UX Workshops, Crazy 8s and bonkers 4s

UX session duration: 60 minutes

What is a Crazy 8s workshop?

Each participant folds a sheet of paper into eight sections. They then have eight minutes to sketch eight possible solutions to an agreed design challenge.

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The subject could be:

• A website landing page
• A mobile booking journey
• An application dashboard
• A navigation system
• A product feature
• A checkout or registration process

When the time is up, everyone presents their ideas. The group discusses the strongest elements and votes on which concepts should be explored further.

Working quickly discourages people from becoming too attached to their first idea. It also gives quieter team members an equal opportunity to contribute.

Why we created Bonkers 4s

Crazy 8s works particularly well for mobile screens and relatively focused interactions. Complex desktop applications often need more room.

For web applications, data-heavy platforms and software dashboards, we use a variation called Bonkers 4s.

Instead of dividing the page into eight small sections, participants create four larger landscape sketches. Each round lasts around two minutes, providing enough room to explore navigation, data, controls and page structure without slowing the exercise down.

The name is less scientific, but the principle is the same: generate ideas quickly before discussing limitations.

How to run the workshop

Begin with one clearly defined challenge.

For example:

How might we help a new customer understand which service is right for them?

Or:

How might we make this dashboard easier for a first-time user to understand?

Give each participant a sheet divided into either eight or four sections. Set a timer and ask everyone to sketch possible solutions.

Drawing ability does not matter. Boxes, arrows, labels and rough notes are enough to communicate an idea.

When the timer finishes:

1. Display all the sketches together
2. Ask each person to explain their thinking
3. Discuss the strongest individual elements
4. Give participants a small number of votes
5. Select the ideas to develop further

The winning concept does not need to come from one complete sketch. Often the best direction combines useful elements from several contributions.

Who should take part?

A productive UX workshop should include people with different perspectives, such as:

• Product owners
• Designers
• Developers
• Sales and marketing colleagues
• Customer service teams
• Operational specialists
• Senior decision-makers

Front-line employees often understand customer problems that senior stakeholders rarely encounter. Developers can identify technical constraints, while commercial teams can explain what the business needs the experience to achieve.

Bringing those perspectives together produces more practical ideas and creates shared ownership of the resulting direction.

What happens after Crazy 8s?

The sketches are a starting point, not a finished design.

We take the strongest ideas and turn them into structured user journeys, wireframes and interactive prototypes. These can then be reviewed and tested before significant development work begins.

This is where a short exercise becomes commercially valuable. It helps teams identify assumptions early, agree priorities and avoid committing development time to an idea nobody has properly explored.

When should you use Crazy 8s?

Crazy 8s or Bonkers 4s can be useful when:

• A project has become stuck
• Stakeholders have conflicting ideas
• A new product or feature needs defining
• An existing journey is confusing
• A team keeps discussing solutions without making progress
• You want broader input before design begins

It works best as part of a properly facilitated UX discovery workshop, where the challenge, users and commercial objectives have already been established.

What you’ll need

The exercise is deliberately simple:

• Paper divided into four or eight sections
• Pens or pencils
• A visible timer
• Sticky dots for voting
• A wall, table or shared digital workspace
• A clearly defined design problem

Remote teams can run the same exercise using FigJam or another collaborative whiteboard.

From quick sketches to better products

The value of Crazy 8s is not the number of sketches produced. It is the quality of the conversation that follows.

The exercise gives teams a fast, practical way to share knowledge, challenge assumptions and explore different directions. It turns abstract opinions into ideas everyone can see, discuss and improve.

Higher Ground runs collaborative UX workshops for websites, SaaS products and complex software. We help teams define the problem, explore possible solutions and turn the strongest ideas into prototypes ready for testing.