Design Jams are one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. Learn more about Design Jams.For developers out there, you might see it as a 'code retreat' or a 'hack day', not for coding but for learning and testing out new User Experience (UX) techniques and methods.
The original design jams started in London by Johanna Kollmann, Joe Lanman, Franco Papeschi and Desigan Chinniah, but other design jams start popping up in other countries/cities with the help of these people.
This saturday (02/07/2011) the third London design jam was organised. The event was sponsored by:
The challenge for the design jam is only announced at the beginning of the day, but we knew it would have something to do with social music as we could deduce from the mentors:
- Hannah Donovan who worked 5 years for last.fm
- Matthew Ogle who worked 6 years for last.fm
- Jason Mesut is Head of User Experience at RMA Consulting, where he leads a team of 36 Experience Design specialists developing cutting-edge enterprise applications
Design a service that allows people to play, listen and contribute to the music in public spaces and situations.There were about 50 people attending and 10 teams had to be formed. Everyone received an empty index card on which you would write your known, what you're good at and what you were planning to get out of the event. Then just put up your index card at a team number and a team is born!
photo by Joe Lanman
I was part of team 5 that we renamed later on the day to 'on the move'.
From left to right: me, Mark Skinner, Millie Chan and Sabrina Rahimzadeh. Picture taken at the end of the day.
The schedule for the day was something like this:
9.30 - 10.00: introduction
10.00-12.00: research and explore phase
12.00-12.30: short presentation
12.30-13.30: lunch
13.30-16.00: design phase
16.00-17.30: final presentations
During the day we tried to document our process on a tumblr page (as requested), but we spent more time on talking about the idea and designing than on documenting.
photo by Joe Lanman
When we sat together with the team at the start of the day, it was a little awkward at first because you don't know what you can expect from the other team members, but after a quick 'tour de table' we decided to brainstorm on the challenge each on our own for a couple of minutes.
After going through all our ideas we managed to sort them in a few categories:
- places with like-minded people: concert, gig, pub with themed night...
- places with people you know: houseparty, family events, office ...
- places with strangers: the gym, hospital, the park, shopping centre, ...
- other interesting places: the toilet, underground parking lots, ...
- social interactions: silent disco, ...
- transport: commute, train, waiting for plane/train, ...
Choosing on what we were going to focus was the next step and went very fast.
We picked the waiting for a plane scenario. It had the following interesting bits:
- there is usually a long period of time in waiting to board a plane, mostly boring time
- there is a clash of cultures
- people who travel to other countries are mostly open to discovering something new
- social aspect of people who travel to the same destination (at that time, and in the past)
We managed to simplify our idea into:
Travellers who want to find out about music specific to the place where they are travelling to in the time they are waiting for their plane.The questions that we needed an answer for:
- Are you with ‘like-minded’ people or in a culture-clash situation? With friends or strangers? Culture clash + strangers
- Is the situation a private event, eg party at a friends’ house, or in a public space? Public space
- Is everyone listening publicly (e.g. from a stereo), or each person individually? Individually
- Is everyone listening to the same music, or can individuals choose separately? Separately
- Are lots of people co-creating the playlist, or is there only one person having the authority? Co-creating
We ruled out the business people as people we should target with our service and then created a few personas who would be a candidate for using our service.
We present you: Joe, Julia and Monica. Millie made really nice pictures for our personas. Joe looks a little bit androgynous, but hey, he plays in an arty-farty music band, what did you expect?
And with more than 15 minutes left to the short presentation we had a very solid idea that we could 'elevator pitch'.
Here's Mark just before presenting our idea to the rest of the teams and mentors.
And while presenting:
photo by Monika Szczygieł
We had a fast lunch with the team and got back by 13.30. And then we kinda got lost in our idea. We had 2 hours and 30 minutes before presenting our final presentation and spent more than 1 hour and a half on discussing on more ideas and features without actually creating content. Luckily Sabrina got us back on track with identifying 3 main features of our service.
We started drawing out a user journey for Joe.
Next to the paper with the user journey is a paper with additional ideas of a kiosk in the airport that would use the service. But still we were discussing on a scope for the service that was too large. Then we got a visit from mentor Hannah Donovan who put us back on track and advised us to focus on 1 story and to work that out.
With 30 to 45 minutes left to the final presentations, we started reworking the user journey and drawing sketches of wire-frames.
With 15 minutes left I started updating our tumblr page while Millie started drawing on our awesome final wire-frames together with Sabrina while Mark was preparing for the presentation.
And suddenly it was 16.00 ... That last hour was really hush hush and flew by in a flash.
Mark did a very condensed and focused presentation showing the minimal viable product for our idea.
I've seen some very cool concepts, ideas, designs and wire-frames from the other teams during the presentations. You can find all the tumblr pages from all the teams on the wiki page for Design Jam 3 London.
After cleaning up the venue we hit the pub and stranded later in the evening at the banana tree for some delicious Asian food where among others I had an interesting conversation with Sedef Gavaz about the difference between User eXperience and Service Design. An excellent end to an inspiring day!
This whole day kind of reminded me of the group assignments I had in my architecture studies where we had to work as a team thinking about a concept for a building, start sketching it out and design it. With that difference that then we had 6 weeks to finish a design, today we had a couple of hours.
Also cheers up to the organizers who did an awesome job. Guiding more than 50 creative individuals throughout the day while keeping a tight schedule isn't the easiest task, but they did great.
Conclusion:
I thought it was a very inspiring and joyful experience. I've met a lot of engaged people and learned a lot about UX techniques. Maybe I might bring a design jam back to Belgium ...
And last but not least: big thanks to Joe and Rachel for letting me sleep at their place for 2 nights and have really nice English breakfast and pizza with fresh green (or was it leaves?)!
Cool! Yes, bring it to Belgium!
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