Design Sprinting: Validate solutions in one week
During our work we encounter countless of questions and problems. Most of them are focussed on creating the best user experience possible. How can the product fit their needs even better than the current situation? How can we make sure that what we are developing is right?
We recently asked ourselves these questions while working for a big client in the healthcare sector. We are almost six months in and are facing our biggest challenge as of yet: How can we make buying meals via the platform efficient and modern? And so we said: Let’s find a way to find the solution!
And so we emptied all our calendars for one week, the concept week, in order to get new insights and validate a solution. The book ‘Sprint’ by Google Ventures is the thin red line in the process. It is a solid base containing methods that are already proven to get valuable information. Since we have an extensive and highly diverse clientbase, we adapt the method to best fit the problem we’re tackling. By adding or changing brainstorm methods, for example.
A concept week in short
Monday
On the first day of the concept week we lay the foundation of our solution. We formulate the problem and goals and we put focus on the deliverable at the end of the week. Together we create a Customer Journey Map to display the journey of all stakeholders in the process. All questions are written down to to make sure they are not forgotten during the sprint.
Monday gave us enormous insights in our client and their users. The insights gave us the knowledge to question our future designs and for upcoming sprints in the development of the product.
Tuesday
The second day we explore possible solutions for the problem. We get inspiration from solutions from other products that could help solve our problem. We ask questions like: How did website A fix this problem? What patterns does website B use that could help us to solve the problem?
Together with our client we looked at various competitors in e-commerce and healthcare. We also asked everyone in the room to show their favorite website. We sketched the usable parts on paper for future usage.
Wednesday and Thursday
On Wednesday & Thursday we create a concept based on all the output from Monday and Tuesday. An interactive prototype will be shown to the client at the end of Thursday.
For this particular project we decided to create the prototype in Framer. This in order to create a solution which feels like an actual product, which will come in handy on the our next and final sprint day.
Friday
On Friday we verify our design. By interviewing the future users and testing the prototype we find out if the solution is a positive experience for the user. It could happen that the end users do not like the solution or that it does not meet expectations. During the interviews we find out why. With the outcome of the interviews we can decide to run a second design sprint to validate a new solution.
Why does this fit Label A?
As Label A we create products that actually solve a problem. With the design sprint we can fully focus on a particular problem and solve this with the most important stakeholders: the client, the experts and the user.
The solution we came up with solved the problem of selling meals to patients in retirement homes and hospitals. We know this is one (of the many) right solutions that will work because we validated it with all the stakeholders including the actual user. Now it’s up to the client to decide whether we are actually building it!
Do you have a problem that needs to be tackled? We are always up for a challenge! Feel free to contact us anytime via www.labela.nl/contact!
To learn more about design sprints the way Google does things, check out gv.com/sprint.
