Sprint Challenges and Lessons : defining a service concept from scratch
LAUP media is a startup based in Korea specializing in spatial thinking and analysis. With a broad idea to create a combined experience of a physical book with that uses maps (created with GIS) and an interactive app, we wanted to narrow down the scope of this broad service flow.
But how? Because the technology we are using — GIS — has a wide pool of potential usages, our initial service concept was not specific/targeted. It was time to consider the target users: who will be the users and more importantly, why would people use or purchase our products? It was time for UX design.
Why we chose SPRINT
Of all those different UX methodologies, Google Venture’s Sprint workshops came to my sight.
“Google Sprint is a three to five day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas. Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype.” -gv sprint
Afterall, GV Sprint provided a nice guideline, KIT, and even a book about the whole process and reasoning for each steps. This article will share our process and lessons.
Planning for the Sprint
We first touched on the logistics: what will be the date and who will be our team members?
Date: March — April 2018 (4 days of Sprint workshops, and many more days of research and teamworks)
Participants: CEO, Facilitator, 2 UX/UI Designers, 2 UX Researchers, GUI Designer, 2 Architects
Challenge & Lessons: Because we had to design not only the physical map book but also the mobile app platform, it was hard for everyone to be on the same page. For instance, mobile app designer would not fully understand the technological possibilities of using GIS. For better understanding the context, we spent a few hours ahead to clarify our assumptions and understand the technology better. Kick-off meeting to make sure everyone’s on the same page is important. We also discovered that teammates who understand and emphasize with problem the business is trying to address is the most important thing when creating a team.
Problem statement: finding opportunities
“Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.” — Benjamin Franklin.
The first step was to find the “problem” in order to find “opportunities”. While sharing our research on the market and also the products with similar concept, everyone wrote down the problems existing on the market on sticky notes. Then, we would start creating an affinity mapping: gathering large amounts of data and organizing them into groups based on their relationships. By gathering and grouping them, we would have key issues — the problems — we can potentially address.
Our keywords were: time, space, emotion, gamification, recording, etc.
Lessons: Through this exercise, we would better understand our problems, and thus our potential solutions. This process was a nice transitioning phase into ideation.
Wait.. We need more guidelines. Who should be our target users?
After the affinity mapping, we moved onto the ideation part. However, because our initial target user was very broad, our results for ideation was too broad and not guided. Our initial users include:
- User #1. goals: relieving stress (힐링)
- User #2. goals: for traveling (여행자)
- User #3. goals: using it as a diary (다이어리)
- User #4. goals: for education / information (교육 / 정보)
We drew user journey maps for each users.
After lengthy discussions, we decided to first specify and narrow down our target user for this project. Because the sprint challenge was too broad, we needed some specific guidelines on the target persona, and general flow of the service. We decided to focus on the user#2, travelers who want to record their places and share their traveling experiences. We chose this user group because traveling would best suit for our purpose to design services that people can “record based on places.”
Concept guidelines: Mapbook + App platform for 2030s travellers
Diverge: Ideation process
Our next challenge was to ideate. First, we ideated on the general service concept for travelers, and then we ideated separate for the mobile wireframes for the app. This took about two full days. Though the original plan for the Sprint was to ideate on just one day, we expanded the time frame because the project involved two mediums (physical map book + digital platform).
We used both the Crazy Eight & 3 step solution exercises guided by the GV Sprint.
Lessons:
- This is the process where keeping the ‘time’ is crucial. Because there are so many great ideas, we might get swept into totally different ideas that look much more attractive. It’s important to keep reminding the team of the initial challenge, and our persona. For other good ideas, keep a side note of those great ideas for next sprint challenges.
- If the results of the first ideation process is too broad, it might be more effective to segment the ideation by different goals. For us, it was ‘ideating for the whole flow’, ‘for mapbook’, and ‘for the app’.
Converge: Storyboard + Wireframe
After a few days, we began our next challenge to come up with the storyboard, and also to start wireframing for a mobile app design.
Lessons: Storyboard works the best when the persona is specific.
Based on the storyboard, we started wireframing for the app as well.
What’s next?
After a few days of sprint workshops, we came up with the service concept, and rough ideas for the map book and app experience. Because of the time limit, we missed some steps like user interviews, but decided to take a slower step with less people to focus on the UX research and iterative design process for the next phase.
We faced some difficulties and excitements through this sprint exercise. We learned that planning ahead for each step and notifying the team are crucial. We also learned that because there are so many different methods to do each process, the facilitator and the team leader should decide which steps they want to take, and why. This way, the whole team will spend less time on discussions. Overall, this sprint was a helpful exercise to move our broad concept to the next step.
