Welcome to Design Thinking: UX designers and Bay Area teens dive into the ins and outs of UX design
By: Laine Riley
Tags: Bay Area, Design, UX Design, Salesforce, Design Thinking

Moving into Define

Next, we moved into the fastest-paced activity of the day — uncovering the users and their needs.

We started with team brainstorming: What are some aspects of the main problem? For example, a team working on a “Rubbish” app might call out problems such as sorting recyclable and compostable material from landfill, finding the closest waste receptacle, or increasing awareness around recyclable materials. Next, who do these subproblems affect? The students themselves? Residents of the Bay Area? Our sanitation companies? Who else?

We then moved into storyboarding, introduced with a quote from Smashing Magazine:

A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user’s experience with a product. It can help UX designers understand the flow of people’s interaction with a product… giving the designers a clear sense of what’s really important for users.

With this guidance, each student was asked to create an individual storyboard, using printed storyboard templates and leveraging ideas pulled from the previous brainstorming section.

At this point, we encouraged the students to pursue their own ideas, then come back together to present to the group and decide together on a single user profile and subproblem. And with that, each team has defined its use case.

The next step is to define the app’s features, as defined by Aha! Labs:

Characteristics of your product that describe its appearance, components, and capabilities…. Features should be added based on quantifiable ways that will add value for the product’s end users.

We again diverged, with each student taking a few minutes to write out key features that apply to their team’s use cases, writing down one feature per sticky note, and handing the notes to the table facilitator, who gathered the flurry of notes and sorted them into groups by feature type.

As the facilitator read out the groups, students voted for their favorites using three dot stickers. When the dust settled, the three groupings with the most votes became the top features for the group’s app.

Primed for Design

The students again diverged, each sketching out screens representing the team’s three chosen features. After 10 minutes (it’s a fast paced workshop!), the students shared their screens with one another, walking through their flows. At this point, we also highlighted characteristics of good feedback (I Like, I Wish, I Wonder). Students again used the dot-voting system to rank their top screens, then merged their ideas into one master sketch on the large sketch paper, representing the teams’ best ideas (converge!).

Refine Time

As we moved into the refinement stage, we introduced the concept of user research and testing: What is usability testing and why we do it? How should we plan it, and how can we get the most out of it? This led into the next activity, in which each group decided on three questions for its usability study. This ensured that we were creating actionable tasks, and not leading questions or clues. Questions groups came up with included “What do you think this app does?” and “What actions are available to you on the home screen?”

At this point, one student from each group took on the role of “participant,” moving to a different table, with the goal of giving that team a fresh perspective on its work.

After 10 minutes for the usability study, the original teams reformed and talked through their findings. This was their chance to tweak their final designs in response to feedback.

Delivering the Goods

At the conclusion of the workshop, each team presented its app idea to the group, using this presentation checklist:

The name of the app

The problem being solving

Which user is targeted

The solution or big idea

In this particular Salesforce Summer session, we didn’t have time for every team to present. Instead, we took a fun team photo of each group showing off its amazing app designs.