Strategy - Toast Method: The Ability to Solve Problems in UX Design

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Strategy

Toast Method: The Ability to Solve Problems in UX Design

Felipe Guimaraes and Aela Team

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Apr 27, 2021

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minutes of reading

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Imagine that you work in the UX Design area of a technology company that developed an educational platform. Teachers use this tool to manage students' classes and projects.

However, both teachers and students encountered several difficulties when interacting with the platform, such as:

difficulty sharing exercises on the platform;
lack of tools to categorize exercises;
difficulties in evaluating students using a mobile device.

Now, you need face all these problems and propose creative and efficient solutions, otherwise, the project will fail.

At that moment, there is a slight desperation in the face of all the problems and you think: “Where do I start? How do you solve these problems creatively?”

Thinking about this challenge of creating ideas and solutions on a daily basis, we are going to explain a practical exercise to solve problems as a team: The Toast Method, developed by Tom Wujec.

Starting with the toast

An efficient way to treat “hairy” problems is to seek new ways of visualizing difficulties and proposing group solutions.

In this sense, Tom Wuejec proposes to improve the visualization of problems through Design and Technology.

Wuejec is the author of several books, a professor at Singularity University and one of the references when it comes to business visualization.

It has several interesting techniques that can be applied in UX Design, including toast method.

O Toast Method it's a simple exercise that helps teams solve complex problems.

The method can generate incredible results when linked to other UX Design skills, such as:

The method has 3 steps and we will exemplify you as its author, through a simple process of making toast.

First step

With a blank sheet of paper and a pen, draw, without writing, the process of making a toast.

Most people, according to Tom, start with something like this:

Tom studied these illustrations for many years and concluded that there are many ways to do things, even if it's something as simple as toast. His collection of drawings shows different ways of making toast, but Tom identified two existing similarities in all the designs:

we (Nodes);
calls (links).

The nodes (in orange) are represented by objects and people. The connections (in green), on the other hand, represent the connections between objects and people.

In this way, the nodes added to the links form a visible model. This happens because of capacity of our brain to create and recreate the how things work.

For example, when you see a plate, knife, toast, and butter, your brain connects these dots in the most usual way you've learned to use them.

However, nothing prevents your brain from expanding the possibilities and helping you to make and/or consume toast in another way. For example: you can buy ready-made toast and use the butter, the knife and the plate. Or you can take the rolls from the day before, cut and place in the oven.

Therefore, the process of making toast is configured in different ways, from person to person.

The same happens when we are describing a problem or difficulty. Each person will look at a problem in a different way than ours.

In this way, Tom points out that when we want to communicate something just by drawing, we must pay attention to these different possibilities and communicate them in a simple and easy to understand way.

Intuitively, everyone knows how to divide complex things, transform them into simple things, and synthesize them. — Tom Wujec

Therefore, when faced with a problem, breaking it into several parts will make you see it more clearly and this will guide you to the solution.

Reading Tip: Benchmarking - How to Analyze Competitors in UX Design?

Second step

At this stage, we will redesign the process using post-it's, but this time we will go into a little more detail and pay more attention to important phases that were left out in the previous stage.

After making the drawings on the post-it's, each person on the team will place them in a place visible to everyone and, in the meantime, they can group the similar drawings together, creating connections.

With this, it will be possible see the ideas that connect, those that complement each other, and those that can be discarded.

While it seems common, Combining ideas into blocks is one of the ways to achieve clarity not that we want. And this is very important within UX Design projects.

Theorists point to It is easy for us to change a representation and adapt it to the model that we consider will bring more improvements to the project.

So, although it may seem silly to use post-it's and leave them visible to the entire team, this process makes the work more fluid.

And do you know why? Yeah, he expands the viewing capacity of the whole. That way, with post-it's, it's easier to imagine objects and people in motion than a simple static drawing on paper or a blackboard, where you stand with another colleague, trying to imagine hypotheses.

In addition, post-it notes also help to identify exactly where they are in the project and what are the difficulties of the problem. So it's a very important step.

Reading Tip: Product Manager - Business, Technology, and User Experience

Third step

In this step of the exercise we will draw how to make group toast!

It may seem a bit confusing at first, as there are so many different ideas and ways to make toast.

However, as the group thinks and rethinks the blocks of how to make toast, the model is more improved and becomes clearer.

Thus, the suggestions and the ideas of each person involved in the project make it possible to build new ideas better.

From these ideas improved in the group, a project model emerges. unified and more effective.

An important observation: in this group construction, several nodes and links will emerge, due to the plurality of people. However, this will not be a negative thing, since everyone collaborated so that these models were built.

When people work together, under the right circumstances, group models become better than individual models — Tom Wujec

And what does this have to do with UX Design?

Have you ever been part of a project where the team crashed or failed to come up with ideas that would enter into a consensus to get out of place? This exercise can be a hand in the wheel to solve this!

After all, teamwork and problem solving isn't magic, not luck, it's training, perseverance and empathy.

This visualization exercise along with the team's dialogue can be applied to any type of problem or business segment. The idea is to produce innovative and efficient ideas.

Therefore, the toast method, when applied, can help solve communication and alignment issues within the team. In addition to:

Organizational vision of the project;
View of the customer experience;
Long-term project sustainability;

Those who see their world with us and links really have an advantage. This visualization act of doing and redoing as a group produces some remarkable results. - Tom Wujec

The toast exercise is a practice to make ideas visible, palpable and facilitate project sequencing.

We hope that you will be able to apply this exercise to your daily life and to the diversity of UX Design projects!