Reverse It is a simple game that can help a design team get unstuck when trying to solve a problem, or to generate new ideas. Instead of solving the actual problem, the team solves the reverse problem.

For example, if the problem is how to increase conversion, design a solution that would decrease conversion. If the problem is how to help people find information to make decisions, design a solution that would make it harder for them to find information, or harder to make decisions.

It’s interesting to see just how powerful this game is. By identifying a way to do the opposite, it is easier to identify and explore key factors causing a particular design approach to fail. It also helps the team think about what a successful solution may look like, because the opposite is now clearer.

Tips

Make this more fun and game-like by:

• Making sure that the opposite questions are more extreme than you would otherwise do
• Encouraging fast responses & a large volume of ideas

How to

Prepare

This game will be most useful when a team are already in the middle of working on a problem, and are getting stuck. In this case, no preparation is necessary.

It could, however, be played as a deliberatelty-planned game involving actual product users or the design team. If run like this, a little preparation may be necessary – for example, coordinating user participants, a list of problems to reverse, or ‘negative’ situations to design a solution for.

Run

Explain the design problem to participants. Provide them with a reversal scenario, or allow them to come up with their own.

Ask participants to brainstorm and design a solution to the reversed problem, then explain their solution.

Teams may like to immediately follow with a design for the original problem.

Analyse

Little to no analysis is needed for this game. Its purpose is to help teams look at a problem in a different way and break out of existing patterns, not to create a real design solution.

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Role playing is a great way for teams to visualise a solution they have designed.

In a role play, team members act out a situation. For example, one team member may act as the user of a website, one as the website itself, one as an external system the website has to communicate with and one as the delivery process. The team works through a whole scenario end-to-end.

It can be surprising just what comes out of a role play. Things that looked straightforward on paper sometimes aren’t as easy when played out. And the act of working in physical space and talking a process through shows up issues that may not have been easy to see on paper. Role plays are also particularly good for exploring the linkages between systems or processes.

Role plays can be done anywhere in a design process. They can be very powerful when a team is discussing an initial idea, but may not all have the same thing in mind. They can also be useful when a design is detailed, to visualise how it will really work.

How to

Prepare

The amount of preparation is entirely dependent on the individual design situation. A role play early in a process may not need any preparation. A role play on a detailed design may need detailed screenshots, props and even costumes.

Run

At the beginning of the role play, describe the background and any other detail that is needed to understand the context. Assign roles to the team and ensure everyone understands their role.

If needed, outline the scenario you’ll be role playing.

Role play the scenario. Make it as realistic as possible – with real data, real questions and real actions. Don’t skip over anything or rush through a part – you may miss something important.

Remember to act up – playing it up a bit will make it more fun and help highlight the high and low points. Don’t break out of role to discuss anything that comes up – continue to play right to the end of the scenario (stopping breaks the flow).

If needed, swap roles and/or run through another scenario.

Analyse

At the end of the game, discuss things that worked well, went badly or surprised you.

Game at a glance

• Group structure: Small teams
• Duration: Up to 1 hr
• Outcome: Visualise a design solution
• Preparation needed?: Maybe
• Who to involve: Design team

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• Group structure: Small teams
• Outcome: Idea generation, breaking a ‘stuck’ design proble
• Preparation needed?: No
• Who to involve: Design team, users

Description

Idea Cards help design teams to brainstorm solutions to design problems. They are good for helping teams think about a problem in a different way to previously.

Teams are provided with a deck of cards that contain trigger words. They draw between 3 & 5 cards and must use the words on those cards as the focus of their idea.

There is no set format for the words on the cards. They will usually contain a combination of emotions, nouns and unusual words, and may also include domain-specific words. If using different sets of words they can be all included in one card deck or kept separately (if separate, teams draw from each deck).

Tips

Here’s a starter list of words:

• Audience
• Integrity
• Travel
• Difficult
• Risk
• Images
• Personality
• Impersonal
• Visibility
• Simplicity
• Identity
• Rigid
• Constraints
• Colour
• Pain
• Complex
• Repetition
• Listen
• Error
• Compelling
• Attitude
• Contrast
• Quiet
• Familiar

How to

Prepare

Hand write or print each trigger word onto an index card.

Run

Explain the design problem to participants. Provide them with the index cards and ask them to draw the number of cards you have selected.

Explain to participants that they are to come up with a creative solution to the problem, using the words on the cards as focus. Explain that they will have to show how the words contributed to their solution.

There are no hard and fast rules about what to do with the cards. You may like to:

• Offer the opportunity to swap one card for a new one
• Allow them to exclude one or more cards from their solution.
• Make up one word that is given to a different team.

Some teams get very caught up in what the ‘right’ solution is for their card, or about how they are meant to use the cards. If this happens, remind them that the idea is to come up with ideas using the words as a trigger, not to solve the problem in detail.

If teams are getting bogged down in detail or stuck for ideas, ask them to come up with three very high level ideas instead of one detailed idea. The ‘pressure’ of having to come up with alternate ideas will help them generate ideas instead of getting stuck.

Analyse

Little to no analysis is needed for this game. Its purpose is to help teams look at a problem in a different way and break out of existing patterns, not to create a real design solution.

The post Design Games — <em>Idea Cards</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post or refer to our other design games.

Description of Design the Box

Participants design the box for a new product (even one that will never be sold in a box). In doing so, they identify key features and selling points for the product.

To use this game, ask participants to design the box for a product. On the front of the box, they should include:

• The name of the product
• A tagline describing the product

On the back of the box, they should include:

• Key features (3-5 features only)
• Constraints or requirements (again, just a short list)

The game should be played with a physical box, post-it notes and thick markers (thick so people don’t go into a lot of detail).

Prepare

You’ll need:

• A product, service or system to be the focus of the activity
• Something to be the ‘box’, such as old cereal boxes covered in white paper.
• Fat markers

You may also prepare an instruction sheet and an example of the activity.

Run

Start by explaining what the aims of the activity are – to come up with ideas and features for a product and succinctly describe them. Explain the product or service idea. You may want to provide a lot of background, so participants focus on their ideas in some detail, or you may want to provide only very sketchy background so participants focus on generating high level ideas.

Get people into teams (teams of 3-5 work well). Allow enough time for the teams to discuss the idea, focus on what they would like to present, and prepare their box.

This may take anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on the complexity of the topic.When everyone has prepared their box, ask each team to explain what they have created and some of their rationale.

Analyse

There is little work needed to analyse the outcomes from this game. As the key idea of this game is to identify key features, pay attention to these and the underlying rationale for including them.

The post Design Games — <em>Design the Box</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post or refer to our other design games.

Description of Design Slam

In a design slam a team works together to create a solution to a design problem. A design slam is usually conducted under some time pressure, and there may be a prize for the ‘winner’.

Design slams are good for identifying potential design solutions, but are also good for a team to learn about how to work together.

Tips

The design problem may be a real one, a completely artificial situation or a situation close to a real-life one.

Participants should be encouraged to generate a couple of ideas and choose one to submit as their solution. The idea should be fairly high-level, not a screen-by-screen interface.

Think about how you would like the team to present their work. For the IA Slam (an annual event at the IA Summit), participants must create ‘one eye-popping page’ that represents their idea.

If you are using this game to help a team learn how to work together, you may wish to assign roles, identify roles that the team needs to assign, or just allow the team to figure each other out.

Prepare

You may like to prepare just a brief summary of the problem, or a full back story with props & artefacts.

Provide paper, markers, sticky notes and other stationery.

Run

Explain the design problem plus any constraints or issues to participants. Explain that they are to come up with a creative solution to the problem

Explain any time constraints and exactly what they are to produce as an outcome. Encourage them to initially generate a number of ideas before selecting one to document and explain.

Analyse

Little to no analysis is needed for this game. Its purpose is to help teams look at a problem in a different way and break out of existing patterns not to create a real design solution.

Notes

The Information Architecture Summit has a design slam every year (appropriately called the IA Slam). The photo above is from the 2007 IA Slam (photo credit: lopolis). It is always slightly crazy and a lot of fun.

The post Design Games — <em>Design Slam</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post or refer to our other design games.

Description of 4Cs

4Cs is a game that helps you to think through different aspects of a problem. By looking at a problem from 4 different angles you can break it down and see it in a new way.

The 4 Cs are:

• Components: What are the parts of the problem or object
• Characteristics: What are characteristics of the outcome – what does it look like.
• Challenges: What are the key issues that affect the problem
• Characters: Who is involved.

Of course, any letter can be used as long as you can find 4 different things to look at.

Prepare

For this game, you need a problem to discuss and a set of 4 ways to look at it – start with the 4Cs above, but if they don’t fit you can use another 4 words (the alliteration is important only to make it memorable and perhaps slighly silly fun).

Run

Explain the design problem to participants. Provide them with the 4Cs and ask them to break down the problem by describing it according to these 4 aspects.

If this is part of a larger design activity, ask them to continue with the design problem, using their 4Cs discussion as input.

Analyse

Little to no analysis is needed for this game. Its purpose is to help teams look at a problem in a different way and break out of existing patterns, not to create a real design solution.

The post Design Games — <em>4Cs</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post. Or have a look at our other design games, Design the Homepage, Scavenger Hunt, Divide the Dollar and Card Sorting.

Description of Freelisting

In Freelisting, for a particular topic, participants have to name as many of ‘x’ as they can. This game is very good for understanding what users know, how they use terminology and to generate lists.

Freelisting is a fairly common brainstorming method. You can make it more game-like by introducing competition between teams, a tight deadline and prizes for the most items.

You can ask participants to work on this individually, or make it a whole-group activity:

• When people are working by themselves, each will make a shortish list, but the combined lists will provide a large number of items overall.
• When working as a group, there is a lot of group energy & generation of names. Watch that the activity doesn’t start to go down one path (suggested by a particular term) and ignore other possibilities.

Prepare

You’ll need:

• A topic to be the focus of the freelist.

Run

Ask participants to name as many ‘topic’ as they can. Tell them what the time limit is and let them go.

If you are running it as a whole group activity, write the results up (on a whiteboard or similar) as you go. You may want to have a helper to write – ideas usually flow faster than your pen!

As this can be a very high-energy activity, you might like to audio-record it so you can come back later and make sure you haven’t missed anything.

If you are running it as an individual activity, you may choose to go around the group and ask them to read out one item from their list. Continue until there are no new terms to read out.

Analyse

How much analysis you do depends on what you need to get out of the activity:

• The simplest analysis is to create a combined list of terms
• If run as an individual activity, tally up how many times a particular term is used
• Analyse sequential terms – freelisting is associative, and terms listed one after each other will usually have some relationship to each other.

Spend some time thinking about why particular items are included. It may be that they are very common in the world or  represent recent experiences.

The post Design Games — <em>Freelisting</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post.

Description of Divide the Dollar

In Divide the Dollar, participants are provided with a list of features (they may have come up with them in a previous game) and $100 to ‘spend’.

They distribute the money across the features according to how important those features are and explain why they have divided their money in this way.

When discussing allocation of dollars, participants sometimes discuss how much cost and effort a feature will take. You can specifically discourage them from doing this, and really focus on priorities and what the features will achieve. Or you can give them another $100 and ask them to divide this according to how much it will cost (remind them that costs should include short term development and long term maintenance).

You can ask participants to choose a small number of features from a long list and prioritise those, or ask them to prioritise the entire list.

Prepare

You’ll need:

• A feature list (you may have a list of features from internal ideas, or participants may have come up with one in a previous game).
• Paper money (optional—you can just tell people that there are 100 points to split)
• A results grid (you can prepare one, or show an example and get them to draw their own)

Run

Arrange participants into their groups and explain the activity. Clearly explain where the feature list is from, and whether they should prioritise the whole list or a subset.

If you are providing a list of features, explain each so participants have a proper understanding of what they are.

If you want a properly-considered outcome, allow plenty of time. Participants need time to to discuss the feature list and the priorities, then agree on the allocation of dollars. This can take a fair amount of time.

When everyone has finished, ask them to explain their priorities and decisions.

Analyse

As with most of the design games, the analysis step is mostly about spotting consistent behaviours and understanding the reasoning behind it.

The post Design Games — <em>Divide the Dollar</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post.

Description of Card Sorting

In a card sort, participants create groups from content or objects and label the groups they generate. We can use that to understand how they think about categories and ideas for labelling.

Card sorting is a common user research technique. You can make a card sort more fun (more game-like) by introducing a tight timeline, prizes for the first to finish or prizes for the most innovative labelling.

Prepare

Card sorting can take a fair amount of preparation, so ensure you leave plenty of time.

You will need:

• A set of index cards. On each index card, list one item of content or one object for the card sort.
• Sticky notes
• Markers

The most time consuming and trickiest aspect of preparing a card sort is to select content to include on the cards. The content may be:

• potential functions (if you are using the game for application menu design)
• pages or sections of content (for websites and intranets)
• products or similar objects

Run

Card sorting is best run in small groups as you can learn a lot from listening to how the group discusses the cards. You can run it as an individual activity if it is more important to collect a lot of data than to understand the rationale.

To run the card sort:

• Introduce the game by explaining what sort of information is on the cards
• Explain what the context or purpose is (e.g. it is for a website, an application or just to understand about grouping)
• Ask participants to sort the cards in a way that makes sense to them (make sure they know there is no ‘right’ answer)
• When it looks like participants have done some initial grouping, provide them with sticky notes and ask them to label each group with a short description.

When participants have finished, ask them to have a look at each other’s groups, and ask them to explain their rationale or aspects they found easy and difficult.

Record the results! (come back to this)

Analyse

The amount of analysis you do is dependent on what you need to get out of the game. Different levels of analysis include:

• Understanding participants’ rationale for their sort.
• ‘Eyeballing’ the data to spot consistent and different groupings and labelling
• Using my card sort analysis spreadsheet to explore patterns and get some basic statistics showing what cards were placed in what catgegories.
• Statistical analysis using one or more forms of cluster analysis or multi-dimensional scaling

The post Design Games — <em>Card Sorting</em> appeared first on UX Mastery.

Is this your first time visiting our design games series? A design game is basically a fun activity played by a small team and used to provide input to a design problem. They may involve users of a product, a project team, stakeholders, or even management.

For a more detailed description of what a design game is, check out our first design game post.

Description of “Design the Home Page”

Participants design the home page for a website, intranet or application. By doing so, they identify key features and content ideas.

The idea isn’t to do the visual design or even have it look like a home page. The idea is for people to identify the main things they would like on a home page, and then make a ‘sketch’ representing the ideas.

When participants are finished, ask them to explain what they have included and why.

You can use the home pages to identify key content chunks and priority information – it’s surprising how easy it is to spot consistent issues and ideas.

Prepare

You’ll need:

• A website, intranet or application to be the focus of the activity;
• Coloured paper; and
• Markers.

Run

Start by explaining what the aims of the activity are – to come up with ideas and features for a website, intranet or application and sketch (or list) them.

Explain the idea of the system. You may want to provide a lot of background, so participants focus on their ideas in some detail. Or you may want to provide only very sketchy background so participants focus on generating high level ideas.

This game can be done by individuals or teams (teams of 3-5 work well), so explain how you will run it and let people get into teams.

Allow enough time for participants to discuss the idea, focus on what they would like to present, and prepare their home page. This may take anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour, depending on the complexity of the topic.

When everyone has prepared their home page, ask each to explain what they have created and some of their rationale.

Analyse

To analyse the game, pay particular attention to the features that people have identified. There will usually be a consistent set of features that most participants come up with. These are likely to be key things for you to pay attention to and provide easy access to.

Also look at the relative priority given to the features. For example, if participants have drawn ‘Contact us’ in a big box on the page, you can interpret this as being important or currently difficult.

Example instructions

Outcome

The outcome of this activity is to design the ideal home page for you, based on what you need most from this website.You don’t have to create a beautiful graphic design, or even anything that looks like a finished home page. But you do have to identify the key elements you think should be on the home page, and their relative importance.

What to do

In your team:

• Identify all the things you would like to see on the home page;
• Discuss which are most important and why; and
• Sketch (individually or as a group) a home page that represents those ideas – this can be pictorial, or done in words.

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