What a whirlwind! Starting last Thursday at noon, we turned off the outside world as best we could to work on our own design ideas. 24 hours later, after plenty of sketching, lots of whiteboarding, a bit of user research, and as much design and prototyping as we could fit in, the event culminated on Friday afternoon with design presentations, a picnic and a terrific afternoon with the team.

Truth be told, it was more than just a 24 hour event. It started a few weeks ago when we collected design ideas for the Slam from the entire company. We ended up with 6 design projects and 6 different teams to work on them:

Mad*Pow Operations Monitor (M.O.M.)
As any company grows and expands their team and operations, that company will experience a certain level of growing pains. At Mad*Pow, our growing pains come in the form of space issues and unknown whereabouts. The team’s solution features a comprehensive overview of company-wide announcements, office-specific announcements, office availability, and a status of each team member.





The Glean Team
Farms routinely find themselves with a surplus of food, either left in the field or harvested and stored. In both cases, this perfectly good produce goes to waste in a short period of time. There is a huge opportunity to create a streamlined system of quickly and efficiently getting this type of food from the farms to the people who need it. The Glean Team envisioned a web-based, searchable communication hub for Farmers, gleaning event organizers, food recipient organizations and volunteers to all get the information they need quickly and easily.





KarmaCrew
When it comes to volunteering, although a lot of people would love to volunteer more, it's hard to commit to a steady schedule or to find opportunities that fit everyone's lifestyle (having kids, having no car, etc.). When it comes to finding volunteers, non-profit organizations often don't have the time or resources to find good, reliable volunteers on a moment's notice. The Karma Crew team designed a web application where volunteers can can find "quick tasks" to do for area non-profits and charity groups. Volunteers earn "karma points" based on the amount of hours they help out and can earn badges for special accomplishments.





Lyphlign
The Quantified Self movement has exploded in recent years, with millions of Americans tracking aspects of their lives including their physiological and psychological states, their medical conditions, and the environment they live in. Measuring this data gives people insights into how they live their lives and how they can improve themselves. The team envisioned a web service that lets people easily collect and compare all of their personal quantified data in one place, and offers insights based on analyzing correlated data.
 



Say Say Oh Playdate
Parents everywhere desperately need a mobile app to help them understand when their child's friends (and parents) are free and where the playdate will be.  To help fill this need, the team designed an easy to use industry-standard calendar and contact functionality, coupled with sophisticated features that will help moms, dads and child caregivers everywhere plan fun playdates.

 


Media Sharing That Doesn’t Stink
Keeping track of interesting things to share is difficult. The goal here was to create an internal, sharable, online media library where Mad*Pow staff can collect and upload digital content (articles, eBooks, videos, tutorials, audio, images), based on a shared topic of interest. Considering the overwhelming amount of content available, we’re trying to tap internal knowledge, tastes, and preferences to facilitate the process by which people find and absorb valuable, pre-qualified information. The end result is a combination of library management tools, users’ external social networked reading lists, recommendations based on preferences, and the ability for your network to recommend content that best fits your information needs right now!

Folks here at Mad*Pow are passionate about designing new, engaging, and useful experiences. Like all designers, as we go through the world, we can’t help thinking about creative ideas, better ways to do things, or cool new applications. Sometimes, though, there is just not enough time in the day to do anything with all those ideas.

Well, this month at Mad*Pow we’re doing something about that. We’re really excited to be conducting our first company-wide Design Slam where people will have the opportunity to work collaboratively on a set of new ideas.

So what’s a Design Slam? I’m not really sure if there is an official definition. But, what we are doing is setting aside some dedicated time for groups of teams to come together to work on a new product or design idea - bringing it to life in the form of a vision prototype, mockups, or working code. The “Slam” part comes from the fact that it will be a bit of a competition that takes place over a specified day and half in June.

We’ll start on a Thursday and teams will have until Friday afternoon to brainstorm ideas, sketch solutions, and design and code as much as they can for a presentation to the rest of the company. It’s going to be a fun, intense, and energetic two days! A company wide vote on the most creative, innovative, intuitive and strategically viable design will determine the team with bragging rights for the next year.

So how about the new product ideas? What will we be working on? In true Mad*Pow fashion, we crowd-sourced the set of 6 ideas that different teams will be working on. We had 34 people submit 48 different ideas. Totally awesome and inspiring what people came up with – new products that would help folks in need, apps for charitable organizations, new ideas for healthcare and financial services, or just plain fun experiences (the Tommy Heinsohn homer quote tracker being one of my favorites). In the end, we settled on 6 new product ideas that aim to help individuals, charities or other organizations. More on the specific ideas coming in a post-Slam blog post ;)

Right now teams are doing a little research in preparation for the Design Slam to start. They’re checking out competitors to these ideas, interviewing stakeholders or noodling on ideas. We’re encouraging the personal brainstorming and sketching by giving folks sketchbooks specifically for the Design Slam. Always be sketching! Our goal is for teams to be ready to hit the ground running when we say go.



Obviously, the idea to carve out time from every day work to explore new ideas and be creative is not unique (Google 20% time, and tons of others). But we’re really excited for the Design Slam as a good fit for us. We think this activity will help us strengthen individual and team relationships, learn about new subject areas, and be inspired by working with subject areas we don’t normally get to work with. And to boot, we hope to have some cool designs that we can build on to help charitable organizations or others in our network.

Looking forward to reporting back on how it goes!

• User-centered design is not necessarily user-led design. If you are looking for an innovative solution, don’t simply ask users what they want. Users are not good at envisioning new solutions. Developing an innovative design this way is not recommended.
• Understanding your target audience is extremely important. In some instances, this may not take much work to developing an innovative solution. For example, if you are designing something new for a broad consumer audience, chances are that the designers may be one of the target audience and have a head start understanding the potential experience. However, for specialized domains, designers may need to ramp up on the audience and understand what it is like to walk in their shoes. For example, I am not a veterinarian or a CPA. For projects where I’ve designed solutions for these audiences, I’ve done my due diligence to understand the audience. I don’t necessarily ask them directly what they want, but I make sure to understand their perspective and frustration points. At Mad*Pow, we call this Research-Inspired Design.
• Lastly, recognize the relative importance of innovation versus usability by convention. The goal of many design projects is not necessarily to develop an innovative design, but rather create a design that is highly usable, efficient and drives customer satisfaction. In this case, application of a user-centered process design is critical. However, this doesn’t mean creativity is thrown out the window, but rather that you are doing your due diligence to make sure the design is intuitive and useful.