Design Sprint — Summer Internship 2020

Hello earthlings,

After our introduction and letting you know more about our training week and our project, it’s time to talk about our Design Sprint. It was a week full of experiences and work, guided by Pedro Cioga🤓, where we learned more about the problem in hand and started thinking about possible solutions to solve it.

Despite being remote-first, we are all doing this internship in person, given that we live here. It helps create a good environment. Also, it is easier for us to communicate and exchange ideas. This is especially relevant during the Design Sprint, as it is easier to have feedback on our work. Yet, we have adopted all safety measures.

This sprint was divided in five days 📅: Understanding, Diverge, Converge, Prototype and Test.

So, let’s take a look at what we did day by day! 🤩

Understanding 📖

On the first day, we started with a small presentation of the problem to be addressed by Bernardo Patrão, our product owner. Then, we noted the facts and assumptions we had about Coimbra’s downtown. And finally, we elaborated questions that would later help us form our problem statement, to objectively identify the problem we want to solve.

This way we diagnosed problems related to the lack of information about what the city downtown has to offer and the lack of promotion of its services and historical heritage.

Then, we interviewed two Nesters, Miguel Antunes and Sérgio Santos, to create our Journey Map, based on our critical path. It was divided in 3 phases:

• Search
• Commute
• Enjoy

After analysing this path, we detailed the different emotions and thoughts the user might have while going to the downtown.

Diverge 💡

On the second day, we did two rounds of crazy 8’s: some really quick drawings, about 30 seconds each, where we started pouring our ideas into paper and not thinking too much about the details. After each round, we discussed what we drew and started having new ideas based on each other’s approach. With this exercise, we ended up having potential solutions to the problems we stated the day before.

Later that day, each one of us made two storyboards based on the ideas that came from the crazy 8’s, each describing a possible interaction in our journey map, divided in the three phases aforementioned. Then we made a silent critique and voted on the storyboard or approach we valued the most.

At the end of this long and hard working day, every single one drew wireframes of how we imagined the solution was going to look like. In the end, each one presented their approach and we made again a new voting round.

Converge 🗳️

On the third day, we took a look again at the problems we identified before, thinking about how we can test them and know if we solved them. Finally, we chose the ones we thought had higher priority. The output was that Coimbra’s downtown needs more innovation and variety in what it has to offer.

For each problem, we identified which alternatives already exist to solve them. This provided us some guidance to what we could improve further more.

In the afternoon we started sketching our prototype, followed by trying to find its problems and to improve it. At the end of the day we had a final sketch of our prototype.

Prototype ✏️

After the Diverge and Converge exercises and conclusions, we prepared one low-fidelity prototype, oriented to the solutions we decided to work on.

Simultaneously, we prepared a questionnaire to interview the people as they tested the prototype.

Our main goals with the questionnaire were:

• Validate our previous assumptions and problems with the person being interviewed
• Understand if (s)he could navigate through the app easily
• Get some feedback about the app and its future usability after the interviewee tested the prototype.

We then had help from Rafaela Ferro to do a dry run, where we found out some problems and had a quick idea of what the people might do or think.

Test 🖱️

On the last day of the week, we proceeded to test the prototype with five new interviewees. We found some positive and negative aspects of the prototype, with some new ideas and strong aspects we should focus our attention upon.

We had some positive reactions to the prototype, as most people said they would use the platform and it would have had value to their day-to-day routines.

What we’re doing now ⌛

We are now giving our first steps into the project, both design and development-wise.

The Design Sprint went from an exhausting week to a week full of great ideas and excellent foundations to start the project the best way possible! We got to know each other better as a team and worked together along all this week, sharing opinions and knowledge.

Stay tuned for the next episode of the adventures of these Nest Summer Interns Covid-19 Limited Edition™️ 😷!