Crazy 8s
A fast sketching exercise to generate solution ideas
What is it?
Crazy 8’s is a core Design Sprint method. It is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. The goal is to push beyond your first idea, frequently the least innovative, and to generate a wide variety of solutions to your challenge.
Here’s a quick overview video:\
Why use it?
This practice is a great way to ensure a product team is taking the time to prioritize user needs and generate enough solutions to needs to broaden the potential for finding the best idea. Often times, a team generates a solution and begins development right away without considering whether a solution is a good one. But “good” is a relative term, so ideally teams should be generating a myriad of product solutions in order to compare and contrast and allow the best option to emerge.
Steps
- Give each participant a single sheet of printer paper and a sharpie
- Have participants fold their paper into eight sections (it should look like the paper in the header image for this post)
- Set the timer for eight minutes
- Each team member sketches one idea in each rectangle
- When the timer goes off, put your pens down
- Have team members spend 2 min presenting their 8 ideas to everyone
Follow-on Activities
After the team presents ideas, you can run a dot-voting exercise to vote on which ideas and idea components the team likes the most. Afterwards, you can consolidate the ideas into a single idea to flesh out into a testable prototype.