ux problem solving exercises

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UX Challenges

Published April 7, 2021

My partner Taylor and I just launched some new UX Challenges.

👉 https://uxtools.co/challenges/

We made these so that designers can learn and practice crucial UX skills. There are too many clichéd UI exercises out there. These challenges are different:

👩🏻‍💻 Based in the real world. This isn’t another fake redesign or “create an ATM for a centaur.” Every exercise looks like a project you’d get in real life.

🛠 Practice important skills. UX is more than just UI. Each challenge helps you understand and train a specific UX skill like card sorting or usability testing.

💪 Stop reading: try UX. Nothing improves design skills faster than doing design work. Practice solving problems and see what real UX work is like.

💼 Get tangible takeaways. Have fun with mini projects, then walk away with a deliverable to put in your portfolio or use as a talking point in interviews.

Each challenge has a real-world scenario, a task aimed at helping you practice a specific skill, hand-picked references if you need help, and recommended tools.

Follow along on 🐦 Twitter : we’ll be re-sharing and posting feedback for people who share their completed challenges there.

Let us know what you think!

Will you take on one of the challenges?

Jordan Bowman

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22 Creative Design Thinking Exercises to Bring Your Team Closer Together

Design thinking exercises are crucial in fostering creative problem-solving, collaboration, and innovation. These exercises engage participants in a structured and iterative problem-solving approach, enabling them to explore, understand, and address complex challenges effectively.

Key takeaways:

• Design thinking exercises are structured activities or methods used to encourage and facilitate collaboration.
• These exercises foster creativity providing structured but open-ended frameworks for problem-solving.
• The list of design thinking exercises is huge; in this article, we elaborate on 22 of them.

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What is the Purpose of Design Thinking Exercises?

The primary purpose of design thinking exercises is to cultivate empathy and a deep understanding of users’ needs and perspectives. By encouraging participants to step into users’ shoes through empathy mapping and user interviews, design thinking helps uncover valuable insights that inform the design process.

These design thinking workshops create a user-centered environment that encourages collaboration and creativity. These activities empower design teams to challenge assumptions, explore diverse perspectives, and approach problems from multiple angles.

Design Thinking Exercises for Empathy and User Research

These design thinking activities enable teams to gain empathy and a user-centric perspective during the research phase, informing the design process and ensuring solutions align with user needs.

• Empathy mapping : Create visual representations of user perspectives by capturing their thoughts, feelings, actions, and aspirations. This exercise helps teams develop a deeper understanding of users’ experiences.
• Persona development : Create fictional user personas representing different user segments based on research and insights. Personas humanize user data, making it easier for teams to empathize and design for specific user groups.
• Customer journey mapping : Visualize users’ end-to-end experience as they interact with a product or service. This exercise helps identify pain points, opportunities, and moments of delight throughout the user journey.

Ideation and Brainstorming Exercises

Ideation and brainstorming exercises are essential to the design thinking process , aiming to generate a range of ideas and possible solutions. Designers use these exercises to foster creativity, drive collaboration , and explore new possibilities.

SCAMPER is an acronym that stands for S ubstitute, C ombine, A dapt, M odify, P ut to another use, E liminate, and R everse. This technique prompts designers to creatively explore different dimensions of a concept or problem, encouraging alternative perspectives and generating fresh ideas.

Brainstorming sessions

Brainstorming is a group activity that encourages free thinking and the rapid generation of ideas. Participants share their thoughts, build on each other’s suggestions, and explore various possibilities without judgment or criticism.

Crazy 8s is a fast-paced exercise that challenges participants to sketch eight ideas in eight minutes. This time-constrained activity encourages rapid ideation and pushes participants to think outside the box, resulting in diverse concepts.

Mind mapping and concept mapping

Mind mapping and concept mapping are visual techniques that help organize thoughts and ideas. By creating diagrams or visual frameworks, designers can explore connections, relationships, and associations between different concepts, stimulating further ideation.

Design studio workshops

Design studio workshops unite cross-functional team members to generate ideas and potential solutions collaboratively. Participants share their perspectives, expertise, and insights through structured exercises and facilitated discussions, resulting in more comprehensive and well-rounded concepts.

Worst possible idea

This exercise challenges participants to devise the worst possible ideas or solutions deliberately. By exploring extreme and unconventional concepts, designers can break free from conventional thinking and uncover unexpected insights or alternative paths.

The 5 Ws and H ( W ho, W hat, W hen, W here, W hy, and H ow) is a questioning technique that prompts participants to analyze and explore different aspects of a design challenge. By systematically considering these elements, designers can uncover new perspectives, identify potential gaps, and generate innovative solutions.

Prototyping and Testing Exercises

These prototyping and testing exercises offer valuable opportunities for designers to gather feedback, iterate on ideas, and validate design concepts.

Paper prototyping

Paper prototyping is a low-fidelity technique where designers create rough sketches or wireframe mockups on paper. This exercise lets designers quickly iterate and gather feedback on a design concept’s overall layout, content, and flow.

Designers can use paper prototypes to simulate user interactions and test usability, compiling valuable insights before investing time and resources into digital prototypes.

Role-playing and simulation

Role-playing and simulation exercises involve participants acting out specific scenarios or user personas to understand user needs and behaviors better. By immersing themselves in the end user’s perspective, designers can empathize with their experiences, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Wizard of Oz testing

Wizard of Oz testing is a technique where designers simulate the functionality of an interactive system while manually controlling it behind the scenes. This methodology allows designers to test user interactions and gather feedback without investing time and resources in developing a fully functional prototype.

By creating the illusion of an automated system, designers can observe user behavior, validate assumptions, and refine the design based on real-time feedback.

Collaborative Exercises for Teamwork and Co-creation

Collaborative prototyping

Collaborative prototyping involves creating prototypes to test and validate design concepts within a day. Team members work in parallel on a single digital whiteboard and then collaborate using a design tool to build a prototype. By the end of the day, the team has a basic prototype to start the iterative process of prototyping and testing .

Co-design sessions

Co-design sessions bring together multidisciplinary team members and stakeholders to actively participate in the design process. These collaborative exercises foster teamwork and co-creation by leveraging the diverse perspectives and expertise of the participants. 

By involving various stakeholders in the design process, co-design sessions facilitate shared understanding, generate innovative ideas, and ensure that the final design reflects the collective input and insights of the team.

Collaborative sketching

Collaborative sketching involves team members collectively sketching ideas and concepts on a shared surface or whiteboard. This exercise encourages open collaboration and rapid idea generation.

By visually expressing their thoughts, team members can communicate ideas more effectively, stimulate creativity, and spark discussions. Collaborative sketching promotes a sense of ownership while fostering teamwork.

Storyboarding and visual storytelling

Storyboarding and visual storytelling exercises help teams convey design ideas and concepts in a narrative format. This technique involves creating illustrations or images that depict user interactions, scenarios, or journeys.

Storyboarding allows teams to visualize the user experience and identify gaps or opportunities in the design. Teams can communicate complex ideas, align design directions, and create engaging user experiences.

Design charrettes

Design charrettes are intensive collaborative workshops where team members solve design challenges within a set timeframe. These super-efficient sessions encourage active participation, foster creativity, and promote collective problem-solving.

Design charrettes often involve brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and iterative design exercises. By engaging in focused and time-constrained collaborative activities, teams can generate ideas, explore design alternatives, and make significant progress in a short period.

Design Thinking Exercises for Reflection and Learning

Rose, Thorn, Bud

The Rose, Thorn, Bud exercise is a reflection activity that encourages participants to share positive aspects (roses), areas for improvement (thorns), and potential opportunities (buds) in a given project or experience.

Rose, Bud, Thorn helps teams identify strengths, address challenges, and explore new possibilities with a structured framework for reflection. The exercise enables team members to learn from past experiences and apply those insights to future iterations or projects.

Post-it voting

Post-it voting is a simple and effective technique to gather insights and prioritize ideas within a group. Participants write their ideas or suggestions on individual sticky notes and then vote on the most valuable or relevant ones. 

This exercise promotes active participation and empowers team members to have a voice in decision-making. Post-it voting helps teams identify popular ideas, build consensus, and focus efforts on the most impactful concepts.

The Four Ls exercise ( L iked, L earned, L acked, and L onged for) provides a structured framework for reflection and feedback gathering. Participants share what they liked, learned, lacked, and longed for in a project or experience. 

The Four Ls encourages constructive feedback, helps identify areas of improvement, and uncovers growth opportunities. The exercise promotes open dialogue and creates a safe space for team members to reflect on their collective experiences and identify ways to enhance future outcomes .

Retrospective exercises

Retrospective exercises are reflective activities conducted at the end of a project or iteration to evaluate the team’s performance and identify areas for improvement. 

These exercises include team discussions, storytelling, timeline mapping, or even gamified approaches like “sailboat retrospective” or “stop, start, continue.” 

Retrospectives foster a culture of continuous improvement by providing a dedicated space for teams to reflect on their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. These exercises enable teams to optimize processes, enhance collaboration, and evolve their practices.

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UX Challenges

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15 solutions to common UX problems

Maybe you’ve been in this situation: Mariya is a fresh graduate who joins an electronics company as a UX researcher and designer, and she’s eager to receive her first assignment and demonstrate what she can bring to the table. She is invited to an early project kick-off meeting. These early conversations involve key stakeholders seeking to choreograph the path forward for product exploration and development, including assigning roles and responsibilities.

Twenty minutes into the meeting, another technical manager joins the call, and the next thing you know, the encounter derails into a debate about the superiority of technological solutions, what the product would look like, and its use cases. Mariya keeps quiet, listening to the big thinkers argue about things way above her pay grade.

This article teaches you how to troubleshoot UX design problems you may encounter during your practice. Think of it as a Hitchhiker’s Guide to UX Design. It aims to share a comprehensive, systemic assessment of critical problems and stumbling blocks hindering the delivery of useful, user-centered products.

With augmented awareness of these issues, I believe UX designers can better spot subtle red flags and symptoms of dysfunction and proactively counteract them. As you know, changing course and fixing issues further downstream may prove prohibitively expensive.

Symptoms of dysfunction to look for

Project management issues impacting ux design, ux team problems, solutions to common ux problems: your way forward.

As an astute UX practitioner and observer, here are two good questions you may ask:

• When should I worry that the UX process is being impaired and deflected away from its foundational premise?
• Which symptoms of dysfunction bode ill for the experience I’m designing?

Think of early warning signs of dysfunction, but do not confuse those with behaviors integral to a healthy UX process. Characteristically, UX processes are not necessarily clean, highly defined, circumscribed, and sequenced as though they were run in a chemistry lab. UX design is a different beast; if you do not hear or see indices of chaos, lack of structure, serendipity, and improvisation, you’re right to be concerned that the process is less than healthy.

Now, let’s talk about some symptoms of dysfunction:

• Heated, divisive debates: Exchanges between two or more participants from the same teams or from across teams overlap and heat up; conversations are unproductive and go against consensus building.
• Working in silos: The UX team is living in Lala land, developing idealistic solutions not shaped by input/feedback from other teams and existing workstreams.
• Jumping the gun: During the early phases of the project, teams formulate early consensus, jump to solutions all too prematurely, and start choreographing product attributes and use cases.
• Putting the cart before the horse: Product teams, including the UX team, decide on a path to a product. Yet, little evidence justifies the need to bring the product into being.
• Shutting the barn doors after the horse has bolted: Teams rush to the actual design component based on a loosely defined idea, then go back to close the loop and attach an improvised problem statement or use cases post-facto to suit the design.
• Squeezed discovery: UX designers are hard pressed by an action-oriented manager to skip ahead and deliver on tangible design specifications and are not allowed enough time to explore and deliberate on a problem.
• Mistaking movement for achievement : The UX team spends excessive time exploring a problem; they cannot decide and thus move the conversation past this stage
• Jumping on the bandwagon: Assumptions or thoughts entertained during early exchanges between teams turn into givens at the level of collective awareness without being subjected to a proper validation process.
• Shiny but not useful: The UX team is called upon in the solution space only to pretty up a design.

• High versus low decision power : In one-on-one meetings, working-level sessions, or roundtable discussions, some teams or individuals act overconfident, dominate the conversation and hijack the direction of things. As a result, the UX team or UX designers feel sidelined, with little say in what gets debated or approved.
• UX team fed with a heavy dose of constraints : they’re tasked to operate within circumscribed perimeters from the get-go. This stifles their proverbial ability to think outside the box.
• Poor documentation practices: Knowledge about the problem is conveyed in an unstructured way and over a series of meetings with team members and stakeholders. Consequently, no proper documentation is left to trace the development process.
• Personal biases trump over method : Questions about UX are based mainly on the team’s personal experiences and not on known UX-specific methods, approaches, or tools.
• Much ambiguity, little confidence : Scoping is loose, direction is shaky, and objectives are unclear and sometimes conflicting.
• Who’s doing what?: There is no clear and documented distribution of roles and responsibilities.

A systematic overview of issues

To visualize the problems attendant upon UX design, let me briefly introduce the Double Diamond Innovation Framework (DDIF) . DDIF splits the innovation process into two consecutive and iterative spaces:

• The problem space: This is where designers deploy divergent thinking to discover a problem both by measures of depth and breadth before converging on a well-grounded problem.
• The solution space: This is where designers diverge again to create ideas that solve the problem. Gradually and iteratively, designers converge on the most optimal solution.

Two types of issues come to the spotlight:

• Issues at the level of overall project management. These suggest a lack of guardrails to prioritize and maintain user-centeredness throughout the process.
• Issues internal to the UX team. These are weaknesses in how the UX team carries out its UX tasks.

Here, we’re going to catalog issues based on where in the process they are likely to occur, with user centricity as a core value. As you review the columns below, remember that some issues might apply to both the problem and solution spaces.

So far, we’ve talked about symptoms of dysfunction and singled out issues arising at the problem and solutions spaces of the design process. As we seek to upgrade the UX designer’s toolbox, we must think in terms of first principles as they relate to UX design and apply them to the two central spaces: the problem and the solution:

• Ensure sufficient user involvement and research throughout the UX process.
• Prototype and iterate often on far-from-finished products and seek inputs from users. Rinse, lather, repeat.
• Adopt a hypothesis-driven development mindset; in other words, experiment constantly, adapt, and course-correct.
• Use your negotiation and consensus-building skills, determine your non-negotiables, and work with partners in good faith to overcome challenges and reach meaningful compromises.
• As a UX team, be proactive in integrating and inserting yourself into the broader organization and product development workstreams.

“Don’t mistake movement for achievement. It’s easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: busy doing what?” – Jim Rohn

• Brainstorm and formulate your research questions upfront with your team so you are all on the same page going forward.
• Don’t dwell on solutions during the problem discovery space; park any ideas that arise for future ideation in the solution conception space.
• Watch out for any hidden assumptions behind a statement and be mindful of when teams want to proceed forward based on unproven assumptions.
• Seek to resolve issues at your level and escalate to and lobby upper management as necessary.
• Map out the steps and milestones to progress your research and design efforts. Identify the knowledge gaps to make the necessary decisions and prioritize the tasks to close those gaps.

• Divergence yields a wealth of ideas. When the time comes to get rid of bad ideas, do it so you can focus on the more promising ones. In other words, “call the baby ugly” and move on.
• Optimally distribute and manage divergent and convergent thinking across individuals and teams.
• Use the DDIF as a crutch when the UX design process is derailed for one reason or another or when teams want to jump the gun.

You might have heard of the movie titled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . I have used this movie as a metaphor to suggest that navigating UX design feels like a grand adventure into a complex stratosphere.

The gist of this journey is that different types of challenges and hurdles can derail a project. With the arsenal laid out in this troubleshooter’s guide to UX Design comprising the problem space and solution space, we are in a position to identify these hurdles and address them head-on. In doing so, our first principle is and will remain user centricity.

The symptoms of dysfunction I have explored constitute early warning signals, prompting us to reconsider our designs and strategies. As we adopt a systematic overview of the underlying issues, we can pinpoint which project management challenges stand in the way of successful UX experiences. Likewise, UX team dynamics underscore the value of managing expectations, agreeing on priorities, being clear about roles and responsibilities, building consensus, and ensuring relevant voices are heard, not dismissed.

In the grand scheme of things, the issues we surmount and the solutions we implement nudge us toward creating better experiences for users and a more agreeable ecosystem for individuals and teams working within and across the organization. It is reasonable to suggest that future approaches to UX design should continue to centralize the human user but should not lose sight of the experiences of those designing the experience.

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7 First Principles Thinking Exercises For UX Designers

Jack O’Donoghue

PRO INSIGHT

Design Thinking is an incredible tool for identifying and solving complex human problems.

But First Principles Thinking is an approach to logical reasoning that will pay dividends in all areas of life.

Especially in solving complex technical problems, where a systematic analysis is really the only way to find a solution.

The designer who’s mastered both, will have a massive advantage in producing thoughtful, logical design solutions that meet customer needs in a way that others can only guess at.

Jack O’Donoghue (2 x Bestselling UX Course Creator) – UX Strategy Blueprint – Design Thinking Made Simple

First principles thinking is a foundational approach to problem-solving.

It involves breaking down complex problems into their most basic components and then reassembling them from the ground up.

It’s about questioning every assumption and getting to the core of a problem.

Here are seven thought-provoking exercises to sharpen your first principles thinking in UX design.

You might also like…

• How To Use ChatGPT For First Principles Thinking In UX
• How to Define in Design Thinking
• How To Use First Principles Thinking For UX Designers

Table of Contents

1. reimagining everyday products, 2. constraint-based challenges, 3. historical analysis, 4. reverse engineering user interfaces, 5. the ‘5 whys’ of user needs, 6. cross-industry application, 7. the simplification challenge, wrapping up, you asked, we answered.

Choose everyday objects (like a coffee cup or a chair) and redesign them as if for a digital interface.

Question every aspect of the product from it’s purpose, physical appearance, it’s materials etc. Try to understand why it is the way it is and what fundamental elements must stay the same in order for it to continue solving the problem it solves. Then try to redesign it for digital.

For instance, take a traditional alarm clock. Its primary purpose is to alert someone at a specific time. Physically, it consists of a display, buttons for setting time, and often a snooze function. In translating this to digital, a UX designer might focus on the core function of time alerting. The digital version could incorporate customizable alarms, integration with other apps for a more holistic approach to time management, and an interface that changes based on the time of day or user preferences. This approach ensures that the digital product retains the fundamental qualities of the alarm clock while enhancing user experience with new, digitally-native features.

This challenges you to apply physical world principles to digital designs, fostering a deeper understanding of user interactions beyond the screen.

Impose unusual constraints on a standard UX task. For example, design a checkout process with no text or a homepage with only three elements. Such constraints force you to rethink design norms and focus on the bare essentials that drive user experience.

Look at the evolution of a famous digital product. How did early versions cater to user needs, and how has this evolved? Understanding the first principles that guided initial designs can offer insights into how and why current UX strategies work.

Take a popular app and deconstruct its user interface (UI) down to the basics. Why is the ‘like’ button where it is? What prompts the color scheme? Scrutinize each element and its placement, questioning the fundamental reasons behind these choices. This reverse-engineering exercise will reveal the core principles that guide effective UI design.

In this exercise, pick a common feature of a UX design and ask “why” five times to delve deeper into its purpose. For instance, why do users need a search bar? Each answer leads to a deeper understanding of user needs, stripping away assumptions and revealing the first principles of user-centric design.

Take a principle from an entirely different field (like architecture or music) and apply it to a UX design problem. This encourages out-of-the-box thinking and opens up new avenues for innovative solutions grounded in proven principles from other disciplines.

Take a complex digital process and simplify it as much as possible without losing its essence. This could mean streamlining a multi-step task into a one-click action or reducing a cluttered interface to the bare minimum. This exercise teaches the art of distillation, getting to the heart of what’s truly necessary for a great user experience.

Incorporating first principles thinking into your UX design process requires a mindset shift that encourages constant curiosity, rigorous questioning, and a deep understanding of the ‘why’ behind every design decision.

Remember that the goal isn’t just to find answers but to ask better, more fundamental questions.

By stripping concepts down to their core, you can build up solutions that are innovative and deeply connected to the real needs of your users.

Q: What does ‘principles thinking’ mean in design? A: Principles thinking in design refers to using fundamental guidelines and standards to inform and shape design decisions.

Q: What is first principles thinking in UX design? A: First principles thinking in UX design involves breaking down complex user experiences into basic elements and reassembling them innovatively.

Q: How does design thinking enhance UX design? A: Design thinking enhances UX design by promoting empathy, ideation, and iterative testing, leading to user-centered design solutions.

Q: What are the key principles of service design? A: Key principles of service design include user focus, co-creation, sequencing, and evidencing, ensuring a comprehensive service experience.

Q: How do UX and UI design work together? A: UX design focuses on overall user journey and functionality, while UI design emphasizes the visual elements and interactivity of the interface.

Q: Can you define a UX design principle ? A: A UX design principle is a guideline that ensures user experiences are effective, efficient, and satisfying.

Q: What is the importance of user experience in design? A: User experience is crucial in design as it directly affects user satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty.

Q: What role does a UX designer play? A: A UX designer focuses on understanding user needs and creating intuitive, user-friendly interfaces.

Q: How does interaction design contribute to UX? A: Interaction design shapes the interactive elements of a product, enhancing user engagement and experience.

Q: What is the core principle of UX design? A: The core principle of UX design is to prioritize the user’s needs and experiences in all design aspects.

Q: Why is visual hierarchy important in UX design? A: Visual hierarchy guides users’ attention to key elements, improving readability and navigation in UX design.

Q: How does UX research influence the design process? A: UX research provides insights into user behaviors and preferences, informing and validating design decisions.

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Creative Problem Solving for UX Designers

It’s normal to pull up sharp in front of a problem; after all, if there was a known solution, it wouldn’t be a problem. But knowing that it’s normal, doesn’t make encountering problems any less frustrating. So how do we avoid sitting in front of a UX problem for hours, achieving nothing?

That’s what creative problem solving is all about.

In this post, we’ll explore creative problem solving, and how it can help you as a UX designer. Then we’ll analyze how you can solve UX problems in a few, easy-to-remember steps. By the end of this article, you’ll have all the tips you need for UX problem-solving.

What is Creative Problem Solving?

Creative problem solving is a term developed by Alex Osborn, the founder of the Creative Education Foundation . In a nutshell, this term is about overcoming challenges in our work lives through innovative solutions. But, of course, such solutions vary by profession.

For UX designers, creative problem solving is about solving UX problems with efficient tactics, that work. And that’s precisely why UX problem solving is so essential because following a specific method can help us avoid getting stuck.

Whether you are a newbie or an experienced designer, you are probably focused on projects that require you to solve problems. If you have never had a problem before, you must be a superhero; for us mere mortals, here are the steps we need to follow to solve a UX problem:

UX Problem Solving in 5 Easy Steps

Delivering a great UX solution is influenced by two key parameters: user research and creative problem-solving. Suppose you have done your user research and are currently looking for an original solution to a problem. In this case, the methodology below will be handy:

1. Identify the UX Problem

I know this may sound obvious, but think about it. How many times have we lost days because we didn’t identify the real problem? If you are solving the wrong problem, it does not matter if your solution is original and innovative.

That’s why the first thing you need to do is think about the problem. Ask yourself what the real problem is, and then get to work solving it. Identifying the problem may take some time, but it will prove beneficial to your project in the long run.

2. Clarify the UX Problem

Now that you have identified the UX problem, it’s time to demystify it. In this step, you could create a user journey plan. It does not have to be perfect; some low-fidelity sketches are more than enough.

Set a timer and start visualizing your solution on paper. Remember, sketching is not about perfection or fine details. Once you have created a customer journey you are happy with, it’s time to move on to the next step.

3. Use Analytics

UX design isn’t about design per se. It’s also about numbers and data. This is why analytics are critical to UX problem-solving. Once you have gathered some data from users and competitors, it’s time to create patterns. This will help you better understand the problem and change your drafts accordingly.

Numbers and data alone can help you a lot if you combine them with an original idea. However, facts alone are not enough, and your original story will not be compelling without them. So what’s better than combining them?

4. Use Your Feedback

So you have come up with an innovative solution to the UX problem. You have successfully combined this idea with essential data. Unfortunately, your work is not yet done.

The next step is equally important. Once you have polished your ideas, you should share them with colleagues and/or customers.

It’s not easy to get feedback for your UX mapping, but it’s very constructive and will ultimately make you a better designer.

5. Solve the Problem

The last step is also the most fun. Once you have listened to people’s feedback, you can redesign your original solution. Then you are just one step away from solving the UX problem. Now it’s time to digitally redesign your idea.

This is the step where fine details matter. Creating a high-fidelity wireframe is not easy, but most UX designers have the knowledge and tools to get it done.

UX Problem Solving: Useful Tips and Tricks

Be methodical.

In my opinion, this is the most useful tip when it comes to UX problem-solving. You do not always have to be in a hurry. In the early stages of a project, try not to get distracted by other problems. Focus on finding the real problem.

Once you are sure you have found it, you can move on to finding the best solution. Then move on to the next step and so on. It becomes clear that being methodical is a brilliant tactic.

UX Problem Solving is All about the Ecosystem

UX problem solving is not about fine details. So try to care less about the design and more about the ecosystem you want to create. That will help you gather all the data you need, from user opinions to analytics.

Low-Fidelity vs. High-Fidelity Wireframes

Starting with sketches and low-fidelity wireframes is a brilliant thing to do. Whenever I have tried to start a project directly with high-fidelity wireframes, I have gotten bogged down in details.

For this reason, pen and paper should be your best friends in UX problem-solving. Sketches help you explore different approaches and get the feedback you need.

Explore Different Tools/Approaches

When it comes to solving a UX problem, there is usually one efficient solution. But that is not always the case. In most cases, we have to consider different alternatives and identify more than one critical interaction.

For this reason, feedback is also crucial for UX problem-solving. Your colleagues and customers will help you find the best method. Try to accept criticism and be open when listening to feedback. This way, you will ensure that you will find the best possible solution.

Solving a UX problem is not easy. However, if you identify the real problem and illustrate different approaches, you will be on the right track. Also, do not neglect to use the data and feedback you collect. The more tools you have in hand, the better UX designer you will be.

Nancy Young

Nancy is a founder of Onedesblog and a copywriter with over 10 years of experience. She loves creating showcases with beautiful graphics resources, web design, and photography.

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Foundational ux workshop activities.

March 1, 2020 2020-03-01

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Thousands of workshop exercises exist. However, few realize at the core of each of these exercises are the same 7 foundational activities. You can combine, mix, and remix these fundamental activities to create almost any exercise needed. As a facilitator, these core activities are should be familiar tools in your back pocket.

In This Article:

2. affinity diagramming, 3. landscape mapping, 4. storyboarding, 5. forced ranking, 6. role playing, 7. playback.

This is the most common and fundamental workshop activity amongst the 7. It is the base of almost all workshop exercises and has the broadest application.

Postup: An activity in which participants individually generate content on sticky notes, then post them up on a wall. Contributions are then discussed, captured, shared, or used as input for a future exercise.

Why: Postups are used to generate a wide set of ideas that represent diverse perspectives in a time-efficient, democratic manner. They are helpful tactics for navigating dominating participants, unproductive conversation, and encouraging full participation.

When: Postups are highly flexible and, thus, can be used at any point in a workshop. The content generated in a postup can be anything: words, ideas, features, sketches, questions, concerns, assumptions, users, hopes, fears, research insights, or next steps. For example, at the beginning of a workshop, you may use a postup to generate workshop goals. Towards the end of a workshop, you may use a postup to generate next steps and action items.

• Add time constraints. Constraints often have a bad connotation, but can be extremely useful in workshop settings. Be sure your postup is productive and efficient by time-boxing the content-generation part. The amount of time given will depend on the content being generated, but start with 5–10 minutes, then adapting from there.
• Give participants quantity goals. Ask each person to produce 3 (or some other number) of sticky notes. This goal will push participants who are less likely to contribute to be more involved instead of letting others contribute for them.
• Explicitly choose anonymity or accountability. Postups can be anonymous, but don’t have to be so. Anonymity is useful when there is a range of hierarchy in the room or when the content generated is sensitive in nature (for example, workshop fears or current roadblocks). Promote anonymity by collecting ideas from participants, shuffling them, then posting them on the wall, rather than having participants post sticky notes themselves. You’ll also want to be sure everyone is using stickies of the same color.

Think of affinity diagramming is often the next step of a postup.

Affinity diagramming: is the clustering of information, often sticky notes, into relational groups based on similarities or themes.   

Note that, even though the input for affinity diagramming is often a set of sticky notes generated in postup, it doesn’t have to be. For example, it can be done by cutting up a list of other items such as customer-support calls or site queries and organizing the content from there.

Affinity diagramming can be adapted as necessary. Clustering can be done as a group (this works best if the number of items being clustered is under 20 and the themes are to be discovered through the diagramming) or, if the themes are predetermined, individually and then reviewed as a group (this works best for more than 20 items).

Why: The benefits of affinity diagramming are twofold. First, it helps us discover patterns across a wide set of ideas. Second, when done collaboratively, it promotes a shared language. Participants can identify and align on what a specific theme or pattern is comprised of, especially if the theme names are generated collaboratively in the workshop.

When: Affinity diagramming should be used anytime you are converging after a postup. It enables a shared understanding and language amongst the group members.

• Plan your theme-naming approach. Decide ahead of time if you will predetermine groups before the activity or if you will allow them to naturally surface during the activity. Predetermine group names if you are late in the design process (and thus already have existing categories to work with) or if you are sorting a large quantity of items. Conversely, allow group names to be collaboratively created by the participants during the workshop if you are early in the design process, or want to enable the emergence of a shared language amongst participants.
• Create an “ungrouped” group. When grouping, participants will be inclined to force each item into a group, even if it doesn’t quite fit. To prevent this tendency, create an “ungrouped” group. This group may contain oddballs or outliers or it may end up helping you uncover new categories.
• Try subclustering. To promote a deep understanding of the idea space, prompt participants to do affinity diagraming on the items within each category (and, thus, create subclusters within the larger clusters) and name each. This method can reveal patterns across categories and can serve to doublecheck that items were grouped correctly.

This activity works as a followup for postup and affinity diagramming. If you took the categories obtained from affinity diagramming and determined the relationships they have to each other, you would be doing landscape mapping. Landscape mapping is how many UX maps , including empathy maps, customer journey maps, and service blueprints, are built.

Definition : Landscape mapping is arranging groups of similar content (usually) sticky notes into a preassigned structure (such as a customer-journey map) so that we can understand relationships, interplay, and patterns across items, groups, and time.

The format of landscape maps is highly variable: matrices, tables (the common swimlane structure of customer-journey maps and service blueprints), and Venn diagrams are the most common. They can be messy and low-fidelity or structured and high-fidelity, depending on goals and context. For capturing and consolidating insights, keep your landscape maps low-fidelity. If you use the map to communicate and share conclusions, aim for a high-fidelity output.

Why: Landscape mapping helps us understand how items or categories relate to each other. They serve to identify relationships, then create alignment and insight across the different ideas or themes.

When: Landscape maps are best used after a generation-based activity (like a postup) to drive further insight and alignment.

• Identify the goal and structure ahead of time. The breed of landscape map you use in a workshop should depend on the larger goal and context of the workshop. For example, if you want to better understand customer actions, thoughts, and emotion, then a customer-journey map structure may work best. Or, if your team wants to better understand complex hierarchical data, then you may adopt a treemap structure.
• Constrain time. Due to the complexity landscape maps can introduce, it is easy to spend endless time discussing the relationships and interdependencies of items, especially in a large group. To circumvent this issue, break apart tasks step-by-step and time-box each. For example, if you are creating a free-form landscape map, spend the first 10 minutes drawing arrows to indicate relationships between different elements. The next 10 minutes can be spent labeling each relationship. Breaking apart tasks allows participants to focus on one goal at a time, ultimately making them more effective and productive.

Storyboards (or vignettes) expand a specific idea and add context to it so that it’s better understood, communicated, and agreed upon.

Definition: A  storyboard  communicates a story through images displayed in a sequence of panels that chronologically maps the story’s main events.

Why: Storyboards put context around ideas or users; they tell stories about our users. When based on real data, they can take the focus off our internal bias, help us understand what drives user behavior, and frame the experiences we create in a holistic way. Storyboards can and should range in fidelity depending on how you are using them.

When: Storyboards can be useful in a variety of workshop types :

• Research and discovery workshops: Storyboards can synthesize research into a shared narrative. Visualizing a user’s context (device, office space, or group setting) helps your team and your stakeholders empathize with your user’s situation.
• Ideation workshops:  Storyboards can be used to flesh out ideas generated in the workshop, contributing to an aligned vision and goal.
• Prioritization and critique workshops: Use storyboards to visualize how users will interact with your application. They will aid in understanding the features that are necessary for your user to complete the scenario and, thus, are important to focus on.
• Introduce constraints. Time boxing is extremely important in order to promote productivity and force participants to be okay with capturing ideas imperfectly. Give a clear quantity goal and a specific amount of time to complete it. For example, have each participant fold a piece of letter sized paper into 8ths. Then, give them 10 minutes to complete an 8-step storyboard — one step per box.
• Remember, mediums matter. The medium you choose to create storyboards will have a large impact on how participants approach the activity. In most cases, limit sketch space and use thick sharpies so sketches don’t become too detailed, but are focused on the overall narrative.

Forced ranking is the foundation of any prioritization exercise, including dot voting , prioritization matrixing , the $100 test, and the NUF (new, useful, feasible) test .

Definition: Forced ranking is any collaborative prioritization activity that directly weighs items against each other in order to create a strict order.

Forced ranking can be as rigorous (tying specific scale or dollar amount to each item ranked) or as lightweight (basic dot voting) as needed.

Why: UX practitioners are often caught in a balancing act: user needs versus what is technically and organizationally feasible. Forced ranking serves to identify the most important things to focus on. This structured, objective approach helps achieve consensus while satisfying the varied needs of the user and business.

When: Forced ranking is extremely flexible and can be applied in a multitude of ways and at a variety of times. Use forced ranking after almost any activity or exercise, in order to decide which of its outputs will be the focus of your next activity. For example, use forced ranking to prioritize which of the ideas generated during an ideation session should be prototyped.

• Give time before ranking. Depending on the context, some rankings may have significant consequences (for example, they may impact future resources or release priorities). In these cases, be sure to give time (anywhere from a day or week) for participants to do their due diligence and rank from an informed perspective.
• Explicitly choose anonymity or accountability. Similar to a postup, anonymity can be an advantage or disadvantage. If the group is prone to groupthink or the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) effect, then consider having individuals rank on their own and submit their rankings anonymously. Conversely, in some instances it may be helpful to surface participant’s rankings, whether to foster conversation or discuss expertise-related perspectives.

Role play is a technique used in workshops to challenge biases and assumptions. It is the key component of Jeff Kelley’s Wizard of Oz technique and Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats .

Definition: Role play is the acting out another  perspective (e.g., user) or system (a set of known information or data) as a technique for exploration and discovery.

Why: Role play in workshops forces participants to change how they think about something. By deliberately challenging how they naturally approach a problem, attendees can develop new thoughts and ideas.

When: A the highest level, role play can be applied in two ways: participants can play the role of the system or the role of another person (someone with a different perspective or a user).

In the first case (participants play the role of the system), role play is used as a review mechanism to assess gaps within a designed system. The facilitator should assign a workshop participant (per group if the workshop is over 6 people) to play the role of the computer or system as it interacts with a user (either recruited into the workshop or played by another participant). The participant playing the system can only respond from a script of what the computer or system knows (even if she otherwise knows the appropriate information or response outside of character).

In the second case (participants play the role of another perspective — such as user or project-budget manager ), role play is primarily used to encourage new perspectives and reassess priorities. This is especially helpful when dealing with finicky audiences, as you can assign roles (such as “optimist”, “pessimist”, or “feasibility driver”) to combat natural tendencies of participants. In this scenario, each team member is given a new role to play. Each participant must then contribute to the activity at hand from the perspective she has been assigned.

• Expect discomfort. Role play is a concept that is often outside of participant’s comfort zones. When prompting attendees to participate, expect resistance and potentially awkwardness, until they get used to the technique. Reiterate the purpose of the method and reassure people that it is okay for the activity to feel unnatural or silly at the onset.
• Make it fun. Many activities within a workshop are rigorous and require intense thought and reasoning. Allow this technique to bring fun back into the workshop. Try providing props (like colored hats and paper prototypes) and switching up the layout of the room.

The act of sharing in a workshop is an activity in and of itself and core to all workshops. It is especially useful when participants are working primarily in groups (which should often occur in workshops with more than 6 participants).

Definition : Playback is the activity of sharing progress, process, or insights gained by an individual (or a subgroup) to a broad group, either in an informal or formal way.

Playbacks can be done within a small group, with each participant sharing her ideas. They can also be done across subgroups, with each subgroup sharing its output to the workshop group. Playbacks can be as quick as 1-minute high-level shares or as formal as prepared presentations (skits or slideshows).

Why : Divergence and convergence is a key characteristic of workshops. By first working independently on a problem, then converging to share insights, teams can leverage progress made by others. Playbacks help converge insights across teams so that everyone within a workshop has an understanding of the outputs and the work of other teams. This understanding ensures alignment and shared language across the whole workshop, not just within workshop teams.

When: Playbacks can and should occur across the entirety of a workshop. The longer the workshop and the higher the number of participants, the more important it is to include playbacks.

• Start small. Not every participant will feel comfortable sharing to the broad workshop audience. Warm attendees up before asking them to share to the whole group. Try using a pair-share activity (in which participants share their thoughts with a partner) towards the beginning of the workshop, subgroup playbacks (sharing within small groups) towards the middle of the workshop, and workshop-wide playbacks towards the conclusion of the workshop.
• Vary formality. In longer workshops alternate between informal and formal playbacks.  Switch up time and medium used for sharing throughout the workshop. For example, in addition to traditional verbal shares, encourage participants to use a combination of role play, skits, storyboards, and digital slides.     

Think of these 7 fundamental workshop activities as ingredients for every workshop recipe. By understanding these and how they can be combined with different constraints, you can create almost any UX workshop exercise you need.

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UX Workshop Activities: Everything You Should Know

Workshop activities can bring energy, creativity, and collaboration to your meetings, fostering innovation and effective problem-solving. Below are five highly engaging activities you can incorporate into your workshops, each designed to stimulate ideas, generate insights, and prioritize tasks.

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Relevance: Voting is a powerful tool for quickly gathering collective input, making decisions, and identifying areas of agreement or contention among participants. It is particularly useful when there are multiple options to consider.

When to Use: Voting is a handy technique when you need to prioritize options, finalize decisions, or gauge participants' preferences on a topic.

Best Practices:

Make sure each participant has an equal number of votes, and that they know how to use them.

Clearly define the voting options and how the results will be used.

Facilitate an open discussion before and after voting to ensure all perspectives are heard.

Consider using online tools or colored sticky notes for anonymous voting.

Affinity Mapping

Relevance: Affinity mapping is a visual technique used to organize a large volume of ideas into logical groups or themes. It's helpful when you're faced with lots of information, feedback, or ideas and need to make sense of them.

When to Use: This method is best used after a brainstorming session or whenever you have a large amount of qualitative data to sort through.

Have participants write ideas or feedback on individual sticky notes, one per note.

In a collaborative setting, allow participants to group the notes into categories based on shared themes or ideas.

Encourage participants to discuss the themes and insights that emerge from the grouping process.

Label each group with a fitting category name.

Relevance: Crazy 8 is a fast-paced brainstorming activity designed to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and generate a diverse range of ideas.

When to Use: This activity is suitable for early stages of problem-solving, when you're exploring potential solutions or looking to stimulate creativity.

Provide each participant with a sheet of paper divided into eight sections.

Set a timer for eight minutes and ask participants to come up with eight unique ideas, one in each section.

Encourage participants to think broadly, and prioritize quantity over quality during this exercise.

After the time is up, ask participants to share their favorite ideas and discuss as a group.

Prioritization

Relevance: Prioritization is crucial for managing resources and time efficiently, especially when faced with a long list of tasks or ideas.

When to Use: Use prioritization when you need to allocate resources, identify key tasks, or determine the most important issues to address.

Establish clear criteria for prioritization (e.g., impact, feasibility, urgency).

Consider using techniques like the "MoSCoW" method (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) or the Eisenhower Matrix (Urgent/Important).

Include all relevant stakeholders in the prioritization process.

Periodically revisit and adjust your priorities as circumstances change.

North Star Metric

Relevance: A North Star metric is a single, critical metric that reflects your company's success and guides your long-term strategy.

When to Use: Use this activity when setting strategic goals, aligning team objectives, or measuring progress toward your overarching mission.

Ensure your North Star metric is specific, measurable, and tied to your company's mission or vision.

Keep it customer-focused, as it should represent value delivered to your customers.

Communicate the metric and its significance clearly to your team, ensuring everyone understands its importance.

Regularly track and review your North Star metric, making adjustments to your strategy as needed.

Incorporating these activities into your workshops will not only energize participants but also foster collaboration and creativity. They can help facilitate more effective problem-solving and decision-making processes. Remember to adapt each activity to your unique workshop objectives and context for maximum impact.

Workshops are a powerful tool for fostering collaboration, creativity, and effective problem-solving within your team. By incorporating engaging and practical activities like Voting, Affinity Mapping, Crazy 8, Prioritization, and the North Star metric, you can inject energy into your workshops and facilitate productive discussions.

These activities, when applied appropriately, can help your team gain clarity, make informed decisions, and align on key objectives. As a workshop facilitator, it's crucial to understand the needs of your participants, tailor activities to the specific goals of your workshop, and create an inclusive and open environment where all voices can be heard.

As you move forward with your workshops, be open to adapting and iterating on these activities to ensure they continue to serve your team's evolving needs. Happy problem-solving!

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How To Run an Awesome Design Thinking Workshop

Design Thinking has become an extremely popular approach to problem-solving—not only among designers, but across all areas of business . A Design Thinking workshop will spark innovation, foster a user-centric mindset, and get cross-functional teams working together to design a great product .

Workshop facilitation is an important skill for any designer, but it can be tricky to master. In this guide, we’ll show you how to run an effective design thinking workshop.

By the end, you’ll be ready to take your colleagues (or clients) through the entire Design Thinking process , equipping them with the tools they need to come up with innovative strategies and ideas.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is a Design Thinking workshop?
• Why run a Design Thinking workshop?
• How to run a Design Thinking workshop (step-by-step)

Ready to run an unforgettable Design Thinking workshop? Let’s go!

1. What is a Design Thinking workshop?

A Design Thinking workshop is a hands-on, activity-based session built around the Design Thinking process. Most often, these are conducted in person, but you can certainly adapt and conduct a remote Design Thinking workshop .

It can last two hours, two days, or even a full week—it all depends on the context and the goals at hand.

Based on the five phases of Design Thinking, a Design Thinking workshop focuses on:

• Empathy: Getting to grips with a real user problem and building empathy for the target users / customers.
• Ideation, innovation, and problem-solving: Generating as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.
• Prototyping and testing: Building low-fidelity prototypes of the ideas generated, ready for testing on real or representative users.

Design Thinking workshops are all about collaboration and problem-solving. As a designer, you might hold a Design Thinking workshop with your direct team in order to tackle a tough design challenge you’ve been struggling with. However, Design Thinking workshops aren’t just for designers; they are also increasingly used to teach professionals how to innovate and problem-solve. Throughout your design career, you might find yourself running Design Thinking workshops for clients—going into different organizations and showing them how they can apply Design Thinking to their own business challenges.

Indeed, Design Thinking can be applied to all areas of business, and a Design Thinking workshop can therefore be useful for everyone—from marketing, product, and sales, right through to the C-level. Let’s consider the benefits of a Design Thinking workshop in more detail.

2. Why run a Design Thinking workshop?

As a designer, incorporating Design Thinking into your process will help you to quickly come up with viable, user-centric solutions—ultimately resulting in a quicker time-to-market, improved customer retention, significant cost savings, and a great ROI.

Design Thinking workshops enable you to spread this value across your organization (or your client’s organization). Here are some of the benefits at a glance:

• Teach people how to problem-solve: Problem solving is a key skill that everyone should master. A Design Thinking workshop teaches problem solving in action, giving the workshop participants an approach they can apply to almost any challenge in any area of their lives.
• Foster innovation and teamwork: The very essence of Design Thinking lies in collaboration and thinking outside the box. As a designer, these things are second nature to you; for others, it might not come so easily. A Design Thinking workshop breaks down silos and shows participants how to challenge their assumptions—a recipe for innovation!
• Secure a competitive advantage: A Design Thinking workshop may result in groundbreaking solutions that ultimately set the company apart—but competitive products aren’t the only takeaway. Design Thinking workshops teach creative thinking, which is increasingly seen as a competitive advantage when applied at a strategic level.

“Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple’s iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results. Why? We rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.  To innovate and win, companies need design thinking .” —Roger L. Martin, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009)

All these benefits aside, Design Thinking workshops are incredibly fun and engaging. They bring together a diverse group of people from different departments and provide a rare opportunity to get hands-on with the problem.

So how do you go about setting up and facilitating a Design Thinking workshop? Let’s find out.

3. How to run a Design Thinking workshop: Step-by-step

Now we’ll go through all the necessary steps for running a Design Thinking workshop. We’ve divided this guide into two phases: how to plan and prepare for your Design Thinking workshop, followed by how to actually conduct the workshop .

Phase 1: Planning and preparation

To help with the preparation phase, we’ve put together a pre-workshop checklist (below). Further down, you’ll find more information to help you with each checklist item.

Pre-workshop checklist:

• Scope out the challenge and set workshop objective(s)
• Find a suitable location
• Plan the agenda (including time slots for each activity)
• Gather all necessary materials

1. Scope out the challenge and set objectives

There are many reasons you might hold a Design Thinking workshop; perhaps you need ideas for a new product, or maybe you’re looking for ways to improve an existing one. It could be that you need to come up with a drastic strategy for regaining consumer trust after a PR disaster! If you’re running a workshop for a client, perhaps the main purpose is to teach them about Design Thinking and how it can be applied to their business. In this case, you can still solve a real-world problem based on their product and industry.

Whatever the context, be clear on what the workshop should achieve. Let’s imagine you’re working for LoveFoundry, an online dating service. The goal of the workshop might be to come up with ways to improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers.

For the purpose of your workshop, you’ll frame the challenge as a “how might we” question: How might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers?

At the moment, this is a rather broad question. However, you’ve established the purpose of your Design Thinking workshop: to generate ideas for how to improve an existing digital product. Later on, you’ll narrow the design challenge down as part of the workshop itself.

2. Prepare the workshop location

Next, you need to create the optimal space for your workshop.

Design Thinking workshops should be dynamic and interactive, so it’s important that participants have plenty of room—especially when it comes to the prototyping stage. Ideally, you’ll have a separate table for all the materials and equipment (more on that in step three!).

Aside from comfortable seating and good lighting, you can create a relaxed environment by playing some background music. Another simple yet powerful touch is to position some thought-provoking artifacts around the room. If you’re running a workshop for a client, you might print display advertising campaigns from three of their biggest competitors, for example.

The purpose of a Design Thinking workshop is to get people thinking outside the box, so be sure to set up a space that invites creativity.

3. Plan your agenda

Now for the most crucial part: planning your workshop agenda. When tackling this somewhat tricky task, there are two golden rules to bear in mind:

• Don’t overfill your agenda.
• Keep it activity-based.

It might be tempting to cram in as much as possible, but the workshop will just end up feeling rushed—which is not conducive to creativity! Think about the time you have available and divide it up logically. Ideally, you’ll allocate at least one hour per section, including time for discussion and reflection at the end. You’ll also need to incorporate an introduction, an ice-breaker activity to get the group warmed up, and sufficient breaks throughout.

Another common error is to focus too heavily on presentations. A Design Thinking workshop should be largely activity-based; your participants need to be hands-on and engaged. The key is to deliver interesting, relevant content, followed by a practical exercise and then group discussion.

We’ll look at what to include in your workshop agenda in phase two of this guide a little further down.

4. Gather all necessary materials

With your agenda in place, you should now have a good idea of what you’ll need for the workshop.

Part of the workshop will be dedicated to building low-fidelity prototypes, for which you’ll need a good selection of materials. Opt for simple, everyday materials that everyone is familiar with—such as white copy paper, colored construction paper, sticky tape, marker pens, and Post-it notes.

It’s also a good idea to have a camera on-hand so you can document the workshop. This is extremely helpful when it comes to reviewing your workshop, and, if you’re running your workshop with clients, photos also make for a great souvenir.

With general preparation out of the way, let’s move on to phase two of our guide. In this section, we’ll explore your Design Thinking workshop agenda in more detail.

Phase 2: Executing your Design Thinking workshop

In phase one, we went through some general pointers to consider when devising the workshop agenda. Now we’re going to consider the agenda in more detail, going through all the elements that make up a successful Design Thinking workshop! We’ve also included time slots based on a 1-day workshop.

1. Introduction and briefing (15 minutes)

Start by welcoming everybody to the workshop and setting expectations. Some key points to include in your introduction are:

• Who you are (if you’re conducting a workshop with a client).
• The workshop objectives and the design challenge: e.g. To introduce the process of Design Thinking using a real-world design challenge: How might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers?
• The workshop schedule.

This is also a good time to mention that you’d like to document the workshop by taking photos.

2. Ice-breaker activity (20 minutes)

It’s always a good idea to kick off the workshop with an ice-breaker. This will put everybody at ease before the real work begins!

Here are some fun ice-breaker activities you might like to use:

• One truth, two lies: Get everybody up on their feet and standing in a circle. Each person takes it in turns to tell one truth about themselves together with two lies. The rest of the group votes on which statement they think is true.
• One-word relay: The aim of the one-word relay is to construct a story as a group. You’ll all stand in a circle and take it in turns to add a few words to what the previous person has said. You should end up with a grammatically sensical yet completely random (and hilarious) story.
• Five-minute portraits: Give each participant a piece of paper and a felt-tip pen. The group has five minutes to doodle a portrait of another workshop participant of their choice. At the end, each person presents their portrait; can the rest of the group guess who it’s supposed to be?

For more inspiration, check out this list of 26 ice-breaker games and activities .

3. Introduction to Design Thinking (20 minutes)

If you’re conducting a Design Thinking workshop with clients or colleagues from other departments, you’ll need to get everybody up to speed on what Design Thinking actually is.

This can be a brief presentation covering the following points:

• A definition of what Design Thinking is. We’ve covered the fundamentals of Design Thinking in this guide .
• The five phases of Design Thinking, together with a quick explanation of each: Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
• The benefits of Design Thinking. This might be a good time to share some interesting stats—for example: teams that are applying IBM’s Design Thinking practices have calculated an ROI of up to 300% .
• A real-world Design Thinking case study, such as the Rotterdam Eye Hospital case .

By now, you’ve set the scene and put everybody at ease. This is a good point to break for ten minutes before diving into the first activity.

4. Building empathy for the user (1 hour)

Understanding your end user’s needs is the first step towards innovation—and that’s the first message you’ll deliver in your Design Thinking workshop.

For the empathise phase of the workshop, you’ll encourage participants to step into the user’s shoes and really think about what they need from the product. Continuing with the example of LoveFoundry, our imaginary online dating service, let’s consider how you might construct the empathise phase.

• Presentation (10 minutes): What is empathy? Why is it so important to design for the user first? You can find lots of information about empathy in Design Thinking here .
• Activity—conduct user research (10 minutes): Normally, the empathise phase consists of conducting research with actual users. For your Design Thinking workshop, ask your participants to pair up and take it in turns to play the user. Provide them with some starter questions, such as: How would you describe your most recent experience with online dating? How did the experience make you feel?
• Activity—create an empathy map (10 minutes): Each participant divides their page into four quadrants: “says”, “thinks”, “does”, and “feels”. Based on what they observed in the previous activity, they’ll fill in each quadrant with hypothetical (or direct) quotes and observations.
• Presentation of empathy maps (20 minutes): Ask each participant to briefly present their empathy map to the rest of the group.
• Reflection and discussion (10 minutes): As a group, discuss what you’ve learned so far. This is also a good time for questions.

5. Define a problem statement (1 hour)

Next, you’ll move onto the define phase. This is where your participants will narrow down the broader design challenge (how might we improve the user experience for LoveFoundry customers?) to something more specific.

The define phase of your Design Thinking workshop might look something like this:

• Presentation (10 minutes): What is the define stage and why is it necessary? What is a meaningful problem statement? You can learn all about how to define a problem statement in this guide .
• Activity—craft a point of view (10 minutes): Based on their empathy maps from the empathise phase, ask participants to create a point of view statement. The point of view statement should include a specific user, a need, and an insight. For example: “A busy, middle-aged professional needs an easy way of meeting like-minded people in the local area. Safety is also an important factor.”
• Activity—reframe the problem as a “how might we” question (10 minutes): Now, participants will turn the user’s needs into a “how might we” question. For example: “How might we provide an easy, safe, online dating experience?”
• Presentation of problem statements (20 minutes): Ask each participant to share their problem statements and “how might we” questions, with a brief explanation as to why they decided to focus on this particular problem. You, the facilitator, will write each problem statement up on the board.
• Reflection and discussion (10 minutes): As a group, discuss what you’ve learned so far. Has everybody identified similar user needs, or is there lots of variety?

6. Ideation part 1: Generate ideas and potential solutions (1 hour)

The third phase in the Design Thinking process consists of ideation—coming up with ideas and potential solutions to solve the user’s problem.

Start by introducing an ideation technique of your choice. For this example, we’ll use the worst possible idea technique followed by a simple brainstorm. You can learn about different ideation techniques in this comprehensive guide to ideation in Design Thinking .

You might break the ideation phase up as follows:

• Presentation (5 minutes): What is ideation? What ideation technique will the group be using today, and how does it work? Provide a few examples to help them get started.
• Activity—worst possible idea (10 minutes): Using the “worst possible idea” technique, ask the group to spend around ten minutes coming up with “anti-solutions” to the problem they’re trying to solve.
• Activity—coming up with solutions (10 minutes): Having explored the opposite of what would be helpful to the user, it should now be easier to find potential solutions. Get the group to spend another ten minutes brainstorming as many ideas as possible. They can use words or sketches.
• Activity—sharing ideas and getting feedback (10 minutes): Ask participants to pair up and share their ideas. This step is all about gathering useful feedback: Are the ideas good? Why, or why not?
• Activity—refining your solution (10 minutes): Incorporating what they’ve learned about the user and the feedback they received on their initial ideas, it’s time for the Design Thinkers to pull everything into one single solution. For this activity, encourage participants to sketch out their solution rather than using words.
• Reflection and discussion (5 minutes): As a group, discuss what you’ve learned from the ideation phase so far.

7. Ideation part 2: User journey mapping (1 hour)

Now you’ll introduce a key UX design tool into the mix: user journey maps.

As explained by the Nielsen Norman Group , a journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. In the second part of the ideation phase, you’ll get your participants to compile a series of user actions into a timeline. Then they’ll add desires and pain-points for each step in the user’s journey, based on the one solution they decided on previously. For this part of the workshop, participants will need plenty of Post-it notes and a large surface to work on—such as a table, wall, or whiteboard.

You can divide the journey mapping phase of your Design Thinking workshop into the following activities:

• Presentation (10 minutes): What is a user journey map? Why do we need to create one, and what steps are involved?
• Activity—define the activities and steps in the customer’s experience (15 minutes): Ask participants to write down all the steps they can think of that make up the user’s journey. For example: Downloads the app, creates an account, uploads a profile photo, browses through potential matches, receives a match, sends a message. For the last 5 minutes, participants should combine any steps that are too similar, narrowing it down to 8-15 steps.
• Activity—group the steps into phases (10 minutes): Participants will now group the steps from the last activity into phases, aiming for 3-7 phases in total. Phases should be labelled from the user’s perspective. For example: Getting started, browsing the app, interacting with other users , etc.
• Activity—adding goals and pain-points (15 minutes): Ask participants to come up with goals and pain-points that relate to each step in the user journey. Goals are what propel the user from one step to the next, while pain-points prevent the user from moving forward. For example: The step “browses through potential matches” could be propelled by the user goal of wanting to meet new people. A pain-point could be that they don’t find any suitable matches in the local area.
• Sharing user journey maps, reflection and discussion (10 minutes): At the end of the ideation phase, put ten minutes aside for presenting and reflecting on all the user journey maps created.

8. Prototype and test ideas (1 hour)

Now for the fun part: building prototypes and testing ideas!

In this section of the workshop, participants will turn the steps from their user journey maps into digital screens for an app. They’ll then gather feedback from the rest of the group. Here’s an example of how you might run the prototyping and testing phase:

• Presentation (5 minutes): A brief introduction to prototyping and the materials needed for the following activities.
• Activity—create mobile screens (15 minutes): For each step in the user journey, participants will sketch out the user interface (i.e. the mobile screen) that would be needed for this step. Encourage participants to use one piece of paper per screen; this way, they won’t need to start over completely if one goes slightly wrong.
• Activity—add functionality to mobile screens (15 minutes): Now participants will turn their sketches into low-fidelity paper prototypes by adding functionality. Using Post-it notes, they’ll describe the functionality of each button; for example “adds item to basket”.
• Activity—user testing (15 minutes): Ask participants to spend some time with each member of the group, walking them through their designs and gathering feedback . Recommend using a feedback grid with the following quadrants: what worked, what could be improved, questions, and ideas.
• Activity—decide on a winning approach (10 minutes): Once the user testing round is complete, stick all design solutions up on the wall. As a group, you’ll now decide on a winning approach. Ask each participant to place a sticker on the idea they think is best.

9. Debrief and outline next steps (15 minutes)

Round off your Design Thinking workshop with a quick debrief. Participants should come away with an understanding of how Design Thinking can be used in the real world, so explain what would usually happen next—turning paper prototypes into wireframes and, eventually, clickable prototypes to be tested on real users, for example.

Dedicate the last ten minutes or so to reflection and discussion. Ask your Design Thinkers how they enjoyed the workshop and what they’ve learned. Was there anything that surprised them? What will they take away with them?

4. Running a Design Thinking workshop: What next?

Congratulations: you’ve just conducted an engaging, informative, and extremely valuable Design Thinking workshop! So what next?

If you are new to the world of workshop facilitation, you can apply some Design Thinking principles to the process itself. Take a user-centered approach and ask your participants for feedback. A great way of gathering feedback is to send a “thank you for taking part!” email together with a survey link. You can also include any good photos you took of the workshop.

Like any design project, be sure to continuously iterate and improve upon your Design Thinking workshop. If you’d like some examples of design thinking in the real world, check this out: 5 Game-Changing Examples of Design Thinking .

For a video overview of how to run a design thinking workshop remotely , be sure to check out this guide:

And for further reading, check out the following resources:

• How to Run a Remote Design Thinking Workshop (with Brittni Bowering)
• A Guide To User Testing In Design Thinking
• What Is Human-Centered Design? A Beginner’s Guide
• A Comprehensive Guide To Lean UX

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A Guide to Effective UX Team Management for Agile Teams in 2024

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17 design activities for team building & upping UX skills

We’ve all heard how teamwork makes the dream work. But what happens when the UX design team gets caught up in the work and design meetings and forgets to have fun? They lose sight of the bigger goal—to create enjoyable experiences for your users—and start viewing their job as a never ending series of deadlines. So, why not give your team a breather from the daily grind? Fun UX team activities can be a great way to upskill your team while boosting team morale and improving productivity. These design team activities create engaging team-bonding opportunities and encourage participants to foster their leadership qualities and step outside of their design comfort zone. In this guide, you’ll discover 17 design challenge ideas your team can use for discovery workshops, design thinking exercises, and generating ideas.

1. No-consequence design challenges

UX design challenges are a great way to engage your team around a common design challenge that has nothing to do with your product. UX design is often influenced by key outcomes and time constraints—both of which influence a designer's ability to create as they’d like to.

Design challenges help designers create without the constraints of briefs or deadlines. They provide a real-world design scenario that has no real ramifications—other than providing an opportunity for UX designers to take bigger design risks than they typically would. It’s an opportunity for designers to try the ideas they can’t apply to your product—and a way to get the team to discuss different design decisions.

2. App design critique

This is a common design interview framework that asks candidates to analyze the design decisions behind an app. In the context of team UX activities, these workshops let teams openly discuss and identify relationships between design choices and product experiences. While there are no right or wrong answers, this activity helps a UX designer to think beyond the surface. Also, it's a great way to fine-tune your team's feedback-sharing skills.

This example shows how to evaluate apps based on their visual elements, interaction design, and product strategy. Also, consider evaluating copywriting and motion design during these team-building exercises.

3. Tarot Cards of Tech

The Tarot Cards of Tech, developed by the Artefact Group, inspire designers, developers, and creators to think outside the box while evaluating a company's product. These cards feature provocations and prompts to help participants think about product design.

When used in a UX workshop setting, these cards enable designers to have fruitful discussions about the impact of a product—ones they typically wouldn’t have during their day to day. The card prompts allow product teams and designers to dive deep into product usage, equity, and access issues. The whole workshop group can use sticky notes to leave their thoughts around each card. Then, the team shares key takeaways or discusses what they've learned during the exercise.

4. Good and bad designs

The good design/bad design exercise is great for getting the team to discover new perspectives (or have a few good laughs) as they look at good (and bad) designs. Start by gathering three product features or designs your team loves, or doesn't, for this exercise. Once you've got the examples, it's time to use time boxing and chat about these designs. This kind of design workshop:

• Helps designers revisit successful UX design traits across industries.
• Enables the team to dive deep into what can go wrong in the absence of research insights.

The comfortable sharing of thoughts during this exercise helps your team bond and collaborate better.

5. A magic wand for bold thinking

Bold thinking is a perfect exercise for teams suffering from creative blocks. This exercise is also for teams looking to finalize an idea for a project. The idea is to give the team a magic wand and see what they can create with unlimited resources. As a UX manager , you can ask them to explore two ideas:

• What will they change in the existing product?
• What would they want more and less of in the product design?

Depending on their innovation skills, the team can come up with attainable or impractical ideas. Your job as a manager is to facilitate a prioritization exercise to convert these ideas into realistic concepts. Consider discussing ways to scale down original ideas with your team to get their buy-in and arrive at a single idea that works for the company.

6. Trending product analysis

Analyzing trending products and apps is another fun team-building activity that’s great for gaining buyer persona insights. Start by choosing a product that's trending in the market. Then, ask your team to brainstorm how the trending product has successfully catered to user habits and pain points. Capturing the broader themes using Post-it notes will help your team discover and analyze user experience trends.

7. Design interview task creation

No matter how many design articles you read or examples you gather, a design interview task is always tough to put together. You probably ask yourself what kind of task to create, what scope it should have, and how to assess design skills . One way to solve this problem is to get the team together and let them brainstorm on a design exercise for new hires—one they know is applicable to joining your UX design team. Let's look at a quick task example. You can ask teams to complete a whiteboarding design exercise—for example, an interactive prototyping task that you can use to develop prototyping skills. The idea here is to develop knowledge around information architecture and different approaches and perspectives. Different team members have different preferences and experiences, and this activity enables your team to share ideas and processes with each other.

8. Modeling clay UX design

It’s what your designers do best, but with a completely different set of tools—more reminiscent of those found in an art school. Give your team some modeling clay or dough and get them to design something—maybe a sign-up page or 404 page. It’s a fun activity that gets your designers building with their hands. The nature of clay modeling forces them to do more with less and pushes them to really think about the exact placement, angles, and curvature of objects on a page. Plus, it’s a fun alternative to what they usually spend time doing and a strong visual representation for capturing ideas imperfectly.

9. Random design prompts

Designercize is a great resource for UX design team activities. The website generates random prompts for designers to work on.

Tasks are best completed on a whiteboard—timed by the in-app, adjustable timer. You can select a difficulty level and regenerate prompts to your heart's desire. We suggest having multiple teams working on different prompts and then coming together to discuss each towards the end of the session.

10. Design article reading

Chances are you often come across design insights from online articles or podcasts. Bouncing these findings off your team encourages healthy discussion where team members get to reflect on what's working for others. This type of workshop starts with you sharing one or two articles that you've read in the past week. Give your team time to engage with the materials and ask them to share their thoughts—either generally, or on a specific concept you consider to be important.. The goal here is to do a reflection exercise for learning new things and moving forward together. For example, you can start off by discussing an episode from these design podcasts . Exercises like this enable designers to take pause, untangle, observe, and come back stronger. You can even use sticky notes to jot down ideas for consideration when working on a design.

11. Designer top trumps

Did you ever play top trumps as a kid? Maybe it was Pokémon cards you dealt in? The concept with these UX designer cards is similar—except the goal isn’t the game but creating the cards themselves.

This activity involves giving your team card templates to fill out with a doodle of themselves, their strengths and weaknesses, and some fun facts. Designers get to relax and have some fun whilst also giving insights into how they view themselves as designers. It’s a fun activity that helps your team connect with themselves and each other.

12. Gamification design

We all know the power of gamification and how it turns tedious tasks into fun activities for users. Design teams can have fun too while creating these gamification experiences. Gamification design exercises involve the design and product team brainstorming how to make the user experience more fun with gamification mechanisms. Ask your team to discuss gamification they love from other products—and even encourage them to talk about what they love about the games they play. For example, can you introduce badges, achievements, or characters to increase user engagement? These exercises are ideal for teams looking to improve retention by rewarding users.

13. Arcade games

Another way you can add a little fun to your design team is with online UX arcade games. These games help add a sprinkle of competition to your team and can help them improve their UX skills.

For example, this game from Uxcel’s Arcade challenges designers to spot alignment errors using fun shapes and jazzy colors. Designers can compete against each other for Pixels—points that earn them their place on a leaderboard.

14. Illustration design challenge

UX designers spend a lot of time designing buttons, scrollbars, and other product interactions—so much so that they often miss out on the chance to flex their creative muscles to the max. An illustration design challenge gives them a break from the day-to-day designs they’re used to creating, and enables them to design something more exciting. Give them a prompt—for example, ‘draw a giraffe landing on the moon’—and a space in which to design—either online or on paper—and watch the creativity start to flow. You can conclude this activity with a discussion about each drawing/illustration and what you like about each one.

15. Thirty circles exercise

If you're looking to warm up the team's creative muscles, this is for you. This exercise asks every team member to turn 30 circles into recognizable, daily-life objects in about 15 minutes.

You can use a Figma frame or create 30 blank circles on a piece of paper for this exercise. Once everyone finishes turning circles into objects, you can compare the results for fluency or ideas or who completed the most. This fun game doesn’t only help you gain insights into team members’ design styles but also helps improve their creative confidence.

16. Design video watch party

The goal of this type of design activity is to get the team to watch design-related interviews, videos, or even UX research sessions together.

It can be anything from design case studies to design thought-leader lectures . The idea here is to keep the conversation going about the design process, thinking, and coming up with new ideas.

17. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

The last one on this list is a fun activity where you nudge the team to think differently. Created by Ellis Paul Torrance, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking is a creativity test that evaluates individuals' problem-solving skills.

The first step is to provide your team with incomplete figures. Then, they have to sketch and create new visualizations from these figures. The goal here is to push designers' creativity and if they can come up with meaningful or original ideas. Plus, you end up with some pretty alternative designs.

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All these exercises bring your team together to learn from one another, solve issues, or create something new. Some activities may be more beneficial to your team, whereas others might not interest them. Regardless, designers learn best through collaboration , and that's the beginning of building design-first organizations. Uxcel Teams is the perfect tool to start building a design-first company. The platform helps designers upskill with courses, challenges, lessons, and more. Plus, managers get an overall idea of everyone's skills and can pick the best learning path for them. Help your team collaborate better with a 14-day free trial today!

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UX Design: A Process for Solving Problems

At its core, user experience design is about solving problems. But before you can solve a problem effectively it must be properly understood and defined. A good problem statement serves as a guide that both feeds the creative process and helps keep the team on track when exploring new ideas and solutions.

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A problem statement is a concise description of user issues or unmet needs that need to be addressed.

For example: “How can we help forgetful pet owners give medication daily in their home to ensure effective treatment, knowing that they may not set up a reminder themselves?”

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” - Uri Levine, cofounder of Waze

Problem Statement as Diagnosis

If you had a sore throat and went to the doctor, she would observe your symptoms, run tests and then analyze the results to form a diagnosis in order to prescribe the right treatment. Similarly, a problem statement can be thought of as a diagnosis of design issues identified through observation and testing. Getting to a good problem statement requires both methodical exploration and empathy for those involved. 

Methodical Empathy

To identify all the necessary information and start  empathizing with the users , use the five Ws (Who, What, When, Where and Why).

• Who is experiencing the problem?  Owners of pets who require daily medication.
• What is the problem?  People forget to give their pets medication at the same time every day making treatment less effective.
• When does the problem occur?  Varies by person, but often either mornings and/or evenings. 
• Where is the problem?  At home.
• Why does this problem exist?  Creating a new habit, like giving a pet medication daily, is hard without a reminder.

To answer these questions you’ll need  user research  such as observations from user testing, or ethnographic research and you may want to measure certain behaviors using quantitative methods. If you have existing research, organize and filter it to find patterns and themes that answer the above questions. Create relationships and connections between the groupings. Synthesize the information to form ideas and stitch together the bigger picture.

Keep Asking Why

The first answer to a question is often superficial the first time around and needs additional exploration to find the root of what is really happening. To dive deeper, use the  five Whys method .

• Why don’t people consistently give their pets medication?  They have a busy schedule and forget.
• Why do people forget?  It’s not a part of their routine.
• Why isn’t it a part of their routine?  It’s a new behavior and even though they try to leave the pill bottle out as a reminder, it’s easy to ignore.
• Why isn’t there a better reminder than the pill bottle?  The lack of obvious environmental triggers means pet owners would have to take the initiative to set their own reminders.
• Why don’t people set up their own reminders?  Overconfidence in their ability to remember and/or general inertia.

Using this method helps get past the surface to really understand the problem. When the root cause is identified, it’s much easier to build upon it to formulate the problem statement.

Communicating the Problem

Once you know the problem you're trying to solve, the next step is communicating it to team members and stakeholders. It’s important to have a clear problem statement because it will guide the solutions. Here are a few traits a good problem statement should include:

Human-centered:  Focus on the user. Frame the problem statement around the user and their needs. Avoid being organization-focused and leave out mentions of technology, budget and product specifications.

Don’t: “Company X wants to ensure customers comply with veterinarian instructions and give pets their daily medication.”

Do: “What are ways we can help forgetful pet owners ensure effective treatment by giving medication on schedule?”

Broad enough for exploration but narrow enough to be manageable:  Leave room for exploration and different creative solutions. However, avoid being too broad which results in little direction.

Don’t: “Improve compliance with veterinary medication instructions.”

Do: “Help forgetful pet owners give medication daily to ensure effective treatment.”

Phrase as a question:  Rephrasing the statement into questions such as “How might we...?” or “What can we do to…?” encourages creativity, ideation and helps generate a wide range of solutions. For example: “How can we help forgetful pet owners...?”

Need Help Defining Your Problem?

Contact our UX experts  who can conduct  user testing and research  to help you understand your users and make sure your organization is solving the right problems.

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Massac County High School Teacher Megan Musselman, center, helps students brainstorm ideas during EcoThink’s “Fast Fashion” sustainability challenge. Teams of students were asked to think of ways to reduce, reuse or recycle clothing, tackling an emerging environmental problem.

PADUCAH, Ky. – Local high school students from western Kentucky and southern Illinois put their problem solving skills to the test during the annual EcoThink project, challenging themselves to address environmental and sustainability issues through critical thinking exercises focused on teamwork and engineering concepts.

“The students really enjoyed this opportunity,” Paducah Tilghman High School Teacher Amy Clark said. “They liked seeing other students’ thought processes and ideas. One student said the word engineering frightened her but realized it wasn't as scary as she thought.”

This year’s project focused on a “Fast Fashion” challenge and the environmental impact of manufacturing cheap, limited-use clothing. Students were tasked with finding ways to reduce, reuse or recycle clothing by determining buying habits, back-to-school shopping needs and how to impact culture changes with their peers. Solutions presented by the teams included creating a phone application and distribution centers for renting clothes and designing clothing that can be modified depending on the season or style.

The EcoThink project was led by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) Portsmouth/Paducah Project Office deactivation and remediation contractor Four Rivers Nuclear Partnership (FRNP).

“EcoThink is a great way to emphasize DOE’s mission for sustainability to students in the region,” EM Paducah Site Lead April Ladd said. “Not only does it bring awareness to real world problems, but by encouraging students to think about these problems, they may consider a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), which will be critical as the next generation workforce is developed.”

EcoThink, which was featured at the 2024 Waste Management Symposia ’s STEMZone, is conducted through a partnership between Sprocket, Inc. and University of Kentucky College of Engineering and sponsored by FRNP.

“Each year, I am impressed with the ingenuity displayed by the students who participate in EcoThink,” FRNP Program Manager Myrna Redfield said. “We appreciate all the teachers and volunteers who come together to make this event possible and look forward to growing and improving the program in the future.”

-Contributor: Dylan Nichols