Design Sprint Project
It’s Wednesday in the morning, the very second day of the UX/UI Bootcamp we started yesterday and we vaguely know each other. After a pechakucha round, the teams -consisting of four students each- for this Design Sprint are set by our teacher Pere -who will also play the role of decision-maker during all the process-.
The main challenge to solve is the news media crisis of the last decade. We have 6 issues but only one can be chosen, so we decide to focus on How to approach quality daily news to Gen-Z & Millenials. Not and easy one, for sure, but we thought this could bring us more freedom and have more unusual ideas to approach it.
Day 1, Map:
After a very productive time of thinking about problems we might find working on the issue -almost 40 rumble ideas came out-, all of these issues went through the How May We machine: we reformulated them as questions, for example: How may we let the user find news quickly?
These questions needed to be structured, so we did it in three variants: User (Usuario), Business (Negocio) and Product (Producto).
Taking a look at the wall full of post-its, now was the time to choose on which problems we should focus to solve our main goal, which was our first contact with the term dotmocracy and how it works. And it does, especially to quicken decision-making.
FYI: Dotes, votes made with dots. A made up word I think describes pretty much the use of color dots in this scenario. I intend to use it though all this story, so you are advised ;)
We stablished the main issues, but we need to know much more our potential user. Because of the lack of time and resources, we started to create Personas of the chosen target of our product and their user-journey in already existing digital newspapers and/or their apps.
Day 2, Sketch:
We know the main problems and now we need solutions. At this point we all four had to came with 4–5 solving-ideas each in less than 15 minutes, where our team-mates had to draw it while we were explaining them. After sharing all of them with the team, it was crazy-eight time! We had 16 minutes to sketch 4 different solutions for 2 issues. Well, we actually spent a little bit longer for this process, a newbies thing. Mine is on the left.
Right after, each one had to choose one of the eight solutions proposed to expand it, like a mini-journey, but showing more detailed design and customer behavior in a three panel sketch. I decided to focus on the news customization mixed with a color scheme (a different palette of colors for each theme).
Day 3, Decide:
We shared again our elections and, surprisingly, three of us went for the color scheme and customization. Also, the experts section to validate the news and increase its quality was highly doted. After another round of dotmocracy, the main hypothesis to solve the main issue, and how to approach it, was made: we would focus on customization guided by a color scheme guidance for news topics.
Day 4, Prototype:
At this point we know our goal, now we need to build a prototype to prove our best card: news feed customization through topics based on a color scheme. Taking in consideration our latest and more doted sketches, we started setting an ideal journey to show this main feature to test users the day after. We divided the tasks according our strengths and started prototyping right away.
While setting this, we started to design our app from scratch and choose a name for it: Newsly. This name came out in 1 minute after mixing two proposals: team decision-making was getting faster every a day.
Day 5, Test:
Today is time to test 5 users -most of the issues involving an app/website are visible if only 3 testers point them out-. At least, we made a more extensive test using the user-lab technique, while the other 4 users were using guerrilla testing.
After all this process, we filled up our wall with the pain-points testers pointed out and the good comments. Taking a fast look at the wall is that one of our hypothesis didn’t work out well: color scheme customization. Maybe for a poorly chosen implementation because it could be more subtle or because this can’t work out well with those generations.
On the other hand, the topics customization -with no logarithms involved- where you can see/read only the topics you want, was highlighted by all 5 testers as a very good and useful feature.
We realize during the results evaluation that our only user-lab tester Andrés, gave us way more valuable feedback than the other four, individually speaking.
While user-lab testing is more expensive and takes more time, in return you get more information: the user is more relaxed and is easier to empathize with, so they will open up easily. Depending on what are you testing, this procedure is a really good investment.
Project conclusions and plans for improving
Negative comments
- Unable to find back/home button
- Colors scheme is not liked
- Log-in/Registration page not useful
- Customization menu placed backwards and should be accessed from the bottom toolbar
- News order is not mentioned (date, topic, etc)
Positive comments
- News feed customization in the Home page
- Navigation between news (not needing to go back to Home)
- High amount of topics for customization
- Simple Home page and navigation within
Future Plans for Implementation*
- Rethink the color scheme, even leave it
- Add a Home icon
- Redistribute toolbars and menus
- Design an onboard introduction for new users explaining our main features
- Fix the customization menu
- Enable push notifications about the most recent news of your chosen topics
- Add a publishing (and update) date in every report
*Conclusions taken after evaluating the results and if the Newsly project was eventually moving forward.
And a global view of our Design Sprint wall :)
Personal conclusions and comments
Being so new to UX/UI Design, this technique was very frustrating at some points because our lack of based knowledge or practice. But at the end, even we failed at many goals, I consider it a total success:
The more we failed, the more we knew how to improve.
At start, I pictured the app in a very different way as we finished it. But it’s not bad. On the contrary, my team-mates contributed improving the weaknesses of what I had in mind and made it even better.
This technique may be not the most appropriate for developing a new app, platform or business from square one. But for testing new features of already existing, it’s quite effective. You can have really valuable feedback from users to continue working on this new feature, change it, or abandon it and focus on another one.
I learned a lot about my teammates and how successful team-working can be if we listen and make an effort to reason our discrepancies. Knowing the strengths of your team and divide tasks according to them can make a big difference at the end: it improves the project success and makes less stressful teammates’ day-to-day.
Since the beginning, Design Sprint technique reminded me of the scientific method but without the iteration part, which have a very important role in Design Thinking.
