Design Sprint

My role:

Facilitator for the Sprint

Figma Leader for Day 4 & 5

In Charge of appointing note taker for the day

Arrange for testers on Day 5 and setup appointments for user testing

The goal:

Simplify the process for acquisition for members.

Having a tap & go acquisition flow to make moving through Health pages easier for the member.

The Mural board I created had a section dedicated to align on the innovation sprint topic selection and next steps.

This Mural board became a maintained source of truth for the team. A series of activities were planned to set expectation, timelines, & key objectives for the project.

I made sure that as a team we reviewed the agendas created and provided feedback for any questions the team had.

Members were not being educated regarding various products offered and were abandoning the journey midway

Preparation

The Mural board I created had a section dedicated to align on the innovation
sprint topic selection and next steps.

This Mural board became a maintained source of truth for the team. A series of
activities were planned to set expectation, timelines, & key objectives for the
project.

I made sure that as a team we reviewed the agendas created and provided
feedback for any questions the team had.

The preparation of this design sprint began with selecting the options available, choosing the
right partners to collaborate and providing examples of the agenda and assigning individual tasks to my teammates.

Some key elements of this phase were:

Identifying activities
Building out the day’s agenda with timings plotted out
Building out the day’s mural section
Team review
Completing revisions
Final team approval

I also used status stickers to indicate if the the task was in progress, completed or not needed
for that particular day.

Some essential component each day needed to have:

Level setting
Goal setting
Icebreaker or warm up activity
Full team engagement exercises
End of the day wrap up
Specific duration times for each section
Breaks
Lunch

The goal of the first day was to level set the team regarding what challenge we were facing.

What would our blind spots be.
Did we look at things from our user’sperspective
What would be the goals of our project.
What demographics were we focusing on.
We also would want to know what would be the most important aspect of our challenge.

I wanted us to plan out a user journey map to help figure out how will the user get from point A to point B. I planned the activity out for us to take notes on gaps and pain points. I also had space for us to document how the user was doing, thinking and feeling during each step of the journey.

Mind mapping was next, to explore different facets of the problem we were facing. We made connections, organized our thoughts and elevated commonalities and themes to highlight the ideas that stood out to us.

How might we helped us reframe our problems as opportunities. We used the ideas that stood out in our mind mapping activity and grouped and labeled themes as they came up.

Prior to wrapping up for the day, we came together as a team to decide which idea we would like to focus on. I had provided each team member with 4 votes for the opportunity that they think was the best goal to work on. Each team member was allowed to vote on an idea they thought was the best even if it meant it was their own! Wrapping up the day included describing in one work how the day went and wrap up any lingering thoughts or questions.

Day 2 started with a recap of the previous day and an icebreaker to see how my teammates were doing. This was a chance for me to learn how the team was feeling and map out the plan for the day.

The best ideas are often remixes or updates to what’s currently available. I jotted out some time for us to go through solutions from a range of companies and competitors.

The goal of the Lightning Demo activity was for the team to share their ideas. Each member of the team was asked to browse online and take screenshots to upload them to the mural board and share their findings with the group. We came together, synthesized notes and gathered themes.

I planned for Crazy 4 as our core Design Sprint method. This is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people. I modified this activity so the team could take screenshots of the ideas and features that impressed them the most. An entire flow was not necessary, only 4 ideas. The goals was to move quickly as I was not aiming for perfection. It was a judgement free zone! A voting activity was planned for the team to decide which idea the team wanted to go with. Each team member got 2 votes and we narrowed all ideas to the top 3. I had planned for the storyboarding activity for the team to write out an entire journey of these key ideas with enough detail so that everybody was aligned on what should be going into the prototype.

After the icebreaker, the recap and setting expectations for the day, we jumped right into aligning on the sprint topic and planning out the next steps. I planned for the team to converge to find a design solution and create a storyboard illustrating the path forward. I had areas to jot down the context, current conflicts & pain points, room for our idea and the resolution. We were also able to regroup and fill out any gaps that were missing.

After doing a team check in, we voted on if we’d like our prototype to be on Desktop or mobile. After deciding to move forward with Mobile as our choice of platform for our prototype, I asked the team to choose which team they would like to be on. Our team was used to working with Sketch and with Figma being introduced at the end of the year, I decided to give my team an additional challenge by adding Figma to the project as our design tool to work on. I provided my team a mini crash course with tips and tricks and figma’s collaborative strengths to enhance the team’s participation and engagement. We parted for the day after a wrap up activity and worked in our individual teams armed with our assignments.

This day was super exciting as our idea was about to turn into a clickable prototype. After an icebreaker and a recap of the day, it was time to set expectations for the day! I designated our 2 teams to regroup again with the goal of working on our clickable prototypes. The ask was to present key frames to the other team and make sure we were all on the same page about the solution we came up with.

I facilitated turning our key questions into a script for the interviewer. The idea was for the user testing interview to last between 20-30 minutes and to determine the level of detail we wanted to use for each question and thus allocate time accordingly.

Some of the questions we needed to consider prior topreparing a script:
How will we introduce yourself to the user?
How will we present the prototype?
Should the user scroll through the prototype on their own first, or share their initial thoughts out loud?
In which order do we want to ask our questions?
How will we wrap up the interview?

Here’s the Script we came up with: Task: You got interrupted while filling out a Medicare Supplement application, and need to open up your application, please indicate “no” for the last 2 questions. Once you’re done, you can return to the dashboard. Questions: Do you feel like any important information is missing?

Do you feel like any of the information wasn’t helpful?
What is the first thing you would want to do, upon landing on your dashboard?
Is there any feedback you would like to share with us?
Do you understand where you are in the flow?
Do you know what was expected of you?

Once the icebreaker for the day was done, I gave the team a rundown of our journey so far and proceeded to review what we wanted to accomplish today. It was a big day for us where our prototype would be tested by individuals. I had already reached out to various design teams in our company and arranged for 6 testers to try out our prototype. Our user testing sessions were planned out so we could split up during our testing sessions, take notes and reconnect after our testing sessions.

I provided the team with guidelines regarding note taking and how to look for organic questions.

The debrief which occurred after out testing sessions allowed us to transcribe out notes into stickies and creating high-level categories based on groups.

I gave each group time to playback their high-level
observations.

I arranged for Rapid Synthesis so we could filter out our ideas/content as we did not have time for a whole
synthesis process.

The ultimate goal was to define key takeaways from the overall testing.

Having a sprint retro gave us the ability to look back on our strong and weak moments. What worked well, what could have gone better and shoutout to anyone who excelled in what they did. I created 3 categories for my team to add their input in:

Format and schedule
Collaboration
Results

This enabled my team to reflect on our sprint experience and share their honest feedback.

Present findings and learning from the Design Sprint to our stakeholders. The team worked really hard, generated a broad range of ideas, and learned from their users. I acknowledged all of this hard work and we celebrated the learnings the team has achieved. Encourage the team to share insights, what they will take away from the experience, and give my team a sense of accomplishment.

I learned that during facilitation, it is mportant to be flexible and have more time added to the estimate for extra padding. We don’t have to make every decision perfectly, we just need to keep moving through the sprint and getting that prototype and testing is going to go a long way towards giving us the benefit we need to start this project off in a strong way. Even though it might be very tempting to start thinking of solutions right away when we start the sprint, but it is very important to slow down and try to build a foundation first and build a shared understanding of the problem we are trying to solve.