Russell:
One of the things that we tend to do in those early meetings is running through some exercises so that we can kind of get people’s ideas as to what could go well in the project and what they may expect could go wrong. That’s kind of another expectation’s gathering kind of thing isn’t it?
Dan:
Yeah.
Russell:
Do you want to talk about a few examples of that.
Dan:
Yeah yeah. No I love them. They’re my favorite bit and you’re politely calling them exercises, I’ve been calling them games.
Russell:
Yeah.
Dan:
Like parlor games almost.
Russell:
Yeah.
Dan:
I sometimes feel like we should break out a bit of charades or something.
Russell:
Or even like pull a nice velvet cloth over the table for us to begin.
Dan:
Sometimes with, let’s explain them and then I’ll explain sometimes what I feel like doing them. What are you referring to by these games.
Russell:
One of those exercises that we do is design or sketch the magazine cover of our successful project. This is getting people to, in their own time in a short period of time, I think a couple of minutes or something, sketch out what a magazine cover would look like about their project having gone really well. It could be one of their customers celebrating how it’s changed their lives. That kind of thing. That perfect story, which is always quite a good one. Especially because when you ask people to explain what they’ve actually sketched they’ll give you different answers sometimes to what they’d have asked if you just said, “What do you want to happen in this project?”
Dan:
You learn their goals and not just goals that they’ve quite stalely sometimes put down on a bit of paper You’ll learn their actual goals. The game is to basically, as you say, imagine that everything’s gone really well and draw a front cover of a magazine, an article about the project and yeah, you learn from what they put on that and you kind of prompt them with do a quote, it could be a famous magazine, and you learn from those things of what someone actually wants from the project. That’s just a useful thing to know, not that you should just straight away shape the projects around that but it just means that you know, okay right, so we are trying to get fade to draw the thing that happened was it became world famous and their company sold because the product was so good then you know that’s what their aim is, and you know that’s what you should be designing towards.
Russell:
Even the flip side of it as well is the fact that we’re going to be doing those sketches along with the client so we’re still sort of measuring between what our expectations are as well.
Dan:
Absolutely.
Russell:
Then we’re explaining why we think that’s a success story.
Dan:
Completely.
Russell:
That’s helpful too.
Dan:
That’s a good one. Always draws strange looks when you get people drawing.
Russell:
Yeah.