During out first design class, we studied two books-related websites. We grouped in 2 and looked at how our classmate was interacting with the website, what they were doing, where they were clicking, their reactions, etc.
We were then asked to list what we thought were good and bad features of those websites, and we all came up with different and similar ideas. Once this was done, our teacher introduced a method called Crazy Eights. The goal of the exercise was to quickly sketch rough ideas to improve different parts of one of the websites. The rules were as follow:
- Fold a large piece of paper in half 4 times. You’ll end up with 8 spaces on your sheet.
- You have 8 minutes in total to sketch, as you have 8 spaces, you have one minute per space.
- When the 8 minutes end, you stop sketching.
After that, we all described and explained our sketches to the class, and could see the same ideas came up several times: make some features more prominent, add more/bigger images, add social medias, etc.
Then, we went back to sketching, this time taking all these ideas into consideration to map and improve the journey of the user.
As I had never heard of the Crazy Eights method before, I decided to read some more about it, and I found out that it is commonly used in workshops and design sprints, to push the designers’ creativity, come up with a large quantity of ideas, without focusing so much on the quality. When you only have a minute to sketch, you don’t have time to think too throughly and decide against an idea that might be too crazy.
The second part of the “game” is to choose one or two ideas and refine them, sketching for a longer period of time.
The third part is to create a storyboard, on which you would sketch the steps the user needs to take to get where they want.
While researching Crazy Eights, I also came across another interesting method called the 6 Thinking Hats, invented by Edward de Bono. The image below illustrates it quite well, without having to get into too much details. Each person wears one of the following hats, allowing them to have different perspectives on the matter, and exchange ideas.
Image taken from http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php
To conclude, brainstorming is a very important stage in any creative decision making, and should not be ignored.
Want to find out more about Crazy 8? Check out the links below:
How to: Run a Crazy Eights exercise to generate design ideas
Honing Crazy Eights with randomness
Facilitating an Effective Design Studio Workshop
My Journey in Web Design 
One thought on “The Importance of Brainstorming”