No more Procrastination! — A refreshing tale of Urban Ladder through our Remote Design Sprint
Pre-Article Note:
Amidst this ever-expanding COVID-19 wave, we — the post-graduation Graphic Design students of MITID, started afresh remote semester in August 2020. We were introduced to a new way of learning, a new visiting faculty — Nikita ma’am (Nikita Kanade-Wagh, Founder and CEO, Viniage Design) and a new term — ‘Design Sprint.’ We were told that it is a method which will solve your design problems in just 5 days, that too in a group. Yes, that is something that seemed impossible!
Our class got divided into groups of 7–8 students and this ride started. On the very first day of our course, we all were utterly confused. But today, after 3 weeks into this course, we know that we have made this possible and we can’t wait to apply this learning in our future endeavors!
Let’s see how we made it till here!
The Team:
What is Design Sprint?
A Design Sprint is a 5-day design thinking method used to solve complex problems throughout co-creation, rapid prototyping, and qualitative testing with targeted users. The method originated at Google Ventures and the process was also described in the book ‘Sprint’ by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. (This is a highly recommended book if you want to run a sprint on your own.)
What’s great about the Design Sprint is that it is a tried-and-true formula. If you follow the agenda for each day, you will dave a productive week. It is a highly effective, even fun, method for approaching a problem or key project. As the word sprint indicates, they’re about getting results fast.
In five days, the Design Sprint will help you to:
Work Process before Design Sprint:
Before this Design Sprint, we usually start with our initial secondary & primary research, identity & study our target audience needs & wants, identify problems & define the problem statement, ideate on the solutions, test these ideas feasibly, then start our design process, develop prototypes, and test with our target users. But generally, whenever we work in a team, we usually have disputes in making decisions. We tend to have a certain personal preference, personal style & personal understanding; and this can differ from others. But the problem we had was we didn’t know how to cope up with such differences, in turn, sabotage the entire process slowly & gradually. Design Sprint definitely solved that problem. A Design Sprint is designed to make quick, efficient decisions in just a matter of hours. Making a mutual decision by means of voting. It was literally & democratically perfect.
Our expectations from Design Sprint:
We had some expectations from Design Sprint. It was obvious if we could get some practical hardcore solutions to our aforementioned problems — decision making, time management & efficient design output.
Objective:
Well, our objective for running this Design Sprint was predefined before beginning but the direction in which this would go was obviously unexpected. Briefly, our goal was simply to ideate, develop & test prototypes of a product or service for a brand in a particular industry. It seems simple but it wasn’t. There were many sorts of challenges we needed to overcome.
Challenges:
It’s August 2020 and COVID-19 are dramatically snowballing. So, there is no chance we would be joining our university any sooner. And hence, everything was supposed to conducted remotely, sitting at our comfy home and collaborating through online software. This list of software was of the best help during the course of our project:
Our team utilized the best of Microsoft Teams for video conferencing remotely and this turned out to be the biggest help during this pandemic. But our work still wasn’t centralized to discuss, ideate, and work together simultaneously. We were introduced with a remarkable platform, MIRO, a scalable, secure, cross-device team collaboration whiteboard platform. We are able to work together at the same time just like we would have done in the classroom but it was more reliable, secure, and fun. We ideated, decided & conducted the majority of our project here. Figma, a platform to design, prototype and gather feedback in one place, was again an outstanding app to prototype our ideas with the team at the same time. Lastly, WhatsApp was pretty handy in communicating instantly.
Imagine an online furniture website and a mobile application that enables you to visualize and find a perfect piece of furniture that actually fits in your very own space, which provides you an advisor who has got your back and user experience so comfortable that makes you go back to the same brand again and again!
Day 1:
As you know that we were compelled to work remotely amidst COVID, we were asked to make ourselves familiar with the software called ‘miro’ which is a platform that allows you to edit content online in real-time. As and how we proceeded in the day further, we started to dwell deeper into our interest in fields. All the activities were completed within a stipulated amount of time, followed by a voting system done simultaneously. The brand that we chose as a group was the Urban ladder which is an online home decor and furnishing brand. By the second half of the day, each of us noted the positives and negatives of the brand, raised our concerns as to how might we solve the existing drawbacks, which led us to derive possible solutions for the same. Towards the end, we landed upon a short term goal of Leveraging our brand with branding through various media platforms and set ourselves further.
Day 2:
The aim for day 2 was to come up with an end goal statement that would help us to give a direction ahead in the working process. This included identifying the hurdles and obstacles the brand faces and come up with possible ‘can we’ suggestions from every group member. Further, the process of mapping helped us to set a goal which was to convert one time buyers into repeated customers. The day followed with a lightning demo activity that demanded research to gather insights and inspirations from the other brands/products/services who worked on similar lines as ours. This activity was done to generate creative ideas for the next step.
Day 3:
This day involved a set of activities done anonymously such as taking notes from the already existing lightning demos, doodling our thought process and then the 8-minute activity which was to sketch 8 ideas in 8 frames, also known as ‘the crazy 8’ (it is as crazy as it sounds). The next stage was the big idea wherein, all of us had to come up with an in detailed concept sketch in three stages. Here, you start getting an idea as to where you are heading as a group. By now, we knew that customer retention was our target to achieve with the help of a website.
Day 4:
We then went ahead and started to prepare ourselves before we could actually get our hands into the final prototyping of our website. Day 4 was all about creating the user test flows for the website, creating storyboards, and mood boards depicting the visual look and feel of our website.
Day 5:
Finally, the day comes when we put ourselves in our very own graphic designer mode getting all our minds into visual communication, while on the other hand, we were getting familiar with a UI UX application called ‘Figma’ that gave us the liberty to work remotely, yet surprisingly turned out to be effective to our notice. For those who are wondering what this application does, let us help you with a link for the same. (https://www.figma.com/blog/)
Day 6:
Our prototype was ready to get tested. Both nervous and excited, we conducted 5 user tests. This phase motivated us to work ahead as we received a fair amount of constructive feedback which helped us to acknowledge the challenges that were uncovered earlier and abandon what was outdated.
The second phase of the sprint:
After a very productive, fun, and bumpy ride through week 1, we were all set to dive into the 2nd week of the process. With constructive user feedback and with some uncovered challenges in our hand, we again derived some HMW’s and Can we statements and identified our 2nd sprint question. We did a ‘Lightning Demo’ session again and picked out inspirations from all over the world. The day concluded with an updated version of seven different sketch notes, crazy 8’s, and The Big Idea. We finalized our 1 big idea and updated the user flow according to it.
The day after was all about making iterations in our prototypes according to the updated ideas. We had the challenge of creating a separate mobile app for the brand from scratch to give justice to the proposed feature. We managed to complete the prototypes for both website and application and to derive some additional user feedback questions and were all set to conduct our 2nd user test session, and this time with 7 different users!
This 2nd round gave us validation of our hard work. The final result in the form of our working website and application made all the efforts till now worth it!
Prototype:
Experience and Suggestions for design sprint aspirants:
Earlier, when we were unaware of Design Sprint, our group-works used to be effective but much more time-consuming. This method helped us to take quick, qualitative, and collective decisions. Every member of the group got an equal chance to put forth their point of view. The time restrictions made us set our goals very clearly and the urge to reach that goal on time increased the energy level of the group. We did not only learn about the design process but also about our own individual abilities. A design sprint is a very organized way of working as it avoids last moment work and zero cluttering of work as all the work gets documented in a systematic manner during the process itself.
It is a process in which everyone (Not only designers) should at least try once in their career to see how their mind and brain work effectively in time restrictions. These days everyone is busier than ever at work, and many juggle with multiple projects in their jobs or academics. In this work climate, it might seem crazy to think that you and your team can set aside. Refer some videos or read about this process before diving into this whole method.
Behind the Scenes!
And lastly, what my experience with a design sprint has been like…https://youtu.be/SUZIn6cdoJo
