UX Workshops, Crazy 8s and bonkers 4s
Crazy 8’s is a design sprint workshop concept introduced by Google as a method to get rapid ideas from a team of decision makers within an organisation.
Written by
UX session duration: 60 minutes
We’ve ran some great UX workshops at Higher Ground. For prototyping an idea, one of the best around is Crazy 8’s.
Crazy 8’s is a design sprint workshop concept introduced by Google as a method to get rapid ideas from a team of decision makers within an organisation.
The aim of the workshop is to gather input from key stakeholders into how a new idea or design concept could work to the customers they understand best.
Collectively, everyone listens to each other's ideas and are invited to vote on a favourite choice.
This approach helps agencies and stakeholders make shared and informed decisions into the direction a design concept should take.
How to run a Crazy 8 workshop UX design session
The lead UX designer gathers key members of a project team, these can be both from the client and the agency helping the client. We find a good mix of staff members on the front-line and senior members is better for quantitative research purposes.
Using handouts, the workshop leader offers template pages. This is usually an A3 page, split into 8 sections, and any drawing equipment they need to get down fast ideas on paper.
Figma now comes with FigJam. It contains heaps of free UX strategy templates from flow diagrams, journey maps to Crazy 8's. Find out more here.
Bonkers 4’s
For web apps which are generally used on larger screens our UX team at Higher Ground take a slightly different approach. Splitting a landscape page into 8 sections is really only relevant for mobile layouts (with an argument to say you can use 8 for modals).
So we’re renamed Crazy 8’s to Bonkers 4's. Which is basically dividing A4 paper into 4 for landscape aspect ratio designs. We suggest 2 minute rounds of sketching, as there will be much more going on in this area.
How is it ran?
A timer of 8 minutes is set and the team are set to work on sketching out ideas of how a concept should look. This could be a web page layout, a landing page, an app navigation, a software dashboard or a company logo for instance.
When the timer buzzes, all sketches are placed on a wall for all the team to see.
One by one each team member quickly talks through their ideas and how they arrived at their decision.
After reviewing all designs. Each team member has 3 sticky dots and are asked to vote on their favourite using one sticky dot for each favourite.
When the favourites are chosen. The winning designs are further reviewed and discussed so a decision can be chosen.
What you will need for this workshop?
- An adequate workshop space
- Sticky dots
- Pens, pencils & erasers
- A4 divided into 4 or A3 divided into 8
- For Bonkers 4’s A4 divided into 4
- Blue tack
- A timer
- Nice people
To find out more, Google Design Sprint academy has lots of amazing resources.
