Tag: Experience Haus

Young people and the police often have a negative relationship. Reputations differ on both sides and it often harms this particular relationship – it’s a complex challenge to address.

On Saturday 24th September, Experience Haus invited 50 students (16 – 21) from across London to join an inspirational and challenging one day event in our Shoreditch studio.

The task? To work alongside Experience Haus design alumni, as well as the City of London Police and Metropolitan Police, to create a series of digital and service concepts that will determine this relationship between young people and the police. The ultimate goal for this event was to build young people’s trust and confidence in the police.

Experience Haus designers spent time asking both students and members of the police a range of questions to help them shape ideas around ways to improve relations between the two. The experts provided advice and guided the process to ensure the end solution was viable and technically possible.

Similar to previous hackathons, this design day was conceived and hosted in our Experience Haus studios, and we were lucky enough to be supported by a fantastic host of companies. The entire event was led by Digital Skills Consulting and sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Other organisations taking part included Barking & Dagenham College, Activate Learning, Hackney Youth Parliament, The Crib, The Wickers, Women’s Inclusive Team and the Osmani Trust.  

The workshop gave these young people a fantastic opportunity for them to explore future careers in design, tech and the police force. They met with mentors, employers, business and government leaders, and other students, helping to develop their communication, teamwork, creativity and networking skills.

Following the success of this event, future workshops have been planned with the students to develop their concepts, and business and personal skills.

Commenting on the event, Experience Haus’ Creative Director, Amit Patel said:

“It’s important to us that every voice is heard during the design of important products and services, especially when we are talking about tackling challenges that have social impact.

Experience Haus is proud to play a pivotal role in this, and days like today bring together our growing design community, as well as inspiring the future creatives of tomorrow.

It’s been enjoyable watching the empathy, storytelling and collaboration unfold between everyone involved, throughout the day.”

Chief Inspector Ray Marskell from the City of London Police said: 

“This exciting event allowed us to engage with young adults from across London. We understand how important it is to maximise opportunities to meet and get to know the communities we serve better. We are grateful to AWS for their support, along with partners from the Metropolitan Police Service. It was an enlightening experience to hear the group’s ideas about how we can improve our relationship with younger people, and we are committed to building on their solutions and bringing them to life where possible.” 

Chief Inspector Lucky Singh from the Metropolitan Police said:

 “This was an amazing event that allowed the Metropolitan (Met) and City of London Police (CoLP) to focus and actively engage with young people, especially from underrepresented groups and females. 

We are extremely grateful to Experience Haus for hosting the event. There were many great ideas, suggestions and possible solutions put forward that we are confident will help build better relations between young people and the Police services. The Met and CoLP will continue working alongside AWS and Digital Skills Consulting to deliver these workshops” 

Amazon Web Services, Head of Justice and Public Safety, John Pittaway said: 

“This was an inspiring event that gave young people the opportunity to have their voices heard by City of London Police (CoLP) and Metropolitan Police (Met) and be involved in designing solutions that will help to improve relations between young people and police. We look forward to continuing the partnership with CoLP, Met and young people from London to address these important topics.” 

Digital Skills Consulting develops projects with the private sector, working with FE colleges, Institutes of Technology and charities to provide students with real-world challenges and experience. Director Julia Von Klonowski said: 

“It has been amazing to see these young people confronting real-world, social issues that affect them in their daily lives and working closely with representatives from law enforcement and the technology sector. “These students have shown tremendous courage, ingenuity and a sense of community. Some really interesting and exciting ideas were shared. We are extremely grateful to our sponsor AWS and all the stakeholders who gave their time to make the event such a success. We look forward to seeing how these ideas are developed.” 

The Experience Haus 5 Day User Experience Design Bootcamp ‘at a glance’

• An immersive course that covers the end-to-end process used for designing digital products
• Specifically for 16-24 year olds (current secondary, college and university students)
• Class will be held everyday in our Shoreditch design studio (from 9:30am-5:00pm)
• Learn design thinking, product strategy, user experience (UX), and user interface design (UI)
• with the industry leading tool, Figma.
• Work on real-life design challenge set by a local business
• Set in a leading design agency in the middle of London’s creative hub
• Lunch and refreshments will be provided each day.

Founded in 2017, and in partnership with leading design consultancy Matter Of Form, Experience Haus has become a market leader in Design Education.

We believe that Design Education will be pivotal in changing the world. Design Education puts an emphasis on the real problems facing businesses – the need for a balanced focus between business strategy and customer experience.

What is User Experience Design?

User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.

A User Experience Designer is the person who is responsible for conducting user research, defining who the customer is, figuring out the right features and flows a product should have, and designing the concepts that are ready for developers to go away and build. UX design is a fast-paced and growing skillset, and an exciting career path moving forward.

About the 5 Day User Experience Design Bootcamp.

This comprehensive 5 day bootcamp is specifically designed for 16 – 24 year olds looking for a real-world learning experience. It covers everything you need to design digital products in the future – user research tactics, design thinking, how to manage clients, product and business strategy, user experience (UX) and user interface design (UI). All of which will come together to play an important role in making successful products.

Students will enjoy a mix of lectures, talks and collaborative workshop time, where they will get to practice learnings immediately and apply them to a real-life project set by a local business.

Who is it for?

This course is specifically designed for 16-24 year olds (including current secondary, college and university students). Our mission is to make our training fully accessible for everyone. So with Experience Haus there is no application process as such, no interview and no waiting to find out if you’ve ‘made the cut’.

There are no pre-requisites to take the course, but having a keen interest in design definitely helps. The course is perfect for anyone who is looking to add digital product design skills to their existing skillset and knowledge areas, and to gain valuable work, life and career experience. There is no need to have any knowledge of particular software as you will be taught everything along the way.

Dates and Costs.

We will be running this bootcamp 4 times this summer. 
Choose the week that works best for you.

• August 1st, 2022 – August 5th, 2022
• August 8th, 2022 – August 12th, 2022
• August 15th, 2022 – August 19th, 2022
• August 22nd, 2022 – August 26th, 2022

Classes will be held each day, Monday to Friday, from 9:30am to 5:00pm.

Each group will be capped at 8 students.

Costs:

The bootcamp cost is £995.00 per student.
 Discounts are available for group bookings.

To book your space:
Visit www.experiencehaus.com/ux-bootcamp, select the week that works best for you, choose your preferred payment option, receive your pre-course work, then wait for Day 1.

If you have any questions please email enrol@experiencehaus.com​​

On Saturday 7th May, 40 of our Experience Haus alumni descended on our studio in London to take part in another of our popular full day design hackathon. These events are open to everyone across our Experience Haus community, so we had students coming in who had taken part in various different courses, from product design to service design. Our alumni started arriving from 9:30am and at 10:00am we revealed the most anticipated part of the day: the brief and client for the day. 

Who was the client?

For this hackathon, we were lucky enough to be given a brief from the City of London Education Strategy Unit (ESU). The ESU is a strategic team within the City Corporation that exists to extend and enrich education experiences in the City and beyond to help all learners realise their full potential. Their focus is on ‘additionality’ – the parts of the education experience that sit outside of their core, statutory requirements of a school.

The design challenge

All over the world, there’s a growing belief that traditional models for schools and curriculums are broken. Employees have made it clear that increasingly, entry level employees aren’t equipped with the most sought after skills. At the same time, young people increasingly feel like what they learn, and how they learn it, is completely detached from the people they are and the world they live in. 

For the first time in decades, the global education landscape is in a state of radical change. Efforts to explore the future of schooling are underway all over the world – but often without the involvement of the most important stakeholders – the learners. 

The ESU wants to ensure they deeply understand the learner perspective on this topic, and they believe technology can really help this. Therefore, the challenge the ESU proposed to our community was to come up with a digital solution that helps secondary-age learners show the world how they would re-invent school or the education system, if they were given the chance to do so. What would they want to learn about and why?

Tackling the challenge

With a wide, and incredibly exciting challenge to get to grips with, we split our students into seven groups of 5 and from 11am – 6pm, they worked through the entire end-to-end design process, from research to ideation to prototyping, and finally pulled together a presentation at the end of the day that met the design challenge. It was amazing to see how much work they all managed to achieve in seven hours and has given the ESU lots of food for thought! 

Reflecting on the day, Torri from the ESU commented that ‘the whole exercise will help [the ESU] to be super focussed and effective with our next steps on this project.

A huge thank you to Experience Haus. It has been a real privilege to be involved in the project and for so much work to have gone into this, on behalf of trying to crack one of our challenges.”

Amit Patel, Creative Director & Founder of Experience Haus said: “This was the fifth time we’ve run this event and we look forward to running them even more frequently in the future. We have a fantastic studio for our students to enjoy, so we look forward to hosting them again in the future.”

One of the challenges that the corporate training market brings is the enormous selection of suitable partners. This is an area that is extremely important to Experience Haus as we continue to seek out new training opportunities, but more importantly build lasting partnerships with our clients. There is so much to consider in that the person or team that is responsible for making the training happen from the client side may actually be confused about which offer will best suit the company’s needs.

Training for all levels of your business.

There is a cultural shift needed – training is often looked at as something that the younger parts of the workforce need to do in order to gain experience, but truthfully, there is a mindset shift needed. Training is required at all levels from intern level to C-suite/executive level. Continuous learning is a must as it will help deal with the ever shifting global economy and growing demands.

Getting the best value from your training partner

The people purchasing the training will no doubt want to extract the best value and return on their investment – and the training needs to suit the way of working for the teams involved. In most cases (certainly what we have seen at Experience Haus) is that the company (or client as we would refer to them as) will want to see an overview of the content, how it will be delivered, and quality assurance that is so important to them.

Most teams will now look to hire in training partners as there is no suitable internal alternative. Most companies will have access to the same delivery tools, but it’s important to choose the right partner with a mix of well-delivered content, industry insight and desire to compliment the training with post training support. This is easier said than done however.

The amount of industry experience and quality of instructors is also key – if not perhaps the most important component of selecting the right training provider. What is the amount of experience they have? Who else have they worked with? Do they have any relevant case studies?

Blended learning continues to be a very popular way of delivering content – a mix between online, on-demand training supplemented by live virtual sessions or in-house workshops. This is certainly the way Experience Haus intends to build out its future learning platform.

Customising the training to fit your business needs

Another factor you should consider when looking for a training delivery partner is whether they have the ability to create customisable training. Selecting an ‘off-the-shelf’ product is no longer enough, and that can be a limiting factor for some of the training platforms that exist today. They are quickly lacking updates and relevance, and cannot keep up quick enough.

Personalisation and customisation will always be in demand, and this will allow for custom journeys that will tie in stronger with the employees specific goals, and help appeal to the different levels of experience within the cohort.

Bringing in a partner that can help align with strategic goals is key – both from the employee perspective and how they should benefit, but also from a business perspective too.

Overall, it is important that a chosen training partner has the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to help develop the most effective training delivery and implementation.

Defining Design Thinking

Before we get started on exploring Design Thinking, it is important to discuss the challenge of actually defining ‘Design Thinking’.

There are two key words that make this up: design and thinking. It’s hard enough to define these concepts, let alone the two of them combined as design thinking as an approach (Rylander, 2009).

If you ask anyone who has discussed, used or regularly applies design thinking inside their business to help with problem solving, it is not surprising that many of them cannot exactly explain what design thinking is, the origins and how it was shaped.

Even the articulation of why it should be used is often difficult to arrive at – who needs to be involved? How long does it take? Why should non-designers inside organisations take notice? Sometimes teams and companies are actually applying design thinking without knowing it.

If you were to ask those that are around the design industry what design thinking actually means, it’s almost certain you will get different answers each and every time. The reality is that design thinking is quite complex and involves many strategic and creative approaches. It is more holistic than one can imagine. But done well, the output from the framework can be powerful.

At a high-level, design thinking is an iterative process that can be used to solve problems. Design thinking can be applied into any type of design work, regardless of discipline. It remains true that whole approach is what is good (and fun!) about the design practice. The divergent and convergent thinking, the iteration, the people that need to be involved, the ideating and testing of ideas – it’s all creative problem solving. And this problem solving has been a large part of the designers role almost forever. 

The term design thinking has grown in prominence over the last 10-15 years largely due it’s commercial use and social awareness. This approach takes the design process and methods and brings them to the limelight – in many cases however there is work done behind the scenes that no one sees (especially clients) that are truly powerful and help with decision making (Dorst, 2011)

The global design agency, IDEO, is often the company that is often credited with coming up with the approach of “design thinking” and it’s practical application. But the whole approach around design thinking is actually something that has been around for a lot longer (going back to the 1970s as a foundation) in fact, and has been slowly been applied with formal identification only just recently.

At Experience Haus, we truly believe it requires a shift in mindset, and if done well, it’s value moving forward is immense. If you compare it to more scientific approaches, that have been around for centuries, design thinking as a more practical (and perhaps applicable) approach has been around for 10-15 years, so it is essentially in it’s infancy. It is still far from global widespread adoption – in many cases teams look at the individual stages and use them to guide the development of products and services, but we will look at the why the mindset shift is actually more important.

The Framework

The design thinking framework aims to help inspire creative problem solving and strategic thinking that will help designers (of all kinds) create value-driven products and services, across various industries and sectors. (Kolko, 2015)

It is not, however, as it may seem, a linear path. Working through the stages in one defined path can often lead to failure. Iteration is key, and the willingness/need to step back as required. As you progress through the stages new ideas may come up and progress you forward, but new findings/gaps may come up that cause a need to step backwards to action further work.

Let’s take a look at each stage in further detail.

Empathy

This stage is where everything starts – in many way the foundational stage. It involves understanding the viewpoints of current and potential customers/users to see their views on current products and services, their behaviours and desires, the competitive landscape, and all done without bias.

If empathy is not something that designers have, there is a monumental task in place in order to design user-centred solutions. Empathy helps build a crucial understanding between the target audience and the product or service that is being potentially designed for them (Brower, 2021).

Other aspects that are often used at the stage include:

• Bringing in experts (often referred to subject matter experts, “SMEs” to ask about their views, experience and design insights.
• Contextual inquiry in order gain a more point of view perspective, essentially stepping into their shoes. Service safaris are where designers immersive themselves in a physical setting where a service, or product, is being current delivered.
• In-depth conversation and research with designers who have tackled this challenge in other industries, sectors or disciplines

This is a crucial stage as the motivations, behaviours, perspective, pain points and past experiences of the target audience will all help towards understanding how to solve the users problem.

Define

At this stage, after gathering useful data points through empathy, discussions with experts, and stakeholders, the design team brings together the design challenge that needs to be focused on. Identifying the customer segment, the problem areas and opportunities as well as a refreshed problem statement are all key here.

A lot of what happens in this stage can be referred to as data synthesis. The problem statement that comes together at the end is an expression of the design challenge that includes who will be targeted and why. This can take the angle of either a business-centred problem, or a human-centred problem.

Some of the questions here could include

• Who is our target user?
• What does their journey look like and where are the opportunities to improve it?
• What business objectives are we trying to meet?
• What does success look like?
• Who else do need to involve along the way?

Ideation

This stage is really where creativity gets to come into play. So much of what has been done so far is heavily based on empathy and data that sets up the ability to generate ideas that solve the design problem with creativity and innovation.

Initial ideation sessions may revolve around thinking “big”, and removing any kind of constraint, and then narrowing down to focus on an idea or two that are feasible and viable. It’s important to note that no idea is a bad idea, and that “bad” ideas can easily become good ideas with a slight twist. These ideations sessions are a must for designers as it builds up confidence around creative problem solving and the sharing of ideas.

The more ideas the better, as this provides more ideas for the team to discuss, investigate and potentially test to see how they solve the users problem.

It’s important to note that by now you should have a very good idea of your user base, so that you can focus on creativity and generating ideas for discussion.

Prototype

The previous stage brought us lots of ideas that we ultimately narrowed down through focusing on viability, feasibility and desirability (remember, design thinking is all about perspective, more on this later) – it is important to take an idea or two and see through testing if they actually solve the problem well. This is where a prototype (or early version) of the idea is needed. This should be done as quickly as possible, like paper sketches, or physical models using easy to access resources are needed. 

At this stage it is all about building potential initial solutions rather inexpensively and at small-scale. They should include the features that will act as gain creators or pain solvers, which are decided through the process after understanding what pain points and motivations the user base has. When testing, there needs to be open discussion about works well and what doesn’t work well, and the open willingness to move backwards in the process if an idea doesn’t land well.

As we move forward into the testing stage, it is important to start to discuss what is needed to bring the product to reality – address any outstanding user experience issues, and testing to bring out further behaviours and expectations for the future.

Test

The final stage of the design thinking framework requires getting real, prospective and current users to review the product in order to gain real data that can be used to measure success and to learn from. 

But calling this a “final” stage is not necessarily correct, as this framework, and designers in general, should be prepared to iterate and move backwards if needed. Iteration is what will bring a product closer to solving the problem well. Testing should be done thoroughly and comprehensively, as without this it is difficult for solutions to scale to a larger user base.

Design teams should be expecting to receive feedback that will require changes and refinements – this may cause a whole sequence of restarting the process especially moving back to the ideation or prototyping stage. New ideas will generated will require a refreshed approach, and teams should not be afraid to seek out tangents in discussion and thinking – which is where innovation may lie.