the goal you pick it’s doable…!!! And a thorough preparation is a MUST!
Preparation
1#Creating the Environment where we run the Sprint.
2#Finding the resources you need
3#Giving knowledge on the product area to all the members beforehand
4#Informing the experts and sending calendar invites giving an explanation on what’s expected from them
5#Writing down the agenda with time duration..!!!
6#And more importantly make the team understand the need of working on time.
How we squeezed a Monday into thirty minutes
After explaining the long term plan and the sprint question, the team started with their map. As they were done on it, our experts who are on site with the customers (Product owners) joined with the team via a video meeting. The team who knew every act was time boxed, started shooting with questions soon. The questions they are hesitant/ don’t feel like asking thinking that they are too simple were also sprung due to the pressure created on time. Which was good.
Ideate, Sketch and Decide
As the facilitator, I picked the method of crazy 8 to ideate. And explaining the reason behind the technique allowed them go crazier and open minded with their ideation. After they did the sketching on one of their favorite designs, of course, we had to use silent voting to avoid the marketing pitches. And they liked the concept of silent voting when they learnt the reason behind it.
Prototype and Test
Since we have Interface guidelines and defined design framework, in our customized way of running the sprint I created some rough screens on their sketches. And they were evaluated for further iterations with experts.
How it fitted us
Well, the team was quite energized and enthusiastic about what they did. This in a way made them be more empathetic towards the users of the system that we build. And more importantly, we could generate more ideas and design more quicker with the whole team. So aren’t these impacts and results, good enough for us to try it again?
Well yes, they asked to facilitate more of the sprints which states how well it suited us…! :)
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