Team building through design exercises

Design exercises are a great way for teams to get inspired, foster collaboration, and acquire new skills.

UX design in large, established, B2B enterprises often carries with it more constraints than what you see in Fast Company Design articles or InVision’s Design Disruptors documentary. It’s common to get insight into the design processes at companies like AirBnB, Facebook, and Lyft, but far less common to see what the General Electrics of the world are up to.

As a result, I think it’s common for enterprise designers to feel like they’re not keeping pace with industry change. Of course, a lot of this depends on company design culture, but these are broad themes I’ve picked up on from my own experience and talking to peers in different organizations. One way our design team is addressing this is through design exercises.

The last Friday of each month, we carve out half of a work day for skill development. We alternate between learning and building sessions. Learning sessions could consist of practicing design methods we don’t normally get a chance to use. And building sessions could include creating a new app prototype or some other tangible product. We also take turns facilitating the sessions to give everyone an opportunity to practice running the exercises.

I wish I’d started documenting these sooner since we’ve being doing it over a year now. Some exercises we’ve already done include: creating product prototypes with Arduinos, researching conversational interfaces and tinkering with Amazon’s Alexa, conducting observational research at an art museum, designing and pitching products based off our museum research, organizing unique Gamestorming sessions, and practicing several IDEO design kit methods.

For our latest session, we chose an exercise I’ve seen referred to as “Design X for Y.” Here’s the premise: everyone writes down a bunch of specific user groups (giraffes, lumberjacks, etc.) and a bunch of specific products (toaster, lawn mower, etc), then the groups draw out of a hat for the products and user groups they have to design for.

This exercise is purposefully absurdist to get people to really research and empathize with their user group. At the same time, it’s a great way to boost camaraderie in the team since it can also be fun coming up with and sharing these wacky product ideas.

My team drew a chair as our product and Jabba the Hutt (seriously) as our user group. So we went to work pouring through Wookieepedia to learn as much about Jabba and the Hutt species as we could in the short amount of time given. We chunked the info we found into key categories that we could reference when we moved on to sketching out the product.

Never knew Hutts could see in the ultraviolet spectrum!

Another team drew a two-toed sloth as their user and a typewriter for their product. This combination was particularly good at forcing extra creative solutions. If you don’t know much about sloths, they hang from trees, can’t see very well, and don’t exactly have the highest dexterity in the animal kingdom. So creating a typewriter for one takes some bonkers assumptions and solutions.

What a typewriter made for a two-toed sloth might look like.

Following each exercise, we conduct retrospectives to discuss what worked and what didn’t. This review part is an important part of these exercises. Without them, prime opportunities to drive home key insights and identify areas for improvement would get missed. In the case of our latest exercise, we realized that this exercise works best if the products and user groups are extremely specific and that you might have to do a bit of culling among the submissions before having teams draw for their products and users.

By participating in and helping lead these design exercises over the past year and a half, I’ve witnessed a lot of real benefits. I strongly encourage design teams of all shapes and sizes to incorporate similar exercises in their practice. And keep in mind, these activities don’t have to be walled off to just designers. All kinds of exercises can be appropriately tailored to any business function. Informal surveys of people who have participated in our exercises say that they’ve boosted morale while teaching tangible skills. There’s now passionate support from anyone who has done them.

Don’t be afraid to put work on pause for an afternoon every once in awhile. You might find that doing so could be more productive.