The Design Studio Method

Creative Problem Solving with UX Sketching

Brian Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138035706
• eBook ISBN: 9781317692225
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The struggle with balancing creative products that are innovative, technically feasible, and financially sound is one designers and web professionals go through every day. The Design Studio Method is a creative problem solving process that allows you to quickly generate ideas, evaluate them, and reach consensus, achieving that balancing act. Brian Sullivan's The Design Studio Method gives answers that you have been looking for, showing you how to be innovative and efficient without sacrificing quality and collaboration. This book simplifies the complicated method, explaining each step, each participant's involvement, and how to adapt the method to your needs.

The Design Studio Method provides step-by-step procedures to ensure your success. From illumination, to generation, to presentation, all the way to iteration, this book provides the road map you'll need to start generating innovate products.

• Shows you how to involve all members of the creative process—from clients to directors—so that everyone participates, critiques, and innovates.
• Features real-world examples of Design Studio projects that highlight the successes of this method and ways to adapt it to your needs.
• Includes a website that showcases videos covering each step of the method and other procedures that crop up along the way.

PART 1
Processes

CHAPTER 1
Book Overview

The design studio method has been used by art colleges, boutique design companies, consultants, and advertising agencies for decades. In these settings, design professionals or students present their concepts and hear critiques of their work by their peers. In the last few years, Web Designers have started to use the design studio method with stakeholders to help the entire product team to generate and evaluate ideas before any software development begins.

"Creative problem solving is looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different."

— Albert Szent-Gyorgi, Nobel Prize Winner

While most business professionals do not have a formal design education, they do think visually. Marketers brainstorm new ideas on whiteboards. Developers sketch out data flows. User Experience Designers create mind maps, sketch mockups, and draw customer task flows. Database Administrators sketch entity relationship diagrams. In short, truly creative solutions to problems often begin with some form of sketching.

The purpose of this book is to help you understand how to harness the power of visual thinking at all levels of your organization by effectively using the design studio method in a business setting. The concepts described in this book are based upon well-established creative problem-solving research, which has been in use since the 1950s, by Alex Osborn, Sidney Parnes, Edward de Bono, Donald Treffinger, and Ruth Noller. In the first part of the book, you will learn how to apply these research-based principles to run an effective design studio.

Definition of a Design Studio

At its core, the design studio process is simple:

1. People generate ideas by sketching their concepts.
2. A group comes together to show and critique other people's sketches.
3. Based upon the group's feedback, concepts get further refined.

Advantages of Design Studios

Design studios provide a creative problem-solving method, where Designers, Developers, and key stakeholders create and explore design alternatives. Based upon my experience, the design studio method offers these advantages:

• Design studios are fast. In most cases, design studios can be done in a few hours or days. This method is ideal for aggressive deadlines. Plus, design studios fit nicely into rapid development processes, such as Agile, Scrum, or Extreme Programming.
• Design studios help you to visualize complex problems more easily. You can more easily see relationships and make associations in a design studio than by reading a document or listening to another person. You visually see problems and solutions.
• Design studios allow you to share knowledge. You should include a cross-functional team of people with different backgrounds and experiences. Concepts get discussed from multiple viewpoints, which enrich and strengthen the final design.
• Design studios promote team cohesiveness. By spending time together, participants create a shared vision for the final design. Their commitment will be based upon their effort spent creating and evaluating the different concepts. Broken teams can heal.
• Design studios help you to get early commitment on design direction. When a design studio ends, the project team should know its design direction. As you move to production, the design will continue to be refined, but the design direction should be set.
• Design studios can help you overcome communication barriers. Participants must illustrate their ideas in a design studio. Since sketches will contain universal symbols of lines, circles, squares, and words, you can more easily overcome language barriers.

Where Do Design Studios Fit into a Product Workflow?

Every Designer uses sketching as a primary activity. Designers will sketch notes, user personas, workflows, user interface elements, navigation options, and more. Designers are very comfortable with sketching. The design studio method fits nicely into their natural workflow.

The following illustration shows the typical artifacts of a web designer.

A Web Designer starts with sketching. When they have a design direction, some Designers will build a wireframe to help with requirements gathering. Customers provide feedback on the wireframes. The Designer will either build a set of comps or a prototype. Usability testing can be done on the prototype or comps. In the end, development will create the code to turn either the prototype or comps into production-ready code.

While the above workflow is a standard process for Designers, it can be foreign or intimidating to other professionals. Product Managers, Developers, Marketers, and other key stakeholders may see sketching as an activity they do periodically. They may not understand how it is an essential first step in the design process.

For some people, the very act of presenting their ideas in sketch form will be new and different. It will be exciting to some, daunting to others, and terrifying to a few people.

Nonetheless, over the past 10 years, I continue to hear participants tell me how much they enjoy the collaborative aspects of the design studio method. Often for the first time, the entire product team works together performing many group-related activities to create and clearly define new products. These include:

• Listening to people present their sketches.
• Asking and answering questions to clarify their sketches.
• Grouping together similar-looking sketches.
• Naming a group category with the other participants.
• Evaluating the positive and negative aspects of the various sketches.
• Voting on the most promising sketches.
• Re-sketching new ideas based on lessons learned in the design studio.
• Mashing up two different sketches on a whiteboard.
• Making decisions together to create a common vision.

After you have finished a design studio, your product team will have a strong sense of purpose and a common vision. Each member will be able to clearly and enthusiastically communicate that vision to their respective teams and stakeholders. This will result in faster development times, smarter decisions on features, and far better user experiences.

Design Studios Maximize Your Design Freedom

Design studios supercharge your design efforts by maximizing your design freedom at the start of a project. Designers use four types of design artifacts, or documents:

• Sketches. Designers use freehand sketches to visually think about a problem or a potential solution. These drawings do not represent the finished work.
• Wireframes. A wireframe is a visual representation of how a page or screen might appear to a customer. Designers use wireframes to flesh out the details of a design.
• Prototypes. A prototype is a simulation of a product (or feature) to evaluate a design in a test environment. The prototype mimics what a customer may see in production.
• Final Deliverables. Final deliverables include page designs (or comps), cascading style sheets, front-end code, and more used by the site or app in a product release.

As shown below, these design artifacts get used at different stages of software development.

At the beginning of a project, your design freedom is very high. Developers have not started coding. Product Managers are trying to figure out customer requirements, timelines, and resource availability. Marketing messages and plans seem far away. During the early days of a project, Designers sketch many things—task flows, site maps, user stories, personas, storyboards, and design concepts. In most work settings, Designers will sketch alone. From time to time, you will see Designers collaborate by sketching together on a whiteboard.

Sketching is a natural act for Designers, but it does not have to be a solitary one. Design studios provide a method for Designers to collaboratively sketch with their product team. Before any software code is written, you can maximize your design freedom in a design studio.

Tip #1:

The single best thing you can do at the start of any project is a design studio.

Design Studios Prevent Escalation of Commitment

As decisions get made on a project, a product team will get behind specific ideas to deliver to their customers. Your design freedom decreases with each decision that gets made.

When an initial direction is determined, Designers will be pressured by Product Managers, Marketers, Developers, and other stakeholders to move from sketching to production. People no longer want to see sketches. Instead, they want to see realistic depictions in a wireframe or interactive prototype. With each passing day, a natural escalation of commitment occurs.

Tip #2:

An escalation of commitment occurs when a person spends a lot of time on a specific idea. You begin to think you cannot be wrong.

As people spend more time on a common goal, they become more committed to it. In their minds, they truly believe they cannot be wrong. They have worked hard (and long) on this vision. Marketing plans, training guides, lines of code, and quality-assurance testing has b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Processes
• Part 2: Procedures
• Part 3: Advanced Topics
• Index