Great ideas don’t have to come from the UX or service designer on a team. Instead, a good designer taps into the knowledge and facilitates idea generation with others. One way of doing this is through design games.
Here are a few that I’ve tried and had success with and some that I haven’t (yet). The ones I’ve yet to try are on my to-do list, waiting for the right opportunity.
Prioritisation games
wow, how, now, pow – helps a multi-disciplinary team estimate the effort and impact a change will have on a user’s experience. It allows teams to prioritise what to do and agree to focus on high-impact activities by weighing up the cost and expected benefits. It uses a mapping exercise to plot changes on an axis of high and low impact vs high and low effort. It helps bring engineers into the design process to keep the UX team focusing on changes that can be delivered to users.