My quibbles with Design Jam
Today I took part in an new kind of event, called Design Jam.
As Johanna Kollmann (one of the organizers) has already done an excellent job providing an explanation of the concept and a summary of the day on johnnyholland.org, I’ll simply advise you go ahead and read her post first if you did not attend the event.
Leisa Reichelt, one of the roaming mentors of the days, provided her own review of the day’s efforts, kindly phrased as constructive advice. I was going to simply drop a comment on her post, but since I kept rambling and did not want to hijack her post, I’m writing my own thoughts here.
I deeply agree with Leisa’s key points. Most teams assumed that “the problem to solve” was fully formed in the brief, and only worked on a solution, without really thinking what actual issue they where trying to address. The lack of clear solution product statement / elevator pitch in many presentations was just a consequence of a lack of definition of the problem.
I must add that I am worried that the rushed process such an event imposes can give newcomers a wrong idea of what a serious design process is. Today, there has been understandably very little research, and no user testing (at least I did not notice any and none was mentioned). This is not remotely close to real user-centered design.
I do believe that such events can be fantastic introductions to what UX work is, butthere is a need to make much clearer to all that this is NOT the real thing, just like Model United Nations, while a great pedagogic tool, is not an accurate representation of what takes place at the United Nations assembly.
An exemple of this is the repeated used of the word “personas” to described the fake users that were created. While they succeeded in getting the team to focus on a problem, and thus lead to a real and interesting solution, these had nothing to do with ux personas. They were simply stereotypes made up on the spot by participants. But by calling them personas anyway and repeatedly, we undermine the work done by researchers who produce real, deep, research based personas, as some will think they just made these ones up too, and that they can be discarded as simply the researcher’s opinion.
These quibbles being shared, I remain impressed by the capacity of the organizers, their passion, commitment and super human capacity to to simply “make thing happen”.
Please do let me know what you think in the comments, whether you think I have a point or that I am wildly off the mark.
I agree that events like this don’t reflect how UX design works in the real world, but I’d argue that it’s very difficult for them to do that. One day events require focus, with activities that can exercise core competencies in a short space of time.
I wear many hats (usability/requirements/systems engineer) and I’d happily run workshops on any of my areas of expertise. There’s no way I can cover everything in a day though, so I’d have to cherry-pick the skills I want to hone in on. Maybe Design Jam should have been more accurately advertised
As for personas, I’m totally with you. But again, I tend to pick my personas based on weeks worth of requirements capture and functional and use case analysis. Not easily done in a day.
Fabien, It was obvious that you were deeply uncomfortable with the proceedings on the day so I’m glad you’ve written this up so we can understand why.
It seems to me that you’ve missed the point of the whole day, which is to provide a highly concentrated environment for solving a design problem. The very fact that you have hours to go from problem to solution means that shortcuts have to be made otherwise you won’t even have ‘proper’ personas made by the end of the day. My feeling is that no one in the room thought that this was indicative of a real design process.
Having said that, as a consultant, we find ourselves faced with all kinds of project constraints. One of the challenges of being a *good* consultant, to my mind, is to find a way to get the best possible outcome within the constraints, or to resign from the project.
This is what DesignJam was about – how can we apply what we know about how to practice and still ‘team up to solve engaging User Experience (UX) challenges’ in 9hrs (the Design Jam objective). This kind of flexibility is something I need to use in commercial practice all the time. Personally I found it really interesting that despite the intensive nature of the process, the issues I listed as key challenges are the same that I find consultants and clients struggling with on projects where they do get time to explore the problem space more fully.
You say that the lack of a clear proposition in the presentations was indicative of lack of time defining the problem – having worked with all the teams I would counter that by saying that, actually, I think is more indicative of a universal issue that we face on every project – it is *really hard* to get a group of people to define a clear proposition and stay focussed on it. The same is true if you have two hours or two months to do the work.
In the end though, you have to be willing to embrace the constraints of the format and see it for what it is. If we had designers in the room who thought this was indicative of the design process or that a 2 second fiction piece is the same as a persona then we have much deeper issues than Design Jam is intended to address.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Design Jam, Fabien Marry. Fabien Marry said: New blog post about DesignJam, following the ones from @johannakoll and @leisa: http://bit.ly/aAjI6L [...]
@Dan: I’m not saying much could have been done differently given the 1 day constraint, my -minor- point is about communicating more clearly was the even is and what it is not.
@Leisa: I don’t think I was uncomfortable about the full thin,g but I understand how I may have given you this impression. Let’s have a chat in the pub after Tuesday’s UX book club.
This is like saying Scrapheap Challenge (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/scrapheap-challenge) is a complete waste of time! But I’ve learned snippets from the “hacking” they do and used it in my (Dad’s) garage!
Don’t you think people realise that in 9 hours you can’t do everything perfectly? This reads to me as you are implying that the event was detrimental to those who don’t do UX design day in day out. I knew it wasn’t going to be a masterclass, but a knowledge sharing exercise.
As for you believing people getting the wrong idea on the design process; on the contrary, despite what you may think I am not going to go away and doing all new UX work in the format of the day. At the end of the day I learned quite a lot – maybe if you know how everyone should have done it then be a mentor next time? Or organise an elitist event, and I can avoid it like the plague.
Hey Fabien, thanks for coming along – and for writing up your thoughts.
As one of the organisers, I know I was worried beforehand that people would criticise the day as not being a ‘real’ design process. In particular we didn’t figure out a practical way to include real users – something that is always such a benefit to projects.
This was a pilot event – we don’t know of anything similar that’s gone before for us to learn from. I think your point of making it clearer what the day is and what people can expect to get out of it is totally valid – however, that’s going to be much easier to do now we have a better idea ourselves!
To me, some of the main benefits of a Design Jam are:
– Collaborating with new people; lots of people don’t get to work with others on UX & design.
– Experience new techniques first-hand.
– Resources for everyone; everything produced on the day is made available online under a copyright-free license, so they can be used by others around the world. The important part is that this isn’t just the final ideas – its the techniques used along the way.
I hope we can find a way to structure Design Jams, and a way to publicise and describe them, that means we can continue to offer these benefits, but not miscommunicate what we’re about.
[...] Fabien Marry – ‘My quibbles with Design Jam‘ [...]
I agree that events like this don’t reflect how UX design works in the real world, but I’d argue that it’s very difficult for them to do that. One day events require focus, with activities that can exercise core competencies in a short space of time. I wear many hats (usability/requirements/systems engineer) and I’d happily run workshops on any of my areas of expertise. There’s no way I can cover everything in a day though, so I’d have to cherry-pick the skills I want to hone in on. Maybe Design Jam should have been more accurately advertised
As for personas, I’m totally with you. But again, I tend to pick my personas based on weeks worth of requirements capture and functional and use case analysis. Not easily done in a day.
Hey Fabien, thanks for coming along – and for writing up your thoughts. As one of the organisers, I know I was worried beforehand that people would criticise the day as not being a ‘real’ design process. In particular we didn’t figure out a practical way to include real users – something that is always such a benefit to projects. This was a pilot event – we don’t know of anything similar that’s gone before for us to learn from. I think your point of making it clearer what the day is and what people can expect to get out of it is totally valid – however, that’s going to be much easier to do now we have a better idea ourselves! To me, some of the main benefits of a Design Jam are: – Collaborating with new people; lots of people don’t get to work with others on UX & design. – Experience new techniques first-hand. – Resources for everyone; everything produced on the day is made available online under a copyright-free license, so they can be used by others around the world. The important part is that this isn’t just the final ideas – its the techniques used along the way. I hope we can find a way to structure Design Jams, and a way to publicise and describe them, that means we can continue to offer these benefits, but not miscommunicate what we’re about.