The five day design sprint now in four days, my name is Eilidh and I am a recent design student. I have recently been introduced to design sprints and I must say they really do help with the design process. This blog is about my journey with my first ever design sprint
What is a design sprint?
A design sprint is a formula used to help solve problems and test design ideas. This was created by Jake Knapp and is formulated to last just five days however; my class did a four day sprint.
Day One
Mapping and sketches. The first day we looked through our briefs and started writing down the goals of our app, the brief I chose was that of a recycling app. This led to my goal being “Make recycling easy to understand and fun” with the secondary goals of keeping the app simple and easy to use. Many more questions are gone through like the ‘What could go wrong’ and the particularly important ‘How might we’ questions, leading to the user journey map. Journey maps are the steps a user will take while navigating the app to their goal, below is my journey map.
The red numbers are where my how might we questions went on sticky notes, in order from left to right they are:
4. Link to my local services.
5. Make the app informative.
2. Let people know how to recycle specific products.
6. make the app engaging.
3. Show creative ideas.
1. Make sure people are recycling correctly.
With this I had more of an understanding on how I wanted my app to flow and the features I need, I then went to work sketching out ideas.
Day two
Storyboards are key for day two, this is where I looked back on my sketches and chose elements I liked and disliked out of the multiple ideas I came up with. From this you come up with six steps, this is the user test flow. This is important as it helps decide the flow of the design and how a user would navigate it, how they get from the start to their end goal.
With this flow established it is easier to make the wireframe for the prototype.
Here we can see the bones of my app with how elements would link together and flow from one screen to the next.
Day three
Prototypes are an easy and cheep way for designers to test and experiment with their design, for this sprint I used the application called Figma. Having only ever used Adobe XD it took some time to get used to the new layout and functions. Below is the product of my first attempt with Figma. A
A very basic and limited function the prototype would still allow users to get to their end goal of either upcycling or gaining clarity on recycling.
Day Four
Here is where we test our prototype and can get more of an idea how our users will interact with our design. This is the best stage to find out if there are any issues with the design or flow of the app as we can easily go back, adjust or even brainstorm different ideas if the current ones are not working. I had two individuals test my prototype, both in their 20s and keen recyclers or want to be recyclers. Here are some of the observations made:
They both found the app interesting to explore and liked the premise of the prototype despite its limited function. They agreed that a version of this fully working would be something helpful and added value in their lives. There were two sources of concern, one tester found the home screen too crowded, or at least confused as some options were information and others took her to pages where she could scroll through creative ideas. The other tester found two of the headings a little vague for them and suggested they could use more clarification, the headings being ‘how to’ and ‘Craft’. This being understandable, as a designer it’s important to have our ideas tested by those who will use the product. Knowing this is it is easy for me to go back and redesign a few elements, especially the home page as my testers found it a source of friction, therefore it needs to be looked at. Luckily, these issues appeared before anything went to production and therefore are cheap to fix.
This concludes my four day design sprint, if this was an actual project it would go back a few steps to get things right but with this being a student assessment of understanding how the sprint works I have not gone back to adjust the prototype. With this knowledge though I will be able to go into future assessments with more knowledge and understanding.
