Doing Design Sprint — Day 3

Published in

Meatball IO

6 min readMay 25, 2016

This is a part 4/6 series in my experience running a design sprint, if you are interested please find the rest of the sprint here

Day 0 — The week before
Day 1 — Monday
Day 2 — Tuesday
Day 3 — Wednesday (this blog)
Day 4 — Thursday (coming soon)
Day 5 — Friday (coming soon)

9.30 am — prepping the room

For the 3rd day, the fatigue was setting in. I found it harder to dragged myself out of bed. But the prospect of what the new sprint day pushed me forward. It’s been great so far. What could go wrong?

Making a nice cup of coffee in the morning has nothing to do with the Sprint at all :p

I got in the office just a little a head of time to clean the room. Made an aero-press coffee and slipped in just in-time.

10.00 am — Art Museum

Just like a museum of modern art — The piece has to speak for itself and things are up to interpretation

I taped all the design that was completed yesterday from the envelop that has no name. Looking back — I should have put all the designs further apart to allow people more room and not be on top of each other while there were looking at each solution.

In this workshop, people supposed to look at each solution in silence — just like a gallery visit.

Each person has a 3 red dots to put on each section that they like. We called this a heatmap. It is not the traditional heatmap like how I used to know it in web matrices. This is more about what sparked interest for each person. If there were any unclear things about each design, people can put a note with question below the design.

After the team voted with their heatmap, we started a Speed Critique section of the workshop.

Here, Chai, one of our engineer pointed out to the team important aspect of his solution

Because the name of each designer still remain anonymous at this point, I had to present each design to the group. We gave about 3 minutes for each design. I found it easy to talk about the design even if I was seeing it fresh for the first time today because the designs were meant to be self-explanatory. The red dots from the heatmap session also help me to pointed out the high-lights to the team.

After that we revealed the identify of The owner of the design. He/she also had a chance here to talk about what the team may have missed during the anonymous discussion. In this part, I found that the ideas in each solution were well captured and the owner of the solution only had to add a few things here and there but there is no major missed.

each of the solution proposed by the team

We then do a straw poll vote. Each person has one vote to vote on the whole solution or just specific section. This is like a normal vote expect it is being done anonymously again — with the similar idea of thinking that we don’t want one person’s decision to effect another.

Turn out that there were lots of overlap. Each person had about 1 minute after that to explain to the team the reason.

Now it is time for the super vote. Our CEO was not available at that time — so after a few minute discussion future workshops and user interviewing strategies. We found that we couldn’t really move forward until we had more clarity about which solution we will be focusing on. So we break for lunch about 30 minutes early.

2.00 pm — Super Vote

Our CEO made it to the room. First, I tried to present for each design to make sure all the pitches were fair. But things turn out that I was not able to explain the design clear enough and there were lots of question from the CEO. We changed to have the solution’s owner directly pitches to the CEO. Each have 3 minutes plus the small Q&A from the Boss.

The CEO was able to understand what each solution was offering and also which offers were interesting to go to prototype to test for. He had 3 super vote. Which ever he chose, it will go to prototype and test with the users.

He picked one specific idea and two more which can be combined. He explained to us why he picked those one, complimented us on the work so far and left the room.

We felt much more sure after being validated by the CEO.

We had a mini break then move to the next workshop.

3.00 pm — Rumble or all in one

First I was not sure why we need this workshop. The explanation given in the book was not resonating with me.

But now in the front line, I understood what the authors meant. Because 3 solutions were chosen, we need to decide how we will test on Friday. Can we combined those idea in to a multiple sections of one design. Or do we need a completely new flow.

For us, even if the selected solutions were not directly conflicting so we don’t need to have the A/B test version of the test.

As things turned out, one solution was so obvious that the CEO was mad of himself for was not able to through about this himself. We all agreed with him. So we decided that if the answer from the user in this question will be an obvious “yes” there was not point prototype it. Just to be sure that we were not jumping to conclusion, we decided to just address this issue as a question during the interview but not as the prototype.

The other two remaining ideas, we wrote a rough user journey on the whiteboard and talk about how both fit into a same design — just branched off. At this point, it seem that a lot if the prototype materials can be share together. And that is a good thing.

3.30 pm — Storyboard

Our little storyboard — not the best illustrated story ever — I know

I read about using storyboard to get in to user context before in the past but not so sure how it would fit into the design process. So when I saw it mentioned here again in the design sprint — I was not sure how it will worked out. But lots of things in this design sprint were “a first time thing”. Since it worked out so far. So mind as well go for it.

I taped up 15 rectangle boxes (more straight than a hand drawn line) and began asking the room where should be our starting scene.

Just like a miracle, our head of UX dropped by to say hi. So I asked him to talk about story board to the team.

After the initial friction removed, we were on the roll. The team started giving out ideas while I tried my best to captured them on the wall. If I couldn’t understand what he/she meant, he/she will walked but to the board and draw out that he/she meant.

We got completed story in no time. Everyone seemed pretty happy about what we had accomplished together today.

For some people who can only got 3 days to join us, this was the last of their session. But everyone feel invested in what we had done. They will checked in during the after-hour session.

Only 2 days left. I could see the finish line. Just a few more steps ahead.

-Pondd-