How did your first sprint go, you ask?
With our first sprint drawing to a close, we reflected on the learnings that we have gained so far, so that we could plan our sprint 2 better.
June 4, 2018: So…where did we start?
Before we get started, just want to remind you of our ultimate design goal: a seamless invoice-to-payment solution. In the first week of sprint 1, we broke off individually to brainstorm and sketch how an ideal procure-to-pay journey might look like for our users. The HMW(How might we) questions we asked ourselves before we jumpstarted were: How might we delight our users in their daily work? How might we WOW our users while they are completing their tedious and repetitive tasks? Coming up with the HMW question also helped us define our user: the treasury management team in a small-size company, usually consists of 1–3 people. While we came up with a list of ideas we want to explore, we decided to focus on three themes for our first sprint: Workflow, Data-driven decisions and Visibility.
June 5, 2018: Refining the designs
We had three designers, one usability tester, and one technology specialist for sprint 1. Each two designers co-designed on one theme, and the other designer designed the theme individually. This collaborative design method enabled us to parallel prototype on one idea, as well as put in front of our users two different ideas on one concept to test. However, it also took us some time to get everyone on the team to be on the same page. With the internal feedback and critique we received from other team members, another iteration of design was made on Tuesday.
June 6, 2018: A day full of learnings
Wednesday was a day full of learning. We tested six designs with six people, receiving in turn a 6-hour long recording, a 20-page document of feedback, and tons of post-it notes. Our first testing session began at 8 o’clock in the morning, and the last one ended at 6pm the same day. Shout out to our usability tester Kanika Khosla! Without her energy and effort put into organizing the tests, we wouldn’t have been able to gain so much valuable insights all in one day.
June 7, 2018: Making sense of the feedback
Trying to make sense of all the feedback we received on Wednesday was a huge challenge for us. With the advice from our faculty advisors, we decided to take different approaches to synthesize the feedbacks we received for different themes.
For the workflow theme designs, we created mini-journey maps to help us visualize the emotion changes along the different screens of the prototype.
For the other two themes: visibility and data-driven decisions, we put post-it notes on the print-out of the screen. Visualizing all the feedback in one place helped us prioritizing the ones we would include and improve in our upcoming design sprint 2.
June 8, 2018: Moving forward
What’s absolutely necessary before planning for the next sprint? The answer for our team would be conducting a retrospective. Everyone wrote down their loves, hates and thank yous for things happened in the first sprint.
With all the learnings and takeaways from sprint 1, we set the design goal, the sprint questions to answer and the success metrics for sprint 2.
Here’s our sprint 1 review! Stay tuned for next week’s blog — sprint 2 summary to come.
— Team Flux
