How Our UX Team Gets Our Creativity on @Moz

Is creativity important to your team?

With only so many hours in a day, we all have to prioritize what is important to us. And let’s face it, there’s a lot to prioritize at work. Creativity often falls to the wayside, which is a big mistake for us creative folks. The only way to really do something, is to do it! If you want to be creative (it’s an important part of your UX role), then you need to make it a priority.

Luckily, we have an environment here at Moz that allows us a great balance of work and personal development. This balance allows us to prioritize creativity as something we value: everyone needs a creative outlet. Some of dev teams here at Moz do regular hackathons, so as a UX Design team, we decided to do regular creative exercises too. About a year ago, we set up a meeting every fortnight to just be creative. We call these sessions Innovation Lab — this time is our chance to break out of the routine and do something different, something FUN.

Each session lasts between 60-90 minutes depending on the activity. We try to trade off who runs the meeting to give everyone the opportunity to do their own project, or just practice meeting facilitation (have you ever tried to wrangle a group of designers?) When in doubt, or if there are no volunteers, I always have my handy book, Caffeine for the Creative Mind to fall back on.

How we Innovate…

Here are samples of some the Innovation Lab projects we’ve done in the last year or so:

Reinvent the Parking Meter

This was our very first Innovation Lab! It was so successful, we made it a two-part series as we all had so many ideas and so much to contribute. Josh was so inspired by the meeting he went home that night and mocked his design into a 3D model!

Designers Head to Head

Like I mentioned, we try to get everyone involved in running the meetings, including our interns. Skye lead a great Innovation Lab that pitted our designers head-to-head in a 15-minute design-off, if you will. Designers were paired up and given a very random topic, then given 15 minutes to come up with a design live. We set up two projectors and watched them each work –it was pretty fun.

 

Bottle Car Race

This is one of the more hands-on activities we’ve done. The task was to create a car out of a water bottle and race them. In the end, the “car” also became something that could fly –just whatever went the farthest. We had one idea that was shot across the room with a ruler slingshot, and another powered by compressed air from an Air Duster found in the office.

 

Off the Top of Your Head

We each jotted down an idea, passed to the person to the left and that person had to draw the idea with the paper and pen on their heads. This was a fun quick one! (The feature image of this blog post was from this fun session.)

 

Circle Photobomb

The task was to take 20 photos of circles, just from around the office. It’s amazing the “circles” we never noticed before. Then we compiled them all together into an a few fun animated gifs.

 

Eyesore

Tall ugly cellphone towers are just eye-sores, so we took it upon ourselves to redesign them. In the end, we came up with a few ideas that were not only beautiful, but also functional — not just allowing the world to connect, but providing additional sources for solar or wind power.

 

The Six Hats 
In this one, I had the whole team breaking into groups and walk around the block, making note of anything that was “white” (or whatever color they were assigned). We discussed what we saw and how taking a very narrow perspective changed our normal walk. Afterwards, I did a short slide presentation about Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, and then a few fun exercises where we all had to take turns wearing the different hats.


Zombie Apocalypse Plan
We broke up into teams and each created a detailed plan of how to escape in the (inevitable) event of a zombie apocalypse — how’d we get out, what’d we take, how’d we defend ourselves and where we would go. As we live in Seattle, heading down to the marina was a popular plan, since obviously zombies can’t swim.

 

Halloween Booth
We decorate the Moz office for Halloween, so we used our Innovation Lab to brainstorm our theme for this year’s booth.

 

Skill Sharez
Abe took the time to present some of his favorite Skill Shares and we brainstormed ideas on what we could do for a Moz Skill Share.

 

Lego Pictionary

We bought three big boxes of Legos for our Innovation lab time, so in this meeting we decided to play Pictionary, only using Legos rather than pen and paper. Each person jotted an idea down, passed to the person next to them and we all had five minutes to create that thing out of Legos!

 

Incomplete Figure

Abe challenged each of us to make something from nothing –or almost nothing, just a scribble. We each had five minutes to add to the scribble then pass them to the person next to us. By the end of the meeting we had quite a narrative of pictures.

 

We’re the Bomb

As a team, we had to work together to defuse a bomb before exploded in five minutes. Needless to say, we died a few times, but it was fun figuring out the puzzles and communicating with the one person in the room that could see the bomb.

 

Getting Your Innovation On

If you’re just getting started, here is a list of creative exercises to get your innovation on:

Have you done creativity exercises with your team?  We’d love to hear (and see!) what you do to innovate your creativity! (We’re always looking for good ideas  )

ORIGINAL POST: May 28, 2016 Moz UX Blog

Jada Williams1 Comment