6–10–14 rapid prototyping: a remote group activity recharges your UX team

Mandy Ding
UX Planet
Published in
6 min readMay 6, 2021

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This activity helps us to reconnect with co-workers in a way we never experienced before.

“Describe how you’re feeling as you wrap-up this week.”

“Fatigued. Exhausted. Overwhelmed…”

A month ago, we distributed a survey to all UX members at our company to do a working-from-home pulse check. Not surprisingly, people were buried in endless meetings and design tasks.

To help everyone reconnect and regain the joy of design, I organized a “team fun activity” which is called “6–10–14 rapid prototyping”. The feedback from our global UX team was very positive, so I would like to share the step-by-step guidance of running this activity. Hope this engaging activity can also help your team to escape from the daily design routines, unleash creativity, and closely collaborate even in this working-from-home era.

Credit to: undraw.io

6–10–14 rapid prototyping: what is it & why?

You probably have practiced rapid prototyping before. Rapid prototyping is part of the design process after you have a clear grasp of the problem and your users’ needs. It helps you to present new concepts to and get feedback from stakeholders in the early stage of your design process, so that they can understand and approve a feature development or a product.

You may ask — well, we know what rapid prototyping is, but what do you mean by “6–10–14 rapid prototyping”?

Here’s the definition —

You sketch or create design solutions for 6 minutes, 10 minutes, 14 minutes, and with a quick additional requirement announcement in between each. Since we run this activity remotely, we give 5 minutes extra time for you to wrap up the design at the end of the exercise.

Unlike the old, classic way of rapid prototyping, this exercise requires the participants to ideate even faster, and iterate the design to reflect the reframed problem statement.

Here’s an example —

After the exercise, you should give time to each group to present their design solution. It will provide an opportunity for UX members to learn how people think through the same problem from different perspectives. If budget is allowed, you can also nominate a winning group and give the group members an award.

You may want to book 2 hours for the entire activity:

Introduce the exercise — 15 minutes

Exercise — 35 minutes

Bio break — 10 minutes

Presentation, nomination, discussion — 60min

Now, I will walk you through the steps and share some best practices for conducting the 6–10–14 rapid prototyping exercise.

1. Set up the exercise

You can follow the steps below to set up the exercise:

  • Divide the participants into small groups: You should assign 3–4 participants to each group, and have 1 facilitator in each group to provide instructions when needed. The facilitator should not be participating in the design ideation and iteration.
  • Define the tools for the exercise: You can use an online meeting software (such as Zoom) to introduce the exercise and let participants communicate within small breakout rooms. For the exercise, you need to pick a whiteboarding tool to allow participants to collaborate remotely. We used Miro for the exercise and gave instructions on finding the wireframing toolkits in Miro. In addition, I provided a storyboard toolkit (some vector images) for each group, and participants can easily drag them if they need.
These scenes and characters are downloadable and can be found in the SAP AppHaus toolkit. Scenes and characters credit to SAP AppHaus.
  • Define the expected outcomes: You should specify what is the expected deliverable before going into the exercise. I used the following images to illustrate what kind of deliverable we’re looking for — it can be a set of lo-fi wireframes, storyboards, diagrams, or a combination of any of the options above.
These are free images found on the internet. I used the 3 images on the right side to show example design solutions/deliverables that can be created in Miro.
  • Announce the winning criteria: If you’re going to nominate a winning group later, you should let the participants know the criteria beforehand. The criteria I used were: Which team presents the most innovative design solution with a human touch? Keeping the criteria in mind, the participants know that they can think broadly, concern less about the technical limitations, and be empathetic when iterating the design.

2. Run the exercise

After introducing what the exercise is about and sending participants to their breakout rooms, you should book 35 minutes for the exercise. I crafted the following requirements to ask participants to think upon the topic of patient-doctor virtual communication, which is a topic that my colleagues don’t encounter in their daily work (we work on insurance tech products).

I drafted the requirements and they’re not referring to any real product or concept.

You can also craft your requirements, as long as the second and third requirements are add-ons to the first requirement, and it is a topic that your participants don’t think often in daily work but is relevant to their daily lives.

During the exercise, you will need to reveal the requirements one by one and make sure all the groups receive the message at the same time to ensure fairness. The facilitators in each group can help you set the timer and provide proper help. Here’s the facilitator guidance I gave:

1. Participants may question that “remote patient examination” involves many phases (make an appointment, pay the visit, get the prescription…). You should let the participants know we want them to focus only “pay the visit” phase.

2. Participants can think creatively and broadly. There is no technical limitations for the design solutions.

3. If participants have questions such as “Who is the user of this digital solution, patient or doctor?” “Is the injured arm the right/left arm?”, you can let them know that they can make assumption themselves, as long as they think it makes sense and doesn’t contradict the requirements given.

4. You can guide the participants to focus more on “thinking through the problem and proposing the solution”. They don’t need to worry about the visual details.

5. You can set the timer in Miro after we announce each requirement. You can also verbally communicate to the team how much time is left.

3. Present the design solution

This will be the most exciting part of the exercise. We had 5 groups of participants, so I gave each team 5 minutes to present their solution, and then I asked each team to use one sentence to summarize — what is the highlight of your design solution?

Below are some snapshots of the solutions my colleagues came up with. (Guess which one is the winner? 😉)

Snapshots of some of our deliverables. They’re not a commitment to deliver any software or functionality, and they’re not referring to any real product.

My colleagues shared their thoughts and learnings after the exercise, such as “Approach design with a playful spirit”, “Always validate at the early stage of your design” “Create an environment where it is safe to fail”.

I was glad to see that people really enjoyed this exercise, and seeing their smiles during the activity is one of the best rewards for my efforts. If you only have a small budget for the team fun activities, worry no more, try out this 6–10–14 rapid prototyping exercise and reconnect with your colleagues like never before.

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Design Lead @Cisco. Art lover, plant lover, amateur baker 🎨🌱🍰