Looking for UX exercises and activities for our UX team to build skills, grow our team closer, and to have fun. These will be used both for our current team and for new hires during the onboarding process. I'm thinking for the exercises/activities to either be individual or group and take about one hour to complete.

My current list includes sketching, creating storyboards, paper prototyping, and card sorting. I'm looking to see what other activities and ideas are out there.

Getting out of the office and seeing UX in the wild is always great. Pick a topic and go see a few in action. We did one about touchscreens and then went to 4 places to use them and see how others were using them.

Also, sharing new sites and interesting UX solves on a regular basis is always great.

We also like field trips. Say we go bowling, we take notes on well or poorly designed interfaces and experiences and share that with the team. We then try to see if there are any parallels with our product. It is fun and funny and very interactive.

We've also taken field trips and had a lot of fun. Most recently we took the team to the VMFA in Richmond with a list of design principles. We broke into teams with the goal of identifying good/bad examples of each principle (documented with photos). Basically a UX scavenger hunt.

Drinking. At a bar.

Traveling gives you a unique perspective on things for sure!

Thanks for all the replies so far!

The getting out of the studio sounds like a constant theme. Any suggestions for in-studio activities?

We used to have a board where we would post bad UI examples (both physical and digital)... a lot of the printouts were quite hilarious... we would also post pictures we saw on our daily activities => The board would be by the coffee machine, which helped with humorous conversations...

Drinking. In the office.

We had a inspiration wall of different designs. They didn't have to be digital -- we went to a bookstore, bought a bunch of magazines, and threw them on the wall. We used it for inspiration for typography and grid design.

Maybe not a UX exercise, but we did this team building zoom/re-zoom exercise recently.

Sand castle building contest!

I happened to attend some interesting sessions on 'Design Thinking' & applying these principles to solve a real world problems by rapidly prototyping solutions based on user centric 'personas'. There are some interesting perspectives on how a group can think in lines of Ux wireframes, application skeletons & build useful tools for interactive apps. From a Ux perspective participants will be able to build clay models, gather facts on colored post-it notes, for designing a MVP based on an interview w/persona in case. This DT book is an interesting read for start goo.gl via designthinkingbook.co.uk

Here's an in-studio UX activity: 'buy a feature' game
uxforthemasses.com

From an UIE.com article:
"The book, 'Modular Web Design' advocates a problem-solving technique for building a library of reusable design components. We start with a large web site, such as the CDC.gov or ESPN.com, and print out their pages. Using highlighters and scissors, we cut out the reusable pieces and assemble them in a notebook of components, making a makeshift library.

This technique hones our skills for identifying things that can be reused. We can practice this with our team, first trying it individually, then comparing our results. We see how each of us solved the problem differently and learn from each other's approaches."
Example: ui-patterns.com