Shadowing Practice: How to generate more UX design ideas with Crazy Eights - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hey friend, this is going to be a little bit more of a

technical hands -on video where I'm actually going to show you

how to do a Crazy 8s exercise as part of the ideation phase in your design process.

Crazy 8s is a really quick and easy exercise that you can do during the ideation phase of your design process.

It's a great way to generate quick ideas, involve different stakeholders In a nutshell,

Crazy 8s enables you to do quick rough sketches and drawings of different concepts and ideas for your project.

Now at this stage of the design process we really want to focus on quantity rather than quality.

So your sketches do not need to be perfect.

Don't worry, you don't need to be good at drawing to do this exercise.

Often actually I bring in my engineers, my product managers, various different cross -functional folks to be a part of this fun exercise.

You'll get the opportunity to draw around eight different concepts within a time frame.

Now don't worry, you will feel rushed and this is all part of the process.

It's supposed to be quick, lightweight, or technical in your designs,

let's keep it high level for now.

And you can either do static screens or flows depending on maybe what the prompt is or the context of the project.

Alright, so there's only three things that you need for this exercise, which I'm sure you can find lying around your house or in your office if you're working in an office these days.

Basically, you'll need paper.

Now, I recommend a three -sized paper, but if you have a four, that's fine as well.

You'll also need a sharpie.

Now, I do recommend a sharpie or some kind of thick marker over a bullet point pen, because with bullet point pens, we tend to start getting really detailed and annotating our designs,

and we don't want to get to that level yet.

So, I really do recommend going with some sort of sharpie.

And also a timer.

It is possible to do this exercise on your own, to get your cross -functional team on board,

your stakeholders involved in this sort of ideation, brainstorming part of the design process, and give them all the chance to kind of contribute to the design and the solutions as well.

Now the purpose of a Crazy 8's exercise is really to generate multiple and different ideas from the group.

You should not yet be at a stage in the project where you've kind of locked down on a solution

or an idea.

You should be doing this exercise before that to generate those ideas

and then eventually you converge and choose on a solution or a direction

Crazy Arts exercise is

that you as the designer are going to have all of these awesome concepts generated by multiple people in your team.

And your job is to kind of go away, take those ideas, reflect on them, have a look through them,

and kind of think about how you might want to consolidate some ideas or discard some ideas and how to move forward.

You might develop some of those ideas into a prototype to do some user testing on.

You might even combine some different ideas that came up from different people in the group.

And some, you know, you might throw away and that's fine too.

Sometimes I also like to do crazy eights just on my own as a little exercise

when I'm maybe feeling stuck or unsure how to move forward

or maybe I feel like I have a lot of ideas in my head

that I just need to quickly get out on paper

so I can let that creativity energy come out and then sort of see them tangibly and make decisions to move forward.

totally you can do this on your own as well instead of in a team setting.

I'm going to show you how to do this exercise in

an analog format however I know a lot of people are working from home

or remotely these days and

if you want to do this remotely with your team then there are a few tools out there

that I think you could easily adapt to do this process with

and I would recommend checking out tools like Whimsical or Overflow.

Let's go and do it for real now.

We're going to begin with our piece of paper

and now we want to fold this into basically eight pieces so I'm going

this piece of paper in half first and then fold it in half again.

and again one more time so that

when you open up the piece of paper you now have

basically eight different sections of your piece of paper for you to draw your crazy eights.

Then I'm going to set my timer to eight minutes and get started with sketching.

I like to draw some rectangles or device frames within each section, but you can just use the whole section if you want to to represent your mobile or desktop device.

Usually when I'm doing this exercise, I actually don't look too much at the timer.

I don't want to pay attention to it and have that sort of distract me or limit my explorations.

If you wanted to, you could try and set a goal of sort of one minute per idea.

filling out all of the eight sections.

So there is no rule here as to how long you spend on each section, but try to constrain yourself to the eight minutes that you set.

Once the eight minutes is up, put your pen down and stop drawing.

Then if you've done this in a group setting, you can go around the room and present your ideas back to the group.

I like to go around the table

and sort of have everyone present very briefly and sort of show and talk through some of their ideas, so that everyone in the room kind of has a sense for what everyone else explored.

Then I like to stick everyone's idea up on the wall

and sort of walk around and have another look at all of the different concepts.

And sometimes at this point you could do dot voting where maybe you give everyone three dots

that they can use to vote on their favorite or most promising idea in the room.

At this point you should have a collection now of a lot of different concepts and a lot of different ideas.

Okay, that is how to do a crazy eights exercise.

Pretty simple, but I think the results can be really remarkable and I've been a part of some really, really fun crazy eight sessions where people have thought of things I wouldn't even dream of

or we get in a really cool rhythm where we're like stacking and combining our ideas on top of one another.

Sometimes we'll do this exercise multiple times.

We'll do multiple rounds of them where we kind of check in after each round, see or concepts from other people.

So I do think that this is a really, really useful and quick exercise to do to generate ideas.

Alright friend, if you want some more one on one help with how to run crazy eights exercises, or maybe you have other questions about different parts of the design process,

you can always book time with me over on Superpeer, and we can chat one -on -one.

Until the next video, catch you later.

Bye!

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Why practice speaking with this video?

This video on generating UX design ideas using the Crazy Eights exercise offers unique insights into brainstorming techniques that can enhance your creative thinking skills. As you practice speaking along with the video, you’ll not only grasp the technical aspects of UX design but also improve your English speaking abilities. Engaging in this practical exercise allows you to emulate the speaker's rhythm and intonation, which is crucial for effective communication.

Benefits of Speaking Practice:

Enhances your ability to express complex concepts clearly.
Increases vocabulary related to design and ideation.
Boosts confidence in speaking within professional contexts.

Utilizing a shadowspeaks or shadowing app to repeat phrases can drastically improve your English pronunciation, especially if you target specific segments that resonate with your learning objectives, making it perfect for IELTS speaking practice.

Grammar & Expressions in Context

Throughout the video, the speaker employs various grammatical structures and expressions that can enrich your vocabulary. Here are a few key structures to pay attention to:

“You should not yet be at a stage…” - This conditional structure indicates a recommendation, emphasizing the importance of timing in the creative process.
“It's supposed to be quick…” - The passive voice here helps convey that the exercise has defined expectations.
“Your job is to kind of go away, take those ideas…” - The informal phrasing provides a conversational tone, suitable for casual discussions in a professional setting.

Understanding these structures can aid in constructing more nuanced sentences in English, particularly when discussing design or ideation phases. You can practice using these phrases in various contexts to diversify your expression while improving English pronunciation.

Common Pronunciation Traps

In this video, certain words and phrases may present challenges in pronunciation, which are important for budding English speakers to master:

“Ideation” - Focus on the second syllable, ensuring clarity in both the vowel and consonant sounds.
“Concepts” - Pay attention to the ending 's' sound; it’s often overlooked.
“Consolidate” and “discard” - These longer words require practice to pronounce smoothly without losing their meaning.

By repeating these tricky terms in context, you will improve your clarity in speaking, an essential skill not only for casual conversations but also crucial for professional environments, especially when preparing for tests like IELTS.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've done · I've been
Possibility with “might / may” might/may + verb — something that is possible but not certain	might want · might develop · might even combine
Advice with “should” should + verb — saying what is a good idea	should not yet · should be · should have
Verb + -ing enjoy, keep, stop… + -ing — verbs that are followed by the -ing form	start getting · stop drawing

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Why practice speaking with this video?

Grammar & Expressions in Context

Common Pronunciation Traps

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?