The Design Sprint — Day 4
This is a part 4/5 series of my experience participating in the design sprint as a designer. If you are interested, please read about the rest of the sprint here.
Yay, we made it till Thursday! The week went by pretty quickly, and it is hard to believe we will be testing our ideas tomorrow. But first things first.
Reminder. The problem we are trying to solve is based on the current engagement of the team members in the company. It is challenging to connect and learn about each other due to the remote nature of work. To solve this issue and increase the engagement rate, we decided to pursue the idea of collecting cards. Each user will design their card by answering personal/work-related questions. To collect cards from other team members, they will have to communicate.
Storyboard.
Sometimes things do not go as planned. For this reason, we spent some time in the morning drawing out some storyboard ideas that we did not finish during our Decide session. First, we focused on some of the questions we had.
- How do the users feel about our idea?
- What do users think about the random pairing of interests or being able to search for someone based on their interests?
- What card archetype do they find the most interesting? (Pokémon, baseball, etc.)
Once we had the questions in front of us, we moved on to generating the storyboard ideas. Based on the feedback we were looking to get after the user testing, we chose these scenarios to move forward with.
- Creating a new card (given some event) (including adding a card for hobby/professional).
- Finding people and collecting another person’s card in particular.
Prototype.
In the context of Design Sprint, the word prototype slightly differs from the one in standard product development. Within this challenge, we see a prototype as an experiment to test our hypotheses rather than building a fully functional back-end.
Due to the time constraints, we split into two teams. Each team chose a storyboard idea to map out, visualize each step of the experience we want to test, and clarify the pieces we need to prototype.
The concept.
I was part of a team who focused on the scenario of finding people to connect with and collect the card. At this stage of the process, we focused on “the happy path” — the story where things go well.
In UX storyboarding, the stories are examples of how people interact with the service. Let me walk you through the storyboard we visualized.
Using the database, Methodites can search for the employees that share the same interests (pets, TV shows, nature) or topics they are interested in learning about (ex. python, illustrations, etc.) and reach out to them to establish new connections. When they click Connect, the automated message populates in Slack. It can be modified for a personal touch. After meeting someone new, you have an option to exchange the cards and add them to your collection.
We spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for the final day of the design sprint. The day we finally test our ideas!
Takeaways.
- Divide in conquer. It is ok to split up to accomplish more.
This is a part 4/5 series of my experience participating in the design sprint as a designer. If you are interested, please read about the rest of the sprint here.
