Outcome
In sweat I designed, led and enacted the process behind the design sprints (not the Jake Knapp ones), created supporting documentation, tutorials and templates and delivered training to development and design team-members.
Sprint Overview
The foundation of a sprint was set during its first day, where we would focus our energy in understanding what needed to be done. This usually came in the form of 'how can we' statements (as in: how can we streamline the on-boarding process of the app), and a number of screens that were likely to be affected by this change.
💡 I have implemented a more stronger, leaner process in my work at Canon, where I also implemented a Product Design Sprints process.
💡 A non-time-boxed approach to this design sprint can be found under the Lean UX Design (Kanban) work I did in Carsguide / Autotrader.
Planning
Elements from the roadmap were taken and fleshed out without prescribing solutions.
UX Design
Day 2 to Day 6, would be devoted into rapidly iterating designs, generating workflows, testing them and making them successful. Three main activities took place during this time:
Collaborative Design
I typically moderate design-studio sessions to come with as many possible solutions quickly, and then refine them in a couple of hours. This technique is really useful as it allows you to explore a wide variety of divergent solutions, and explore which of those are likely to survive in the wild. The process is described below:
During the session, I would make sure the session runs timely, and gather insights from the team's reaction to the different presentations to see what works and what doesn't. Then I would try to consolidate or lead the consolidation to the best of my ability, adhering to heuristic usability principles.
I typically consolidate designs with hand-drawn sketches to keep fidelity minimal and the conversation alive until we achieve consensus, then increase fidelity.
Usability Test & Design Iterations
After agreeing on the design, we would then test it and refine it. Usability tests then would be linked to the Strategizer Test Card above, but I would outline the different ways the workflow could be engaged (golden path) and get the usability test written. If necessary, insights then would inform a series of changes to be done in the design, which would get retested.
Sometimes my team would test two competing solutions if we couldn't reach consensus on which one to pick.
Then after assessing all results and user behaviour and learning from the user, we then would craft a new solution altogether, which would be tested again.
UI Design
The creation of high fidelity design assets were the last phase in the Design Sprint at sweat. During these days, we would focus on fulfilling the spec and assets in the handover checklist that would allow developers to create beautiful interfaces with minimal rework.
Comps
Most of my involvement with high fidelity design (comps), involved leading, supervising and mentoring a young team of visual designers. Here's some of the work we produced together associated with the examples above. This work was done using Sketch app.
Style-guide
Last but not least, the last stage of the design sprint involved creating design patterns that could help developers reuse code and keep the application visually tidy and consistent.
