(2015-03-27) Patton Design Studio Recipe

Jeff Patton on Design Studio Recipe

In a design studio, everyone sketches and shares ideas. By everyone I really mean everyone: UI designers, developers, testers, product managers, business stakeholders, end users, customer service people, and anyone else interested

This article contains the Design Studio Recipe from my book User Story Mapping.

At one of the first IXDA conferences, maybe the first (I forget), I heard Bill Buxton speak. He’s the author of Sketching the User Experience, and he’s great. I like listening to him speak. But, he delivered a dig to Agile Software Development saying that “Agile’s problem is that they iterate, but they don’t ideate.”

at that same conference, I saw Jeff White and Jim Unger deliver a talk on a practice they called Design Studio, a fast way to do collaborative iteration in an Agile environment

Meanwhile, on the other coast of the United States, Brandon Schauer and Leah Buley at Adaptive Path were describing a collaborative ideation approach they called Sketchboarding.

To ideate means to come up with a variety of different possible solutions. What that means is you might start with a perfectly good first idea, then set it aside and come up with another. But don’t stop there. Come up with ten more, twenty more

Here’s the Design Studio Recipe

• Invite a group of people
• Describe the problem you’re solving
• Optionally share examples and inspiration.
• Everyone sketch!
• In small groups, share ideas
• Optionally repeat.
• Ask each group to consolidate their best ideas
• Ask each group to share their best, consolidated ideas
• Thank everyone, and gather up the sketches and ideas. You, your UX designer, or your core discovery team will need to leverage them to create a final best consolidated UI sketch