The Ladder’s Google Design Sprint

In the fall of 2018, we completed our first design sprint with the Ladder. The Ladder is an organization that hosts innovation workshops for non-profits and social enterprises. The goal of the Ladder is to assist social enterprises by breaking down their business plan and running it through a six-week design sprint. The design sprints are inspired by Google, and with the help of the facilitators and members of the Ladder, they have helped hundreds of social enterprises across multiple countries.

Our team was lead by community facilitator Karl Byrne, and supported by 5 volunteers - Ellen, Katie, Achintia, Zili, and Sebastian. Katie was kind enough to write about her time with Change Donations and the Ladder. Below is her account of our time together:

Katie Goodwin: Ladder experience with Change Donations

Background: I become involved with Change Donations though my role of volunteering as a UX designer at The Ladder (link). Change Donations (link) is a start-up that aims to change the way people donate to charity by allowing them to donate to causes through rounding up their purchases and having that money transferred to the cause of their choice.

The founders who met with us, Will and Lizzy, had already got a website set up and first prototype of their mobile app was in the process of being made.

After an initial meeting with them, we clarified the main design problems for the app:

1. how to get Irish people -generally skeptical about donating to charity- to trust them and
2. how to explain the process of setting up an account with them given the complexity of the Irish banking system

Research approach:

Personas

We wrote the stories of people who might be interested in the concept: We considered the financial capabilities of each, their relationship with charitable giving and any problems that each of these people might have around donating

User journey mapping:

Choosing one of our personas, we then considered how that person might come into contact with Change Donations for the first time. What avenues in their daily lives might take them there? We came up with several possible avenues they might come through: a social media post shared by a friend, though a university newsletter, an event or a website of a charity linked to Change Donations. We decided to base our prototype on the latter journey as this was the most likely one the user would be making at the current stage of the business.

Low-fidelity wire-framing

In the true Sprint fashion, all members of the group drew up sketches of what we each thought the user journey should look like. The main point of contention was where to put the information explaining the concepts and the sign-up process.

In my design, I recommended having as much information as possible given before the sign-up process in easily digestible forms such as diagrams, videos, and infographics. Information should also be available during the sign-up process through clickable question mark buttons.

When finished, we stuck these on the wall and put stickers on the parts of each design we liked best. When all the frames had been voted on, we made one master wireframe, featuring the best parts of each design.

Caption: my wireframe is the bottom one. As you can see, people liked my design of the explainer page as there are many small blue stickers placed there. I like to put real text instead of lorem ipsum on my designs.

Prototype:

At The Ladder, we only have 2 sessions to make the prototype (this adds up to around 5 hours). What we create, therefore, needs to be cheap and quick. It also needs to represent the future product as accurately as possible as the prototype is tested on real users from the public.

We decided to create two things for this prototype: a video explaining the concept and some interactive screens.

Video

We wrote a video script explaining the concept of donating using round-ups then filmed it using my phone. The founders have space in Dog Patch (link) and we filmed the video there. This was a very lean approach as it was completely free to make the video. We also didn’t have time to add animations to the video. Basically, we just wanted to see how the users reacted to the explanation in the video and if it helped them to understand the concepts and gained their trust more.