Design Session

Prepare a plan of attack for your next team meeting and get to the meat of any design project in a half-day or full-day

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Preparation

Note any documents that need to be reviewed or activities that need to be completed before the workshop.

Problems

Focus on the customer’s actual experiences. Prioritize them in order of severity and choose one or two to focus on. Resist the desire to skip ahead to “fixing” until you have organized the problems you are going to solve.

Solutions Brainstorm

It’s time to figure out how to solve the problem, design the flow, or develop the plan.

Brainstorming tips:

The more ideas the better!
Don’t worry about how feasible an idea is just yet. Expensive ideas may lead to other ideas that fit your resources
Provide sketching materials. Encourage everyone to visualize the solution.
If the group is large, break into smaller, cross-disciplinary teams and then report ideas back to the group.

Size & Prioritize

List your potential solutions in the following format --> Solution | Impact | Effort

Rewrite all site copy | medium | medium
Leverage API to automate enrollment | medium | large

Do we need to...

Gather more evidence? (Can we understand the problem better?)
Explore alternate solutions? (We loved these solutions but they’re too big. Let’s find a quicker fix to fit our timeline.)
Research solution size in more detail? (We need more information to understand which solution actually requires less effort.)

Next Steps

@name Task by DUE-DATE

Parking Lot

Store topics and ideas that are out of scope or beyond reach for this workshop.

How to use this template for your next

Design Session

Use this framework for a long-form design session where you and your team want to dig in deep on a specific issue. The meeting agenda follows a simple flow: preparation, brainstorming, prioritizing, "do we need to..." (sanity check), and logging next steps.

It's important during any of these parts of the agenda to also use the Parking Lot, which is at the end of the agenda. The Parking Lot is where you put good ideas or questions that are off-topic. You don't want to lose these precious ideas, but you don't want to be distracted by them either.