How did I run a Design Sprint with my team in 3 days?

Day 1

you can read from my last post :)

Day 2

Recap from day 1, we defined our potential customers, list out their needs and pain points, and brainstormed ideas to solve these problems. In day 2, we will go through 2 processes: Decide and Prototype.

Decide

• Grouping and organizing ideas based on user segments. We found that some ideas can combine together to form a base product to serve both segments, and we can offer some different services on top of the base product.

• Ideas were then ranked based on the following parameters: scalability, economic viability, desirability, and technical fesibility.

• lastly, we discussed with our CEO to evaluate our ideas and decide which one we should prototype first.

Prototype

As we want to explore a new market (B2C), we decided to prototype the Maker Toolbox + Online Maker Classes idea targeting parents with 6-17 year-old children. Now we have a rough idea of what to prototype, what's should come next?

1. Consolidate the details of the prototype on a concept communication chart

To make sure everyone is on the same page, putting details of your prototype on concept communication chart helps you to communicate your ideas in a more concrete way to the rest of the team, and helps clear any misunderstanding or confusion. Here is how we did it.

Fig. 1 Prototype Concept Communication Chart (Photo: Maria Li)

3. Design user test

In order to decide what does your prototype actually look like, it is important to know what do you want to learn from the user test. I found a pretty good diagram from "Value Proposition Design" written by Alex Osterwalder and his folks. In his book, he illustrates the testing process.

Fig. 2 Overview of the Testing Process (source: Strategyzer.com)

Hypothesis are the assumptions you made, so that your idea will be a success. That's mean your business idea will succeed based on these assumptions. If the assumption is wrong, your business idea will fail. The biggest assumption in many business is "You product is solving the users' problem."

Here are some of our hypothesis:

- The Maker Toolbox and online makerspace is desirable to parents

- The content of the classes is attractive to the kids

- Kids are motivated to join the online maker contest

- User can follow the class to complete a project

2. Pick the format of the prototype

There are different ways of building a prototype. First, ask yourself "Is your product digital, a service, physical, or it's a combination of both?" Figure 3 shows the examples of various types of prototype depends on the nature of your product.

Fig. 3 Formats of prototype (Photo: Maria Li)

After choosing the format, you can start making a low fidelity prototype first, then iterate to higher fidelity.

Here, our product is a combination of digital, physical and service. In this case, we prioritized the hypothesis we want to test for the first round of user test. We decided to test this hypothesis: "The Maker Toolbox and online makerspace is desirable to parents." using a digital mock up of a product landing page and an email campaign.

Fig. 4 Sketch the assumptions and user test with team (Photo: Maria Li)

4. Start working on building the prototype

With the project team, we spent 1 day to make the prototypes. The prototype doesn't need to be perfect here, but should be including the core part to collect information for your learning.

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Day 3

Test

First, we did a feedback session with teammates outside the project team. The fresh eyes can give you honest feedback. Good suggestions was made on the concept of the product, taglines, visual communications etc. We also collected good questions which we overlooked.

After that, we iterate to our prototype v.2 and share with the whole team again before publishing it to our target audiences.

Test are still on going. I will put the updates here 3 days later.