Day 2 is about creating as many ideas as possible. Jake Knapp describes day 2 with a great analogy:

Remember in the Legend of Zelda how the map would light up rooms you had visited as you explored the dungeon? That’s what you’re doing on Day 2: illuminating all of the possible paths.

Day 2 focuses on working individually to generate a lot of ideas to share with the rest of the group. I’m excited about this day because it looks like it’ll translate well to an individual project (and sharing on a blog).

The day is also focused on working on paper. Here are the steps: 1.) Choose part of the problem, 2.) Take notes, 3.) Mind map, 4.) Crazy eights, 5.) Storyboard, 6.) Silent critique, 7.) Three-minute critiques, and 8.) Super vote.

Steps 6-8 are group activities so I don’t know how that will pan out for my process. I’ll likely turn these into a single step called “give myself a gold star and pat myself on the back.” But first I need to get through cheap jerseys China steps 1-5.

Choose part of the problem

From the day 1 design diagram, you’re supposed to break the story into parts and then do this design cycle for each. This will be great for future projects. In my case, I think the story can be broken into the following pieces:

Upload photos Create grid of photos Modify size and placement of photos Save/export

I might be able to get more granular (change photo source, drag photo to new location), but I’ll stick to those pieces for now. 2 & 3 are the only ones I’m concerned with for this exercise, because my goal is to share a prototype of this single screen at the point where photos have been selected and exported.

Mind map

Here’s a ten fifteen minute mind-map:

Mind mapping should get the ideas going and I think a good sign is that a lot of questions came up:

Do we want to create the grid first with placeholders? (Kind of like the iPhone Pic Stitch app.)

Do we want to start with all the photos on the canvas?

Do we want to work with a row by row flow in mind?

What would the Angular directives look like for this?

Solutions to these questions can be explored through methods such as design activities.

Crazy 8s

In the Crazy 8s activity, you sketch an idea in 40 seconds then sketch another in 40 seconds until 8 ideas are sketched. A lot of the end results aren’t useful but it helps break through plateaus in creativity.

Crazy 8s leads to a lot of ideas, not all of them good. But a little while after finishing there’s usually something useful that comes to mind. For whatever reason, iterating rapidly kicks off the right back burners for creativity.

So here are the results of the first cycle:

Default view where the images are just shown with 2 in each row. Each image has an overlay with thumbnails of the bucket of images to click through and switch. Modal for image bucket providing bigger thumbnails than #2. Bottom menu with image bucket. Similar to Lightroom. Toolbox that shows up when hovering over image. Not sure what the tools would be. Drag to resize and move photo around. Row based layout creator where you can drag rows of photos up and down. Pre-determined sizes, similar ot apps like Pic Stitch.

Nothing mindblowing, but it helped me see that some solutions would be better depending on the workflow I’m looking for. If I know what order that photos will go in (if I’m trying to show what we did progressing from day to night), then switching images in place isn’t useful. The image bucket isn’t necessary.

On the other hand, sometimes I’ll export a ton of photos knowing I won’t use all of them. Some shots that vary slightly and I’ll switch between a few to see what I For like. But I don’t want the other ones to be floating around in the layout. This is where the image bucket would be helpful.

Here, we’re getting into conflicts, and day 3 (decide) deals with this.

An intermission: 5 Whys

I even did a 5 Why’s and came to this: why make this? To make posting easier, so I’ll post more, to have more to share, because And it’s good encouragement to keep creating, because I think it’s important to practice creativity.

Storyboarding

Before storyboarding, I sketched out a user story. From that I got to the gist of this whole thing. Looking at it as a black box, I want to put photos in and get a nice layout out (as a markdown file).

I ask everybody to draw UI in the three frames of their storyboard showing a progression: first this, then that, then that.

Here are my three frames:

Start with all images at natural size on the page. Arrange images and resize. Layout all done and ready to export.

The storyboard seems a little high level—it’d be good to drill down and do a cycle for resizing and a cycle for arranging. But hey, perfect is the enemy of good (and done) and we I feel like I have enough to move to day 3, so let’s do that.

Useful Links

Gamestorming: 6-8-5

Quora: Why does Adaptive Path say that sketching a design should take 5 minutes and 6 iterations? – answer by Todd Zaki Warfel

Vimeo: The Design Studio Method – Todd Zaki Warfel