Online Workshop- Venture Design V: Designing the Right Product

Learning Objectives

This workshop links the design output from the prior Venture Design workshops to a systematic view of how to structure your focal points and perspective on the venture’s objective into a set of actionable inputs for product development. This workshop introduces concepts around the use of agile user stories, storyboarding, prototyping, and wireframing.  The learning objectives are:

1. Hands-on experience linking agile user stories and storyboards to personas and value propositions
2. Techniques for decomposing your idea into a set of UI components and then selecting and diagnosing the applicability of comparable existing implementations
3. Know-how and do’s + dont’s for creating prototypes and wireframes
4. Ability to quickly and effectively develop a set of relevant visual guidelines for your product and related materials

Slides

The following are the workshop slides, on SlideShare:

Video

This is a video of yours truly delivering the explanatory portions of the workshop.

Preparation & Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites. While the other Venture Design workshops are designed to precede this workshop, the workshop works fine on a stand-alone basis.

Instructor notes: The checklists below describe ‘minimum viable preparation’ and additional related preparation.

Minimum Viable Preparation

1. Review the slides
2. Prep the materials below

Additional Preparation

Review the tutorials on the underlying tools and frameworks from the exercises:

1. Personas
2. Lean Startup
3. Business Model Canvas

If you’re interested in the surrounding body of work on Venture Design, see that link and if you’re interested in a structure program for product design & entre/intra-preneurship, check out Startup Sprints.

Materials

1. Index Cards

While Post-It’s are more in fashion for design workshop type events, these exercises are designed around index cards. The reason is that the students will progressively layer more information on to the cards. That said, use whatever works for you; just make sure to review the exercises and have advice for your participants on how they’ll organize their work. I do not recommend doing these on the computer- it tends to create writers block and a desire to create something more permanent than this material is meant to be.

2. A Product Idea to Work

Since the workshop involves sitting down and creating storyboards, all the participants will need to have an idea to use. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in an advance state of planning- as long as they generally know what it is and who it’s for, I think you’ll find it’s sufficient. For those without an idea (or wondering what level of description will work), here are some sample ideas: Venture Concepts.

3. Storyboarding Squares

 STORYBOARDING SQUARES

For workshops, group exercises, and generally getting started with storyboarding, I like to use these paper squares and a sharpie/pen. The PDF you can download here has a set of typical scenes which you can print out and use. They do need to be cut or ripped since there are two/page. You’ll find cutting marks and the individual pages and what I actually like to do is use a metal ruler and just rip them (see left). I created them with the online tool, StoryboardThat.com and you may find you want to go there and create your own (not to mention creating digital storyboards once you’re ready). If you want to use the above squares in the PDF on Storyboardthat.com, you can copy the storyboard template using the preceding link.

Workshop Agenda

120 Minutes

ID	Item	Time (min.)	Materials & Technique
	Intro to Agile	5	Slides 2-10 Notes: The workshop is hands-on and students should have an idea they’ll use through the exercises. Their own idea will be much better, but if they don’t have one there are a set of predefined ideas here: Venture Concepts.In a perfect world, the students review these and select an idea in advance (so they’re already a little familiar with it before they start the workshop).
	Exercise: Write an agile epic	5	Slide 11 Materials: index cards (or whatever) Notes: Make sure the participants are clear that a product will have many epics and that the epic isn’t a kind of summary story for the whole product. For some reason, this misunderstanding occurs a lot. I’m working on a solution.
	Exercise: create a storyboard for the epic	10	Slide 12 Materials: Storyboarding Squares
	Draft four agile user stories in support of the epic and its storyboard	10	Slides 13-15 Materials: index cards
	Peer presentations on storyboard and stories	10	Slide 16 Notes: That’s 5 min/each
	About prototyping	10	Slides 17-23
	Break	10 (~ 1 hr)
	Exercise: select comp’s	5	Slide 24 Notes: If the students aren’t online with a computer, it’s best to just skip this and leave it for them to think about. Or, if you’re in a very small group, do it together off of the projector or shared computer.
	Present comp’s	6	Slide 25 Notes: Select three students to present at 2 min/each
	About wireframing and drafting for applications	5	Slides 26-35
	Exercise: set up Balsamiq on Gmail/Google App’s	5	Slide 36
	Exercise: do a Balsamiq mockup	15	Slide 37 Notes: If adding Balsamiq isn’t desired, use any tool- pencil and paper is fine. The less structure the tool has, the more you’ll want to get the students to anchor their draft in comp’s and existing UI metaphors.
	Peer presentations	10	Slide 38
	About branding and visual communication	5	Slides 39-42 Notes: There are a series of exercises mentioned here. They’re not part of the 2 hour design, but if you have more time you may want to have the students do them in class. It will add roughly 30 minutes to the session time.
	Recap and close	10	Slides 43-47