Blog

13th Nov 2019

Volunteering at #uxlive

Day 3

Chatted management technique and hub-spoke agency model with affable MC Andrew Collinson Jonathan Lovatt-Young was all about excellent emotional engagement with customers, instead of simply ‘more conversions’. Go for deep participation, build trust and support users responsibly. Reflect on the quality of your decision making relative to the time you allow.

Ben Sauer used the visual poetry of slo-mo F1 tyre change (and Mad Max!) to ask for (high level) time to think and make better design decisions. Design functions get pressured to ‘feed the beast’ (expensive continuous delivery dev teams), which can damage outcomes. “Go fix some bugs!” Lower down the hierarchy practitioners have to make the case more subtlely - ‘can do in the time but not the same standard’. Improv theatre can help develop confidence! The Value Proposition drives all work, not process. Spend two weeks refining it. Then make sure everyone understands it.

Alignment is a key component of @christhelwell ’s daily LESS framework @ey-seren - Listen, Explore, Sketch, Share. Look forward to hearing more about how it integrates with development sprint frameworks

Day 2

Fairly innocent panel on subjectivity in research culminated on the threshold of the quantum self - via personal revelations, assumptions and a caution to bias in AI 🤔 Instead of apologising for bias and subjectivity in research the panel rejected the idea of scientific authority to loop back and celebrate the value of opinion, expertise and curated actionable insights. Setting the brief or objective wasn’t discussed but all agreed that’s what research should deliver on - not necessarily ALL findings, but filtered outputs that are going to help the client. David Attwater (EIG), Zoé Guiraudon (Foolproof), Professor Karen Pollitt-Cham FRSA (Brighton University). Renato Verdugo chaired the generous exchange.

Day 1

Two top notch workshops with an ethical thread at Tech Circus UXLive today Grant Broome and Andy Ingle pointed out more than a few pot holes and easy Design wins on the road to an AA rating. Watch those H1s and H2s, design for tabbing and don’t talk about ‘hover states’! Do try the Funkify extension for Chrome.

Respect to Joe Macleod for shining a light on the forgotten third of the consumer experience - the End. His off-boarding workshop/writing transposes a sustainability mindset to design and pushes for product responsibility beyond conversion, beyond ‘the crack of doubt’!

24th Sept 2019

Human Rights-centered Design anyone?

Great day at IXDD 2019 hosted by IxDA London and Foolproof.

Heard how data literacy is a big deal and maybe its time people have some agency with their profile, beyond 'Accept/reject cookies'. People's ‘data self’ may not be such a pretty picture and increasingly people’s data profile will influence their options. Caroline Sinders warned how people may be coerced to live up to market-driven generalisations, presumably as they try to live up to social media imperitives.

How can design help people manage their data? Designers (and plenty of other actors) might make noises for data rights and advocate for systems enabling people to access and edit their profile(s) - especially if polluted by emotional episodes and account sharing. Do people care if their data profile is accurate?

Georgina Bourke suggests designers could add some friction to create a context for reflection. IF’s Data Permissions Catalogue is a collection of non-dark patterns for Just-in-time Consent.

I can’t quite recover the language but on the topic of Accessibility Alistair Somerville talked about designing for people’s capacity rather an impairment. Its more generous to ask 'what kind of experience would you like?' and design meaningful alternative experiences, rather than a compromise.

13th Sept 2019

Who needs a Design System?

Design systems are buzzing. They featured in two meet-ups this week - Pi People #15 at Idean and a session at Habito. The goal is to influence product experience and reduce time spent on design and build.

How does it get so bad in the first place? As with magazines, when design is in development phase, still feeling its way around, toying with themes, testing components, nothing is decided… and then suddenly you’re live! There’s a lot of cleaning up to do. Even if the project inherited some guidelines from some above the line work or a branding agency, chances are they haven’t designed for application in your sphere. A design system should be a plug and play library of components.

UI audits, pre-mortems and MoSCoW Method... Through a series of buzz-processes the Habito team streamlined their component library and move toward a foundational design kit (they felt they had too many unique needs to deliver a system).

Typography, style sheets, colour palettes, grids, toolkits are familiar to me from publishing. Surfaces, screen sizes and WCAG accessibility guidelines less so.

They are a great way to unify cross-functional teams, deliver consistency for users and quality to a brand. So long as everybody buys in and uses it. I met one product designer whose overseas engineering team were ‘too busy’ to use it!?

Systems reduce development costs, produce efficiencies and free people up to do more valuable work, like testing and refining user journeys.

Best practice and tools: BBC, The Guardian, Gov.uk, Material Design, WebAIM, Adobe Colour, Google Elevation Guide, Material Sketch plugin

11th Sept 2019

Powerful podcast

https://your-undivided-attention.simplecast.com/episodes/pardon-the-interruptions

Tech should be helping us to minimise interruptions and be more deliberate. Can we nurture resistance to habit forming technology?

Appealing to the ethics of designers (and businesses) to consider the societal consequences of habitual interactions. The podcast accuses social media of colonising user’s goals. It challenges the industry on whether it really is in the users interest to manufacture persuasive technologies, where people are diverted from connecting with people to seek approval or recognition?

Privacy concerns deepen when you have to consider the commodification of your personality with a persuadability profile! Where machine learning is targeted at predicting behaviour there is a prospect of a person’s every aspiration being manipulated toward the most business-desirable outcome.

People might feel they have no option but to go offline (Walkaway).

How Might We use social tech to...

Develop deeper relationships

Better social connectedness

Get better support

Help people to achieve a better work/life balance

Help people to achieve the goals that are important to them

See - https://humanetech.com/designguide

4th September 2019

WiP

UI Design Patterns for Successful Software, IDF

Coming from a visual design background I'd put my learning emphasis on research and experience design. That's the phase I'm most interested in and the tools to gather insights were less familiar.

As much as my commercial experience has value Naveen at Futureheads advised that specialisations in junior roles were rare and employers are looking for a broad skill set.

As much as patterns are logical and familiar it's a great to develop an understanding of the particulars. I'm loving fat menus and pagination patterns. Looking forward to applying these learnings to my next project (and adding to some previous work).

31st July 2019

Jobs-asProgress

JTBD London Meetup

Alan Klemant delivered the slightly less introductory version of Jobs-as-Progress, framed in terms of demand generation.

What causes someone to adopt a product in the first place? Ask someone ‘What else would you think about buying or using?’ and the answers are not as obvious as you’d expect.

I’m still having a hard time working out how this is different from old-fashioned aspirational marketing - help customers become a better version of themselves by selling them a product or service. The more experienced researchers I spoke with seemed fairly convinced of the framework’s merit in terms of innovation and also recognised its mercantile character (or the examples at least).

How does it help to approach a product using the Jobs-as-progress framework?

Know what business you’re really in
Anticipate (predicting) what people will want next
Create growth-related metrics

Alan was keen highlight how understanding of two different types of goals might help move a product toward growth:

Use Goals

Outcome goals of a start-stop nature e.g. ‘When I use [product X] I want…

These refer to physical characteristics of a product e.g. tastes good, feels good, easy to use

Be Goals

Process-type goals of constant/circular nature e.g. ‘When I am [describe context] I want to be…..

Once Be Goals are identified further research is used to identify the Constraints ‘What’s stopping you from achieving X?’ which helps the write the How Might We… and begin to ideate/frame an Enabler, the product that provides a relevant catalyst for the desired change.

In that sense it’s a neat framework. Just start, learn which questions work, iterate.

Need to check out Switch Interviews apparently.

27 July 2019

Research Chat

Had the chance to chat with User Researcher Carmen Brion in advance of Alan Klement’s appearance at the upcoming Jobs To Be Done London Meet up. She'd been a panelist at a previous Meetup so I asked her for pointers on core research skills, and also her take on the merits of the ODI and Rewired JTBD frameworks.

For her, she said, ODI struggles in an innovation context. She felt that business is often too keen/under pressure to get up and running, using Lean or simply moving straight into the second Diamond, before they really understand their customers. ODI is results driven and business likes results. Which suggests ODI is business-biased. “How can they be user-centred if they don’t understand their needs?”. She sees a lot of wasted effort launching early and learning through failure.

It seems reasonable to expect to understand the user, to meet a validated need. But I’ve also read around Lean Startup and GV Sprints, and can appreciate there is a time when being timing is important. Launch quickly and use up runway faster or take time to do it better but miss the first-to-market opportunities?

That problem is above my pay grade. My focus is on developing tools to learn about customers when I need to, so the chat was still constructive.

Skillswise Carmen advised me to nail customer journeys - each persona has a different journey and JTBD. Its what made Amazon UX great (amazing after-sales customer service). Amazon also proves you can be the best with an awful UI! She thinks Personas have merit because they help understand the task(s) - a product can handle 4, maybe 5.

Next steps: IDF: Customer Journey Maps

26th June 2019

Diversity of Engagement

Pi People 14, Idean

Hot on the heals of #GAAD Idean curated a hugely informative panel for Pi People 14. Speakers addressed the theme of inclusivity in design, in organisational culture, design teams, process and products.

“Inclusive design is where the greatness happens”

David Caldwell and slide of Inclusive Design Principles

Lynn Esther Chung on relational awareness, how it fosters an inclusive culture (and by implication design) through being mindful and respectful of individual strengths and vulnerabilities.

David Caldwell talked about designing services inclusive of financial vulnerability e.g. first mortgage, having a child, loss of a partner, gambling, zero hours contracts. Interestingly strategies include reintroducing friction to create space for reflection and kerb spending, by delaying dispatch of late night purchases or blocking gambling spend.

Lauren Currie OBE launched an MVP to combat stage fright. Her project Upfront does a great job of diversifying the projected authority of the white male by making it easier for the intimidated or discriminated to get up on stage to add their voice to the wider debate.

24 June 2019

Case studies from VR

The Research Thing

Life at the edge

Good range of presentations describing the gains and challenges developing meaningful VR experiences. What constitutes meaningful VR experience? How do use VR to navigate and interact with environments, objects and avatars? It was curious how the uses of Virtual reality tended toward modelling an enhanced reality, where ‘places’ and ‘things’ embodied information.

HMW reengineer VR for health and social care users?

Nicholas Babaian (@TheAstonishingV) showed the significant impact VR is having in health and social care. Up to 50% patients with low levels of mobility were encouraged to take bigger steps and move more, which helps counteract the effects of Dementia. Being immersed in VR is hugely effective in helping burns patients cope with pain while having dressings changed. Isolated people don’t want to fly over the Grand Canyon, they want to go to school plays and family events.

The research challenge is to balance immersion with engagement. Testing is constantly disrupted by feeding, monitoring and other medical routines. Users would remove headsets to respond to questions, to gain eye contact. Hardware had to be customised, even 3D-printed, for easy on-off and durability - clinical space has a tradition of single-use and gaming is focused on one user. The time of day could skew data (Sundown Syndrome).

By recording sessions with a 360˚ camera the team could review from any POV

You can’t always trust users.

@FilipHealy (@threesixtyUX) and Alex Street (#skyVR)

360UX and the guys from Sky are trying to work out what VR content looks like and how users interact with environments. There seemed to be concern to maintain skuemorphic approach, possibly to help users adapt to 3d. Attention directors e.g. open this, pull that, go this way, break the immersion but enhance the experience. Weirdly not much reference to gaming where attentian directors and interfaces are conventions of the immersion.

They ran split tests on the inclusion of gravity in a VR object handling product. With gravity on items were continually dropped or falling over. Despite these frustrations testers said that environments should have gravity!? The experience was so much richer with gravity off.

Insights from Oculus avatars

María Murcia @caaadillaaac walked us through the Oculus work on interpersonal relationships in VR. They’ve been exploring ways to balance embodiment and social presence to optimise social interactions. How much facial expression and body language are necessary to achieve a ‘sense of being with others’ in VR? A wife could not relate to her husband’s voice coming from a Fidel Castro avatar! This product was the most like Ready Player One. They tested resolutions, wireframes and skins.

They found that people value skin and hair in identity.

Micro-expressions such as eyebrow moments, blinking are a big part of communication but they are looking to strike a balance, as more realism raises expectation of functionality (as with prototypes I guess).

18th June 2019

Pitching to investors with Lean

Lean Startup Night London

Pitching to investors is crunch point for entrepreneurs when it comes to transforming their passion into products. The guys at Lean Startup did a great job stressing the importance of evidence to investors - “Evidence demonstrates the entrepreneur has a vision not a hallucination”

Davide Turi in front of a screen displaying a slide 'Don't fall into the build trap'

What’s that got to do with Lean? Do investors love Lean, do they understand it? They probably don’t really care.

What they actually like are the outcomes of Lean - answers, evidence, proof and an actionable plan to turn investment into profit (return-on-investment).

They also like to know about cash, financials, teams and how the product is going to grow.

We blitzed through five pitches and threw questions at the founders to see what role evidence had played in their respective journeys. The pitches tended to focus on the big vision and hypothesis, some untested, while a couple demonstrated traction from MVPs

Davide Turi described the MVPs that helped launch Transferwise and Instagram

Top tips for entrepreneurs and innovators:

Don’t fall in love with first idea. Fall in love with the problem
Don’t fall into the build trap - Question > Learn > Test (spend a little £ to validate), pitch (ready to spend roll out)
Commit resources as uncertainty decreases.
Apply scientific approach to innovation - Test > Measure > Learn

30th May 2019

Design Challenge

Great hosting (and pizza) from Tigerspike’s Sang, Tony and Blake.

How might we create a digital solution for UK residents that optimises their available budget and time when booking a holiday abroad.

Collaborative design challenge, let’s do this! Er... where do we start? We had the tools, the brief, the method was in front of us but still we fumbled.

My team seemed to experience a balance of egos as we tip-toed around each other’s unknown capabilities. On reflection collaboration added a few layers to the challenge, testing our social and professional confidence, communication and team skills.

Humility had yet to give way to openness so we advanced awkwardly. In part we were still parsing the brief and the in-house process, which we should have just trusted and made a start. Gradually we became more effective (open) and made faster (pragmatic) decisions the less time we had!

Group think did slow us down though. We agreed on a primary persona of couple with children (school holdays, arrrrgh!) to form the basis of our challenge but then during ideation and crazy 8s that identity was joined by larger family and friendship groups. On the upside the temporary ambiguity helped us to identify collaboration as a key feature for our product - helping time-poor individuals to piece their holiday together as and when time is available to them.

We aimed to high, got stuck on detail and went down a fair few rabbit holes. Tigerspike’s Sang Valte was on hand to guide us back on track, forcing us to revisit the brief and prioritise the objectives.

Storyboarding in the run up to presentation felt a little like failure since we were still ideating and redefining our product. More generously we were working in a flow-state, engaged in some very rapid and very open collaborative design.

22nd May 2019

JTBD

At London Jobs-to-be-Done meetup I discover there are some cool variants on the useful tool Jobs To Be Done.

As Strategist at Beyond Jessica Lee used Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) to segment jobs for a digital tabloid.

With a half-page bounce rate the challenge was how to drive deeper engagement with users to monetise content through advertising. Their starting proposition was ‘How might we create new value for digital readers?’ She broke it down...

They divided their myriad users to identify all the different jobs they wanted to be done. Applied ODI to analysis looking for high scores and target underserved needs. Segmented users to learn more about who they were. Screened and moved to qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys to find 100-200 jobs. Got users to filter by answering relevant questions only. Learned that people focus on sections e.g. health or sport. Got stakeholders to buy in to 2 of 6 opportunity areas. Users with ‘financial objectives’ were actually trying to solve unplanned debt. This helped make a new persona

Impact of the work - the work identified sources of revenue and three ideas for the client and a backlog for the content team (to serve the newly identified jobs).

Take away - consider how you can work and slice the data. Better segmentation and knowledge of users helped them assess whether content was serving any jobs.

She advised that JTBD seems like the answer but it is only the first half of the first diamond - identifying the right problem. It’s a good start to identify a valuable problem for your client.

Steph Troeth went granular with The Switch Model to hire political impact. See Re-wired

Researcher on project to merge two sites providing a digital political surgery for agencies. Began with a heuristic analysis to assess the current designs and interviews to learn about users’ understanding of sites purpose. First identified issue of trust.

The Switch method uses a timeline and no prescribed questions to learn about the ‘point of commitment’. Similar to the ‘Four Forces’ tool and Karpman’s Drama Triangle the method helped identify what was driving people to give up their time e.g. for surveys

Somehow she tested users “propensity to engage” to recruit participants from new users, competition and ex-users

Underlying need for trust in a system for political feedback. Trust is vulnerable where people don’t know if their action has impact. The new site shows user impact.

Ryan Garner prioritised innovation opportunities using Jobs-as-Progress.

Expressed as a desire-state Jobs-as-Progress tries to understand ‘What is the user working towards?’ e.g. ‘help me build my financial safety net’

Ryan’s JTBD was to redefine customer experience. ‘Start with the broader context of user need. Deep dive into the domain area with face-to-face interviews. Organise jobs into themes and rankings. Conduct competitor analysis to research jobs being done by the competition. Organise into an Opportunity Matrix'. This can be a great tool for innovation, to identify opportunities, a next How Might We and can lead to shorter Sprints

When a job can be done, when a tool or service is hired, that job becomes less important. A workaround can be to link with other products e.g Rightmove and free up resources to focus on underserved jobs. Underserved jobs equal opportunities.

When looking for products to design into a service Jobs-as-Progress is good for understanding motivations behind a users’ need - “What matters to the customer?”.

Granular versus high-level - can the user or the brief describe what the product can deliver e.g to be debt-free?

Involve the stakeholders to help their customers. Ask them ‘ how are we going to design this product to help customers?’

16th May 2019

UX for Change

UX for Change scheduled this Meetup on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2019. I attended to boost my awareness of designing for accessibility.

Phil Robertson, UX Consultant

“20% of users have difficulty using your product”

Phil has been working with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for over 20 years. An A-rating has become the minimum requirement. Since legislation was put in place accessibility lawsuits are on the rise - Dominoes were sued for discrimination because their offer codes were not accessible to screen readers.

Vision tends to garner most support - visual impairments account for something like 70% of people with a disability.

Language support can be relevant to migrant workers, asylum seekers, speakers all other languages, tourists.

Interaction Design Foundation provides useful materials

W3C Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List is invaluable. Phil shared some favourites.

Jaws is a market-leading screen reader. Phil confessed to using it to read books in the shower. And to fix a computer that had a broken screen. VoiceOver • Window Eyes • Dolphin reader • MAGic • NVDA • Zoom Text • Dynomapper for Usability testing • ACTF - a disability simulator (not very PC but good to generate empathy) • Color Contrast Analyser • Wave • Sort Site produces amazing accessibility heuristics evaluation • Accessibility Valet • Eval Access 2.0 • Be My Eyes • Blind Square -an app that uses GPS to describe the landscape. You’ll discover things you never even knew existed • Bard mobile • Colour safe - check out whether that dress was really black or dark blue • AppleVis for OSX iOS resources

Matteo Belfiore, Senior Frontend/UI Developer at The Dots

"Don’t assume functionality is obvious"

Matteo presented a conceptual narrative related to affordances - is a button a button, or something else? Since the electronic telegraph, the consequence of pressing a button has been abstracted from the mechanical chain of events and functionality inferred. A tag such as Bootstrap's ‘btn’ can signify a ‘Link’, ‘Button’, ‘Input’, ‘Submit’ or ‘Reset’ semantic labelling is necessary so that accessibility tools convey the functionality.

Avoid defaults - buttons that don’t look like buttons and non-buttons that don’t behave like buttons - fill in your tags. Use Semantic HTML markup to give meaning to content and ARIA to annotate code, so that screen readers can describe the function of the button. This kind of housekeeping resonated with my visual designer experience, where labelling layers and files was best practice.

Tim Harwood, Head of Design at Softwire

"Go mouseless for an hour!"

Tim preferred the term universal rather than accessible, indicating that good design should include everyone, not a ‘fix’ to suit particular people. He explored subheadings to accessibility including Cognitive, Neurodiversity, Mental Health, Age, Context, Literacy (textual, financial or digital), on top of Visual, Hearing, Mobility...

Universality should be the norm. Because you can and it’s the right thing to do. It’s not necessarily easy but the technologies are available.

Cover the basics - colour contrast, type size, inclusive components. Maybe apply Jakob’s Law.

POUR - Perceivable - Operable - Understandable - Robust

Build empathy - Visit the Accessibility Day website where you can explore how and issue can affect your experience - go mouseless for an hour!

What happens after you? - part of good design is a roadmap for handover

Rochelle Dancel, Design Lead at Idean

“Commit to two accessibility improvements”

At Idean accessibility is a mindset of collaboration and openness. Their UX advocacy policy makes testing mandatory - team members can sit in on testing sessions, designers can visit call centres and listen to customers.

Her Centrica case study started with a HMW… make it easier to submit a meter reading? Her team wanted to understand why 7% of users submit readings without logging in, and whether the client was able to cut the cost of servicing this feature. It was someone outside of design that suggested these readings might be carers, submitting on behalf of customers, so design invested in additional discovery to support these accounts.

I was curious, “surely the additional cost of installing external meters and sending people to read them went against the efficiencies objective?”. Rochelle answered that the wider remit of service design sees the cost of these accounts balanced against the potential Daily Mail headlines!

Check out the new British Gas atomic design system

Challenge your team - commit to two accessibility improvements

Case study insights

Support users who support users
Join the dots - look beyond your immediate team to explore the problem
Exploit and enhance your toolkit - she challenged her team by suggesting that all testers will be dyslexic
Data - track and measure everything. When challenged on the additional work of accessibility she replied to stakeholders “how would you feel if I removed 20% of your conversion
Share successes and challenges e.g. accessibility wins

24th April 2019

Designing fictions, Futurice

This was a fascinating introduction to Speculative Design - “Its not about designing solutions but designing questions” for relatable imagined scenarios!

Futurice describe themselves as a digital engineering, strategy and innovation company. In addressing service design problems they offer to concept and deliver transformation to some big slow-moving businesses, such as vehicle manufacturers.

Identifying as a UX designer I was curious to learn about the crossover with service design - how a user-centric practice helps clients meet the needs of the future.

Facilitated by a mix of service, UX and UI designers, the workshop provided a playful glimpse into the realm of innovation. It was a taster of the surreal Sprint-like tool they use to co-create with clients. The exercise extrapolates from trends through a genuinely exploratory exercise and culminates in the proposal of a boundary object - the product that speaks to the cultural step-change.

The workshop was augmented by Futurice’s own IoT Service Kit which was really effective in prompting groups to probe the fictional futures. It sounds dreamy but it was fast-paced and a few nudges were required to consider the imaginary actors, fictional contexts and riff on concepts.

It was a great intro to a powerful tool. Get one here - its Open Source!

13th April 2019

Volunteering + Design Club

Design Club is a social enterprise running design thinking workshops and after school clubs. After attending their Meetup I decided to volunteer as a mentor and help deliver a design thinking workshop for children at the Science Museum.

Thinking back to my experience facilitating art activities at Tate Modern I thought this would be a great way to reinforce my own knowledge of design thinking and introduce young people to the methodology. When you teach you also learn.

For the 1 1/2 hour session we used an existing worksheet to help children develop a Marvel prototype. Science Museum were keen for the session to tie in with their video game exhibition so a bit of topical research was required. As mentors we collaborated to learn about the UX and UI of video games and get up to speed with popular genres and game types, to better help children through the design process.

Shadowing experienced researchers and designers, and facilitating myself, was so rewarding. Guiding children through the different phases without leading them was very much like interviewing users. I encouraged children to take notes (record their data) and ‘map’ their concepts. This helped them to stay focused (and avoid mission creep) during the long session and finish on time. Their experience mirrored the design thinking journey as they moved from uncertainty to first concept.

Our hope is to streamline the journey to ensure that children get to test concepts to gather feedback and develop the confidence to present their ideas.

It was a pleasure to meet such enthusiastic young people and work alongside so many talented and generous designer-mentors. The commitment all round was impressive and concepts exceptional.

4th April 2019

Volunteering + Design Sprint 2.0

I reached out to Bill Tribble for experience and volunteering opportunities. He invited me to assist him on Day one and two of a Design Sprint using AJ&Smart’s 2.0 model.

Day 1

Morning: Define the Challenge

Expert Interviews + HMWs

The group listened to each others’ perspectives on the general goal and translated these into ‘How Might We’ questions

Grouping HMWs into themes helped the group to visualise where the business could be in two years time and propose KPIs for success

Map

Through mapping HMWs and analysing the touch points between business and prospects the team chose to focus on delivering personalised learning - the earliest most crucial part of the student and business journey.

Long-Term Goal + Sprint Questions (Can We...)

Together Alone the visions were synthesised and presented as Long Term Goals

[NDA - content to be updated]

Afternoon: Produce Solutions

Lightning Demos

The team was given 30 minutes to research competitors, comparators and best in class examples. This was a challenging phase for me(if not all) to contribute to meaningfully as the HMWs had revealed areas that would benefit from deeper research.

It was my feeling that advance research would add real value and focus to this comparative phase of the Sprint. The themes would obviously be earmarked for later iterations

4-Part Sketching

• Note taking

• Doodling

• Crazy 8’s

• Concept

Although I was aware of the principle, in practice I (and other team members) were slightly wrong-footed by the looseness of this phase.

Decider + 1 other v invested and creative. Most popular concepts came from them and solutions tended to be from one with hints of the other… There were two strong voices in the team who consistently synthesised ideas to produce popular suggestions.

It is a testament to the focus required for Sprinting that the team must keep moving, processing ideas on the fly and filtering them with the Goal and SQ in the forefront of their minds

Tuesday

Morning: Vote on Solutions

Heat Map Vote
Solution Presentation
Straw Poll Vote
Decider Vote

An intense start to the day reviewing all concepts in detail. It was tough to express a bias as elements attracted heat rather than whole concepts.

It was interesting to hear alignment as we heard each team member explain their selections.

Afternoon: Create Storyboard

User Test Flow

Changes within the team brought new perspectives and we suddenly insights from closer contact with students pushing less direct contact and more social media.

Team members took the opportunity to review the start and end point of the user flow as well as introducing students to proof of concept’ testimonials, ROIs, tutors and materials.

Storyboarding

It was great to cut and paste from earlier concepts as it felt like ideas were being retained and ownership of the solution was shared. Referring back to the Sprint Question the team was able to distill duplicate features and streamline the process where screens had become overpopulated.

It was important for the Facilitator to manage expectations and remind the team that the purpose of the Sprint (and prototype) was to test the concept.

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