Design Sprint 2.0 at Aurachain — Case Study
This is a report about a four-day Design Sprint performed for our low-code platform.
Overview:
Aurachain is a low-code enterprise platform which allows the visual creation of both blockchain-enabled and off-chain digital process applications.
Goal:
Our goal was to improve the user’s experience in the Document Builder section when formatting and working with dynamic content.
My Role:
Design Sprint Facilitator, UX Designer
Now, our sprint week:
- Monday — Define & Sketch
- Tuesday — Decide & Storyboard
- Wednesday — Prototype
- Thursday — Test
Team:
Our team had 12 members from various department — PM, BA, Client Support, Marketing & Front-End Development.
First Day — Monday (Define and Sketch)
Step 1: Initial Kickoff, Expert Interview and HMW Notes
We started with an introduction about the design sprint approach and the topic at hand. Since this was the first design sprint for our team, we did some ice-breaking exercises in order to have everyone relaxed and ready to sprint for the very first day.
During the expert interview, a lot of questions appeared and I encouraged everyone to write down relevant notes related to our goal. All of these notes were translated into an HMW format, to frame them as something we can solve, rather than a blocking problem.
Note: The team had some time to turn their notes into HMW ideas, because it’s a little tricky to pay attention to the expert interview and also translate your thoughts into HMW notes.
Step 2: Long Term Goal and Sprint Questions
We managed to define our long-term goal and sprint questions by going through the expert interview notes and our up-voted HMWs.
Step 3: Map
As our third step, we created the map, which helped us get more comfortable with the flow of our product.
Step 4: Four Step Sketch
This step was tricky, because we all know that when it comes to sketching, we might feel a little bit uncomfortable, so I had to make sure that everyone was aware of the impact of their ideas.
We kicked off with some notes and rough ideas just before jumping in that lovely Crazy 8s exercise which was the most interesting one — in 8 minutes, you need to come up with 8 variations for your idea. Given the fact that nobody was a drawing expert, we made a compromise and 6–7 ideas were also accepted.
For the last exercise of the day, we replaced the Solution Sketch with a Design Charrette experiment and — voilà, we had 3 final sketches to be voted on Tuesday morning.
Design Charrette: Split your experts into 3 teams of 4 people, appoint a leader for each one and rotate one person every 15 minutes, 3 times. This way, the ideas & sketches can be improved by the input of the new members in each team.
Second Day — Tuesday (Decide and Storyboard)
Step 1: Short Recap, Art Museum and Heat Maps
We started with a short recap of the first day and then I asked them to show their sketches and create heat maps with unlimited red dots. In the end, we really had a lot of red areas.
Step 2: Speed Critique
Next, as a Facilitator, I had to present the concepts to everyone in an explicit way to make sure that all the experts understood the concept.
However, at the end of each concept presentation, I asked the team if I missed something — which actually happened!
Step 3: Straw Poll and The Super Vote!
During the Straw Poll voting, everyone placed their final votes silently on a single concept. Everyone also had to motivate their pick in a 2 minutes pitch. The Decider later took the final decision by voting one concept and one feature to integrate into the solution.
Step 4: Storyboard
This step was the most important of the day, since the Storyboard should capture an entire journey through our product/section without leaving unanswered questions. Very important to add — as a Facilitator, I had to make sure that we didn’t include any new ideas on the Storyboard.
To simplify the process, I asked the team to write 6 steps that the users need to perform from their first interaction with the product until reaching their ultimate goal and we voted an ultimate flow of action steps. This exercise helped us a lot to draw the storyboard.
Third Day — Wednesday (Prototype)
Our goal was to deliver a prototype that can validate our solution. For this day, I didn’t follow the Design Sprint methodology. Instead, I chose to have the whole team back at their day-to-day work, except for the 2 designers in the team. I was one of them and we focused on crafting the prototype.
This helped because the team had the chance to work on their day-to-day tasks, while my colleague and I were much more focused on our work.
Step 1: Paper Prototype
I love starting with pen and paper, so we translated our storyboard into a paper prototype and tried to cover a big part of the storyboard.
Step 2: Digital Prototype
Since we had the paper prototype and the storyboard, my colleague and I started crafting the digital prototype using Adobe XD. We were working simultaneously and it was very helpful that we already had an updated design system with our components.
Note: I encouraged the sprint team to come into the war room periodically to give us short feedback on what we were prototyping. This helped us to stay focused on the main idea.
Fourth Day — Thursday (Test)
Step 1: Present The Prototype
Our day started with a short presentation of the prototype, so that everyone was aligned with what we had built. It seems that we managed to cover our main idea, so we were ready for interviews.
Step 2: Interviews
Given that our team had a quite busy schedule for the week, we had to split into teams of 2 people and interview our users separately, at the same time. Even though this wasn’t the best technique, the insights we gained were valuable and we mapped each user’s the pros and cons in a big table.
We ended up comparing our users’ feedback with our Long-Term Goal and we concluded that we touched our target. Of course, there are plenty of things that we need to work on, but our 4 days sprint validated our main ideas and, on this note, we successfully finished our Design Sprint.
Takeaways:
- It’s hard to keep enthusiasm in a group so you must have an overflowing energy as a facilitator;
- Not everything goes according to plan — sometimes it’s good to do things differently from the methodology;
- Build a Parking Lot where the team can write new ideas that are not related to the purpose of the sprint;
- Before starting the Design Sprint, validate your process with a more experienced designer, internal or external — this helped me a lot as I found some gaps in my flow.
Finally, we are satisfied with our final result and we are looking forward to our next sprint.
Thanks a lot for reading this article.
Final Note: Since privacy is very important, we decided to blur most of the pictures taken during the sprint.
