Design Sprint — Summer Internship 2019
Let’s find out about our journey through the Design Sprint!
Hello again!
After introducing ourselves and letting you know a little bit more about each member of this year’s summer internship, we want to tell you about our experience with the Design Sprint! Everyone told us it would be the best week so let us prove that in a few paragraphs.
We were challenged to work on Nest’s internal management platform called Nestatini (which was born in last year’s internship) where members from Nest Collective’s companies can organize and visualize all the companies, co-workers and even events. This way it would be easier to keep up with everything that is going on. This is really useful not only for intern members of Nest but also for potential clients or literally anyone with an internet connection.
These days were probably the most important ones because a lot of ideas were born there, we got to know each other and discuss our own opinions.
It began with a meeting with the Product Owner, Miguel Antunes, who introduced us to the project and showed us the main problem statements, which we had to deal with and eventually solve. Every morning we would make a recap of the last day to keep everyone updated.
Initially there were four problem statements:
- As a Nest member, it’s difficult for me to keep up with everything that is happening or being planned (events, meetings, new companies, etc.).
- As a company partner, it’s difficult for me to consult, gather, export and share other company’s information with clients. Information such as their members, experience, tech areas, interests and portfolio.
- As a Nest member, it’s difficult for me to gather all the information about Nest or even to share that information (companies, office location, and private/public events). I would like to easily access all this information and make it available to everyone.
- As a new Nest member, I’m not aware of how Nest works and its rules. I would like to have access to a “handbook”, especially on my first day.
We ended up merging problem statements number 1and 3 because they circled around the topic of events and looked too similar. By merging them together, we could solve two problem statements with one single approach.
After analyzing the information, we had to identify what characteristics our users will have, so we created different personas to help define our target and choose real people to interview. We defined each persona by different characteristics, for example: by role (founder, worker, ex-worker, intern and client), by location (uptown, downtown and remote) and by working time (junior 0–3 years, intermediate 3–5 years and senior 5+ years). Our first big challenge was prioritizing the information and deciding which one we were going to use in this case. In the end, we’ve looked for Nest Collective members that matched the personas we created before and we interviewed them.
The interviews resulted in reports converging to problems that were very similar, like having some difficulties when it comes to identifying all the members or keeping up with all the events. Then we moved on to the “How Might We (HMW)" exercise and a more detailed list of problems from each problem statement in order to select the most important ones. In order to focus only on the important stuff, we had to discard a lot of problems that didn’t seem so urgent, prioritizing the product owner’s goal for this summer: centralize and organize all information about companies and events.
We ended up getting three HMW questions:
- How might we centralize events and ease the access to the event’s info?
- How might we, as clients, access to the company info (portfolio, core business, hard skills, resources)?
- How might we centralize general info about Nest (important Slack channels, passwords, office keys, pet policy)?
On the third day we had to put our creativity to the test. We started by working on critical paths and user flows in order to better understand the main problems that we selected from problem statements, and start to grasp possible solutions.
Then we used our drawing skills and moved to the four-step sketches based on some quick research, notes, doodles and finally some crazy 8’s. What are the crazy 8's? Those are really quick sketches (1 minute per sketch, to be exact). The main goal is to think really fast and not waste time on details. In the end, we discussed all the ideas, like we always do, and tried to understand what features are most needed to implement on the platform.
During those days we met again with the Product Owner to clarify some questions and approve our decisions. Right before the interviews, we decided to merge two problem statements related to events and companies that were very similar to us, so clearly we needed the sign-off from the Product Owner to proceed with that change.
The end of the week was getting closer and it was time to decide our wireframes, so we created a heatmap and voted to choose which solutions were more interesting. After that, we made a storyboard for each situation to find problems on the user journey. At the end of the day, we had to discard the Handbook with rules and extra information about Nest, so we could focus on the companies, members and events in order to get better results (at least we thought so) instead of planning a lot of tasks and risking not finishing them all.
Eventually, we had to split the team so dzainers could prototype high-quality mockups while developers were creating a system context diagram and user stories. After that, it was already time to move on to product validation. We ended up investing more time than expected to make all the changes we wanted. After all those tests, we analyzed the problems and found solutions to better organize everything we want to share, like lists of events and companies, with all the information that might be necessary. Members are also allowed to create events easily and if you’re a founder, you can create your own company’s page.
We’re now building a platform with different options for Nest members. There you will be able to see all the companies, members and planned events. Nest members will have some extra options like company creation (if you’re the founder) and create/edit events. We couldn’t forget our visitors so we are also planning to improve Nest’s website, so even if you’re not a member, you can still access the company’s public information, members and public events.
That’s it for the Design Sprint. It took a lot of work but it was also very fun and we got the chance to work as a team. It was really challenging because there was a lot of information so we had to discuss different opinions and make important decisions that will affect our path in many ways. But in the end, it taught us new ways to solve problems, listen to/accept other opinions and also defeat our point of view.
Thank you, mentors!
