How to Run a Crazy Eights exercise

When you want people to ideate quickly on an theme during a design sprint or workshop, Crazy Eights is a fantastic technique for every designer to use. This I Am Not My Pixels post will go through step by step instructions for running a successful Crazy Eight exercise.

Instructions for Crazy Eights:

Gather together your UX supplies, including A4 paper, markers and sticky dots
Give each person an A4 sheet of paper and ask them to draw eight boxes on it. Or, for even more ease, simply use my free downloadable Crazy 8’s template!
Set a timer for 8 minutes
Ask the group to sketch 8 quick ideas each in 8 minutes
When the timer pings, everyone stops sketching
At this point (time-dependent) you can either:
- Ask people to present their top three ideas to the group
- Ask people pick their three favourite ideas. Give them 6 more minutes to sketch out these three ideas further. Then ask them to present them to the group.
Give everyone 2 sticky dots and ask people to vote on their favourite ideas out of the whole group

The idea is to generate as many ideas as possible within a short timeframe, focusing on quantity of ideas not quality, and then once you’ve got a bunch of divergent thinking on one topic, to begin converging on some winning ideas by voting on the favourites.

These chosen ideas can then be worked up into prototypes, more refined designs, or you could even do another round of rapid sketching on them and then another round of voting to hone in even further on the top top ideas.