Design Jam London – my review

I was fortunate enough to get a ticket at the very first Design Jam today. It was put together as part of Mozilla Labs’ work to encourage ‘open design’, and runs in the spirit of developer ‘hack days‘, but mainly aimed at UX designers (the first of its kind?). I’m happy to say the event was successful in generating a lot of conversations, getting involvment from the local UX community and beyond, and getting people excited about UX.

I was looking forward to seeing how other designers approached UX, looking to gain insight and value from other practitioners’ work. Although I expected many more UX people to be involved, there weren’t many experienced UX practitioners who participated. Still, I learnt a lot from my teammates who came from varied backgrounds (dev, research assistant, comms, anthropology, veteran generalist).

Here are some of the positive points from my experience with Design Jam:

1. It’s a whole level of experience doing design itself, as opposed to learning about it from books and events. Design Jam succeeded very well here.
2. There was good diversity of skills – many people I’ve never met before, and certainly had the pleasure to work with. We all learnt how good design could take place with the right conditions and environment.
3. Mentors – having them around provided a real yardstick and that extra polish and validation to our work. I was happy that Leisa Reichelt and Ivanka Majic came along to assist.
4. The space – kudos to City University and the organizers for setting up and providing the space needed to do the work. It was perfect.
5. Equipment, tools, etc. – apart from some minor glitches with the projector, I felt there were enough stickies, post-its, etc. although I did bring along my own design kit (instead of a laptop, like everyone else did).
6. The organizers (@johannakoll, @joelanman, @cyberdees, @bobbywatson, Kate from City Uni) were really helpful, went out of their way to get us coffee, and worked their asses off to make this happen.

I think some improvements can be made in future runs of Design Jam:

1. Incentivize more experienced UX practitioners to participate. I certainly saw many people hungry to learn about UX, and it’s not just about having the ability to create personas, using a UX process or doing user research. An experienced practitioner can make a real difference in how all that gets synthesized.
2. It would’ve been better if we had more time for reflection and learning. I felt there were many people, some of which were new to UX, who could’ve given their thoughts and opinions about their experience. It would’ve been much more valuable to gain those insights during the event.
3. The presentation phase could’ve benefitted from more structure. Having some sort of structure and time limit would encourage teams to focus and deliver a more compelling presentation, rather than a looser format of this-is-is-our-prototype-and-heres-how-we-got-there – keeping in mind that energy levels usually drop fast toward the end of these kinds of events.
4. It became a bit intrusive to edit the wiki while doing groupwork – it meant that occasionally one member of the team had to be disengaged from groupwork to focus on the wiki. While I appreciate the value of real-time conversation and updates, it could’ve been given a bit more thought – maybe allocate time for groups to do that rather than steal away precious group time.
5. For some reason, I feel it’s important to have good wall space do to UX design. There were teams that had to make do without ample space, but I guess no one seemed to complain.
6. It felt a bit harder to work without easy access to coffee (ok this is a bit out of place, but…). Thanks again to the wonderful organizers who went out of their way to get us takeaway coffee from a nearby cafe.

Some interesting highlights:

• Our levels of do – part of our conceptual map of the user’s re-finding activity.
• Our user research, done on twitter – complete with incentive for willing participants.
• Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes cards came in handy.
• iPads as prototyping tool and makeshift powerpoint slides.
• Family friendly.
• Makeshift wall.
• Location-based piles.
• Design Jam wiki – thanks to @jeffvancampen.
• Our team, SevenHeaven.

I’m looking forward to the next one! Big applause to the organizers and sponsors (Mozilla, City University, Johnny Holland).