Speedy Eights

The goal of this exercise is to push you outside your comfort zone, add more variety to your thoughts, and surface ideas that you would otherwise dismiss.

Requirements

• Estimated time needed: 8 minutes
• Team: Facilitator, Note-taker, Stakeholders

Why should we do this exercise?

Speedy Eights works great in the early stages of the ideation process to come up with a lot of varied ideas on an interface very quickly. The time limit doesn’t allow for participants to weed out any ideas. It works great early on in the ideation process because it loosens up creative muscles and generates lots of ideas quickly. Originally based on the 6-8-5 game.

Instructions

1. Have everyone fold a sheet of paper in half 4 times so they all have 8 panels on the sheet.
2. Set a timer for 8 minutes. Explain to the team that they will have to draw a sketch every minute for 8 minutes, and that the speed is designed to force out the weirdest ideas that they otherwise would not have considered.
3. Start the timer.
4. Throughout the exercise continue to remind people of the time and make sure that it is clear which sketch they should be on.

The sketches will not be shown to the rest of the group.

Tips

• You can try rapid variations of similar ideas, for example how a button would look.

Example