Week 8: Higher Fidelity Prototypes & Sprint 1
After synthesizing the feedback we got during user testing last week, we were ready to get started on the first sprint. We had our first sprint planning meeting on Monday, where we began figuring out how to break our product into epics and user stories.
The planning session was important because we determined what exactly are the core mechanisms of our product. In other words, in the simplest and most basic form of our product, what features are paramount? This would be the starting point for our development and would guide us on what issues to tackle first.
We decided that there were two core features that we should consider first: writing a journal entry and viewing analysis from past entries. Of course, these features can be broken up into many more parts. For example, just the journal entry can be split into: create a new journal entry, write an entry, save an entry, submit an entry’s data, make the entry disappear. After we had determined success criteria for each of our user stories, which are descriptions of capabilities that users should have for a particular feature of a product, we voted on how much effort would be necessary to complete each story on a scale of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.
We kicked off the sprint on Tuesday morning and have been moving at full speed since. Sherry and I spent some time drawing out a site map of the product and how the user will interact with it. Specifically, we investigated what different screens will be necessary for the user to successfully complete the flow of the product.
This was extremely helpful in addressing what the function of each screen really is. Sherry brought this analysis into her designs and has been working on creating some higher fidelity prototypes in Sketch. Now that the general features aren’t changing as much, the design is focusing more on the product brand and UX.
As we reach the end of the week, I’ve started reaching out to a bunch of users to start planning our next round of interviews next week. It will definitely be a busy week of interviews, planning, designing, and developing for us.
