My first thought on Design Jam

Today I had a chance to involve in Design Jam from my colleague Eewei from Thoughtworks. The idea of this event is to get together with the team in every role (Dev, PM, QA, or as many roles as you could find in your team) to gather ideas as much as possible to solve a problem in design. After you’ve given a problem to solve, you will be divided into teams and work out the a possible solution to your problem.

The problem that we were trying to solve was

**“Going to the cinema used to be a fun social event for people of all ages. Today consumers prefer to watch movies on their phones, laptops and home cinema systems. How do we make the cinema experience at your local theatre more engaging and attractive? Create a mobile app that will get consumers going to the cinema again.” **

Your team will have to think how to design a mobile app for a young busy professional woman who also has just started to date someone. The rules of this game, would be “no rules” you can think of anything you could possibly think of.

We had some templates that we need to fill in, such as follows:

• Rules
• Team 1 in action
• Team 2 in action
• Empathy mapping – Who will use it? This helps understand what the users motivations are
• Elevator pitch – sum up what your app d
• Features – what is the min and max delightful set?
• User journeys – what is the happy path?
• Paper protoypes of the killer apps!
• Presentations – sell it to the dragons den in one sentence!
• Feedback/Retro! fyi, sad feedback was that they wanted more time and to develop the app. I see that as positive!

My surprises would be I’ve neven thought we’d come up with all these ideas in 1.30 hr. And you could get as much as ideas without any boundaries. It is an awesome game that you could play with your team if you need as much as ideas possible to solve a problem.

Reference : http://www.designjams.org/wiki/Design_Jam_London_1