4 days design sprint

Alexandra Linortner
Nov 5 · 5 min read

Week three of my UX & UI bootcamp at Iron Hack Berlin. This week we were working in pairs. Anna B and me were doing a Design Sprint in four days by following the Design Thinking process.

The Challenge

Fun People Inc. is a company which offers in-person courses for adult education. The challenge of this week was to transform this offline experience into an online platform.

The Company

Fun People Inc. is an educational company born in 2014. They currently offer in-person courses of languages, music, yoga, cooking and first-aid for adults. Their main attraction is workshop camps. Dozens of people join every month the workshops in different locations, as the school has a very special recipe: they integrate classes, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching people additional skills.

However, many people are unable to attend the workshop camp due to time and cost reasons, but still, want to take part in a course. Fun People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for people who cannot attend the workshop camp.

1) Research Phase

The first day was all about research. To learn more about our target group we created an online survey by using the Lean Survey Canvas.
After sending it out to the world we started to find out more about our competitors.

Competitor Analysis

Our competitor analysis showed us that we were dealing with one direct competitor. But we knew that we can differentiate from this company by focusing on the USP of Fun People Inc.: The enjoyment of learning.

2) Define Phase

On the second day we already got some insights on our target group from our online survey. These helped us to create our primary persona.

Phil is 30 years old, living on the country side and working full-time. He is eager to learn something new besides his job but he never manages to stay motivated enough to finish an online course.

Primary Persona

The outcome of our research led us to our final How Might We statement:

How might we offer an enjoyable e-learning experience that keeps people motivated?

3) Ideation Phase

Feature Prioritization by using the Moscow Method

During our ideation phase we came up with way too many features. As our goal was to build an MVP (or at least the mid-fi wireframes for an MVP) we had to do a Feature Prioritization. We used the Moscow Method to decide which features we really needed.

After that we used Card Sorting to find the best way to organize the content in our product.

4) Prototyping

Our survey showed that 85 % of people preferred their notebook as their main device for e-learning. So we went for a desktop version of our product.

The third day of our Design Sprint started by designing some Paper Prototypes. We’ve spent the last two days of our sprint doing user testings and iterations. The Paper Prototypes were followed by Mid-fi Wireframes and a Figma Prototype.

Final Mid-fi Wireframe of the entry page.

Phil already went through the log-in process when he was preparing everything for his course. Now his entry page is the student platform dashboard.

The schedule — the other learning units — the progress tracker

Phils schedule has 3 predetermined live-classes. This is a very important aspect of our product. First of all because our survey showed that users wanted live classes to enjoy learning and stay motivated during the course. The second reason for the live classes was that it’s the best way to implement the offline experience in our online platform.

Phil already learned on his first log-in that he can drag and drop the other learning units into his schedule like he wants to. This gives him the flexibility he needs to reconcile his job and his online course.
These other units are divided into mandatory and voluntary because 60 % of people in our survey voted for mandatory classes to stay motivated during the course.

Another highly rated tool to stay motivated was an automated progress tracking which we also included in our dashboard.

Phil still has half an hour left before his first live-class so he decides to start a mandatory video tutorial in the meantime. During the video he gets an altert for the live class to start. He enters the classroom where he can chat with the other students, take notes and also raise his hand for taking part in the conversation. During the live-classes teachers will make quizzes and games to maintain the fun factor the company’s philosophy is built on. After the class Phil is redirected to his dashboard.

Wireframes of the whole User Flow

Go to the clickable wireframe here!

Learnings

  • If you want to do such a sprint in only 4 days focus is the key. During every discussion we asked ourselves “is this really important now or are we getting lost in details again?” This really helped us to continue fast with our process.
  • Taking some time to find the right questions for our survey was definitely super important! I loved how we were able to base every single feature on our findings from the survey.

A big thank you to my team mate Anna B for going through these intense four days with me!

Alexandra Linortner

Written by

Freelance art directrice for product design, packaging design and graphic design — alex-design.at. Co-founder of glitterandtechno.com. UX/UI design student

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