THE SOLUTION

Design team workshops and ideation sessions that reveal all teammates’ ideas to find the best opportunities for innovation.

With such a massive project to tackle, we knew that we had to innovate from a position of strength. We’d need to make sure the entire teams’ ideas made it to the forefront, so I intentionally designed workshops that allowed us to uncover diverse perspectives that might not be heard without a strategic approach to collaboration.

At first, our team workshopped together to build a shared conceptual model of our initial research. We then used design thinking exercises to synthesize our analysis into creative solutions. To deliver the project by our deadline, we worked together to complete stakeholder interviews, analyze research, synthesize findings, wireframe solutions, and complete designs together.

A STRATEGIC APPROACH

Planning for Success

I value taking a strategic approach to any project that must deliver relevant results. With such a big project, proper strategy and planning was essential. To pull this off, the whole team needed to be in-sync and understand their roles.

But before embarking on such a complex undertaking, I partnered with our resident team strategist, Keva Blair, to help map out a strategy that could guide us towards our goal. Pictured below are the various elements that we worked together to define (deliverables, team ceremonies, roles and responsibilities, project timelines, weekly milestones, and other regular team activities).

By using this approach, I was able to assign and lead a team of individuals with varying roles and availability. To make matters even more complex, our team would need to constantly pivot into different “work modes” as some teammates would become more (or less) available due to shifting workloads and responsibilities. At any moment, I learned how to shift from manager to designer to facilitator as the configuration of teammates constantly shifted based on the workloads around our agency.

EMPATHY

Learning about our Stakeholders Goals and Current-state Research

In order to innovate, our team had to first understand a mountain of information from our own research, client presentations, and stakeholder interviews.

Much of this information came to us in piecemeal, and interviews proved to be spotty and sometimes unhelpful. In addition, some of the presentations that clients had given us were vague. It would take a lot of teamwork to understand the capabilities of each cyber defense application and how they worked together to counter a cyber threat.

DEFINE

Mapping the Journey for a Shared Understanding

To make sense of our vast stock of newly-discovered findings, we set to work mapping a shared conceptual model of the functionalities across applications that were involved in the current-state counter-threat workflow. This practice highlighted duplicative capabilities across systems, and gave us insight into gaps where new capabilities could improve the process.

IDEATE

Team Workshopping for Innovative Integrations

The core of our innovation methodology was to create an approach that would allow us to leverage all of our team’s ideas, but again, this could only happen in workshop settings that planned to use a framework designed to reveal all ideas on an equal playing field.

As a result of the pandemic, we needed to update our practices by enacting these UX workshops remotely. We used Mural.co, a team workshopping application, though we were careful not to include any sensitive information over the platform. These digital whiteboarding sessions allowed us to organize our thoughts using digital sticky notes. That gave us the freedom to creatively group our ideas into unique clusters. This practice is called synthesis, where important findings come together to form creative solutions for creating new capability integrations.

As we worked, we made sure to save all sticky note groups, just in case we wanted to validate or remix our ideas later. Eventually, hundreds of pieces of information started to collate, and through our discussions, opportunities for innovation slowly came into view.

DIGITAL SKETCHING

Team Ideation at Lightning Speed

We continued to use the Mural.co whiteboarding application to create, organize and arrange our ideas into early design concepts.

Each of our newly-sketched ideas became capabilities that could be integrated into a user interface. We used screenshots from applications around the web as inspiration, quickly informing what our imagined user interfaces could look like.

WIREFRAMING AND DESIGN

Delegating Interface Design Across the Team for a Speedy Execution

After each user interface wireframe was completed, we split up the design work by assigning different pieces of functionality to different teammates. This allowed us to design our interfaces all-at-once, integrating them into a cohesive layout as we worked.

The project progressed through five phases of workshops, ideation, and design, each representing a unique phase of a counter threat scenario provided by the client. As we worked through each phase, our wireframes began to look more and more polished. This is because we were able continually borrow components designed in earlier phases to quickly complete new interfaces. Our team had started to develop a fluid rhythm, accelerating our workflow with each completed phase.

THE RESOLUTION

Sharing our Work with Stakeholders

As the user interface designs began to take shape, we started to put together a presentation to share with government stakeholders responsible for the planning, development, and oversight of the defense program.

After our presentation, the stakeholders seemed shocked into action. The explorations that our team presented caused the organizers to realize that they needed to quickly investigate more than initially imagined. Our work helped them to see the scope of their vision, and highlighted a need to start pursuing planning aggressively.

Before we had started our maps and design process, the project had only existed “on-paper”. Our work helped spur the program into action. Planning is now underway, and some of the areas for integration that our team discovered are being considered for development.

In the end, our work created a vision for our stakeholders’ organizations to rally around, and helped them to understand the scope of the journey that they had embarked upon. Our work was commended, and our team was assigned to the contract for another year, providing another great source of revenue for our agency.

Our work also highlighted the need for an over-arching design system that could accommodate prior and newly developed capabilities. We were asked to begin work on that project, so we spent the next 6 months building a set of governing design principles that could extend across a huge network of capabilities.

REFLECTIONS

Though challenging, this project proved to be an incredibly fun team effort. Rather than a few colleagues making all of the design decisions, we approached this project so that the whole team could follow a well-structured methodology for innovation. The workshops and collaborative sessions that I designed helped us to combine and remix features, eventually creating something “greater than the sum of its parts”. Because we followed a strategic design methodology, we are certain that we brought the full capacity of our team's creativity to bare.

Over the course of my career, I’ve come to value a strategic approach as absolutely paramount to good design. Without design strategy, ideas often “miss the mark”, and lose sight of the client’s (and audience’s) true needs and mission. Design often defaults to the vision of one or two strong team members if the environment lacks a solid hierarchy that can effectively create a democratic design process. In other words, a systematic approach to the work ensures that all teammates’ ideas take center stage, not just those of the loudest members.

In the end, our team-based strategic approach helped us form a shared understanding of problem. Using that understanding, we could creatively workshop solutions together. We then weaved those innovative ideas into designs what would impact our stakeholders meaningfully.

Learnings and Takeaways

1. Design Strategy is essential to complex team efforts and must produce a well-considered approach.

2. Team workshops expose ideas that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. Group discussion and workshops create a confluence of these ideas, resulting in impactful design concepts.

3. Every teammate has a different language and perspective that must be considered during project planning.

4. It’s important to be sensitive to team members’ suggestions over the course of a project. This kind of awareness can help a team pivot when conditions inevitably start to shift.

5. The speed of design radically increases when sketches and wireframes are created in real-time together with teammates.