Quick, can you create a gift for someone you’ve never met out of one post-it note?
In less than a minute?
That was the kickoff to our third annual World Usability Day Detroit event when local Detroit designers Gaby Dorantes and Zeke Harris led us through a fun, interactive design thinking session.
More than two dozen Detroit User Experience members joined us at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in downtown Detroit last Thursday evening to learn about brainstorming and coming up with creative solutions to design challenges.
Participants included user experience designers, programmers, social media professionals, photographers, developers, content strategists, project managers, as well as members interested in learning how to brainstorm useful and creative ideas.
How would you redesign the experience of a mom with children whose flight at Detroit Metropolitan Airport is now delayed several hours?
What ideas do you have to improve the experience for someone who arrives at the local Secretary of State office only to find 30 people waiting in line?
Those were two of the challenges Dorantes and Harris gave the teams of four to five people.
We learned how to:
- Generate as many ideas as possible in a short amount of time
- Be open to any idea, no debate or judging of ideas
- Consider unexpected surprises and constraints in developing ideas
as well as the How Might We approach to identify needs and build on each other’s ideas.
By the end of the session, the walls were covered with dozens of colorful yellow, bright pink, and orange post-it notes, the results of the How Might We questions that kept us scrambling to quickly jot down our ideas.
To wrap up the session, Dorantes and Harris asked each participant to share their thoughts about the session in the form of I liked
and I wish
statements.
Here’s a few replies:
- I liked how we had to quickly come up with ideas
- I wish we had more time to explore the How Might We approach
- I wish I could have used this method last week at work!
- I wish Gaby and Zeke can come back and do another session
Shoutout to Blue Cross Blue Shield for hosting the venue and food for World Usability Day Detroit 2015.
It was a wonderful event, our first interactive hands-on session for our Detroit User Experience group. From our member responses, I know it won’t be our last!
Have you ever taken a design thinking session? Or used the process at your work to spark creative ideas? I’d love to hear about your experience.
