Day 5 Summary. The purpose of Day 5 in a design sprint is all about user testing. It is a day of learning, listening and taking feedback without judgment or bias. User testing like LIFE is unpredictable. (stay with me here)
‘Life is a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get.’ ~ Forrest Gump
However, Day 5 is also about making decisions, deciding where to continue, where we need to pivot, and what to kill.
…… The following article provides a list of notes, quick tips, and the actual ‘executed’ agenda from our 5-day remote product design sprint. It also assumes there is already a baseline understanding of the traditional design sprint process and we are just summarizing our variations and call outs for this specific remote design sprint experience.
Context
- Healthcare tech startup needs to decide scope for MVP and 1 or 2 killer capabilities that will differentiate them in the market (1 target persona)
- Participants: CEO. Chief Revenue Officer. COO. Engineer. Product. Designer
- 5-day remote design sprint
- Tools: Zoom, Mural, Figma, Slack, Spotify
- 3 user tests (B2B)
Notes and Tips
Day 5’s schedule was defined by the availability of the user for testing.
- User Advisory Board. This company had the foresight to establish a user advisory board early on.
- UAB advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of the board are having a user testing audience you can go back to with a regular cadence who will provide feedback and subjective guidance. However, it is still important to test outside of this group to ensure that you have the amount of diversity needed to de-risk your innovation and decision-making process.
- All nighter. Our scrappy and no-nonsense designers also worked late into the evening and did an early morning review session to align with Kandis O’Brien the test script: prompts, questions, and transitions.
- Test lead practice. Kandis (facilitator) led the first test, the product leader led the second test, and the engineering leader led the 3rd test.
- Testing feedback. After each user test, we finished posting our notes, quickly organized the stickies on Mural, called out our learnings, and also gave feedback on the tester. (ex. when asked a question, ask another question to dig down deeper, Q: ‘What is X button supposed to do?’ A: ‘What would you expect it to do?’)
- Breaks. We only had a one-hour lunch break from 1 to 2pm on this day. One user test had to be moved up and another one went longer than planned. The team was up for it so we kept going.
- Chat on Slack vs Zoom. Our users were on Zoom during the user testing session and I received multiple chats from the team during this session. This always stresses me out since the user could be accidentally copied on a question or comment. Moving forward I’ll make sure team chats happen on Slack during the user tests rather than the Zoom chat.
- Continue, Pivot, Kill. Considering this was a combination of a Vision + Product Sprint our prototypes covered the MVP. We had 4 prototypes in the end that the designers built over 2 days (Wednesday prep/Thursday final). The team decided to continue, pivot, and kill 2–3 items per prototype, per category.
- I have my MVP. The product leader, just 3 weeks into her new role had an MVP and alignment across her leadership team; and engineering had a clear view of what they were going to build over these next 3 months.
- I have my Roadmap. Based on the decisions made, success criteria, metrics, the sprint questions, assumptions, risks, milestones post sprint activities, parking lot, etc the last exercise the team did was populate the one-year strategic roadmap. Activities on the roadmap ranged from tasks that involved investors, customer targets, hiring targets, priority partners, and product and engineering. (moving back to the office was also on the roadmap vs WFH)
Day 5 Agenda (adjusted based on actuals)
Pre-test prep 9:00–9:30am
Test 1 9:30–10:00am
Summarize 10:00–10:30am
…… Break 10:30–11:00am
Test 2 11:00–11:30am
Summarize 11:30–12:00pm
Test 3 12:00–12:30pm
Summarize 12:30–1:00pm
…… Break 1:00–2:00pm
Summarize Learnings 2:00–4:00pm
Strategic Roadmap 4:00–4:30pm
Retrospective 4:30–4:45pm
Team Retrospective Summary
I Like…
- User testing feedback
- How much was completed in one week
- Making decisions and the general direction we are taking
I Wish…
- I had greater clarity around one of the features
- We had more diversity in our user tests
- We were able to review and iterate on the prototype before it was tested
- We had more discussion around the roadmap
I Wonder…
- If we have sufficient differentiation
- How we top this team activity
- Are we providing game-changing experience
Resources
- Digital templates from New Haircut’s Toolkit
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We are The SIX, a women-founded and owned strategy and innovation firm. Feel free to ask questions, challenge, and share new ideas and frameworks in the comments section below. To learn more about us visit us at www.the-six.co
