Sprint story: Accelerating the time to solve business challenges

Using design sprints to help our clients understand the best solution to the right problem.

In today’s fast-changing marketplace, leaders of marketing, IT, technology and innovation at organizations are tasked with innumerable challenges to keep pace with customer expectations, modernize technology and drive innovation — real strategic innovation, not innovation for innovation’s sake.

At EffectiveUI, we see the Google Ventures style design sprint as a tool to jumpstart progress on these challenges. Organizations can leverage this framework to very quickly (within five days!): deeply understand the challenge at-hand, get internal alignment with key stakeholders, determine and prioritize the best solutions to allot investment, and move into the development stage with the business case and roadmap needed to move forward to achieve overarching business goals, such as improving customer experience and customer loyalty or drive top-line growth.

Impossible? We think not. EffectiveUI has a measurable, human-centered design approach to building better experiences that engage customers and transform businesses. Inspired by the Sprint model and recognizing our clients’ need for speed, we created a new service offering called Effective Labs. We integrated the rapid development approach with our own expertise in human-centered design and data strategy to make design decisions informed by customer behavior, while also taking into account the business key performance indicators (KPIs). Using the Effective Labs framework, we’ve been able to determine the right solutions faster than ever with clients while staying true to our ethos and without comprising quality.

Watch the video to see Effective Labs in action.

What question did you want to answer in your sprint?

It always depends on the client challenge! To prepare for an Effective Labs engagement, we use several frameworks to define what we are truly aiming to solve. We first go through a “Mad Libs” activity to help elicit the vision from our clients and frame the business challenge. Then we do an exercise using a four-box framework to break down business goals into three months, six months, one year and five-year goals. We layer these business outcomes with our data strategy practice to identify KPIs that will measure success against those four timelines. These KPIs are also used to benchmark our progress throughout the five days and hold us accountable to design strategy and decisions.

Who was on the sprint team?

Team dynamic during an Effective Labs engagement is key to the success! Teams include key stakeholders and team members with specific characteristics, such as:

• Ability to think expansively/ideas person
• Positive attitude
• Adaptive and able to pivot
• Engaging, charismatic, high energy
• Collaborates well
• Ability to quickly churn out ideas, sketches, work, etc. without becoming overwhelmed

Teams must also be cross-functional and have a combination of the following hard skills:

• Facilitation
• Visual design
• Interaction design
• Research and usability testing
• Workshop experience
• HTML/CSS
• Sketching

As in the GV style design sprint, we look to fill the following roles when putting together an Effective Labs engagement team:

• Facilitator: We quickly realized that it’s better to have two facilitators throughout the week due to the intensity of the five-day workshop. Our Engagement Manager (a hybrid role between an account and project manager) takes the role of lead facilitator, responsible for the agenda, keeping the team on schedule and achieve daily outcomes. We also add a co-facilitator to lead certain sessions of the day and facilitates those activities.
• Decider: We ask the client to identify the ‘decider’ from their company when preparing for Effective Labs. Having the client be the decider has been very effective in accelerating decision-making and the flow of the engagement.

How did you make your prototype?

Prototyping day is incredible!

“The first three days, we map, sketch and decide what the best solution to the challenge could be. But it’s on day four where all of that hard work comes to fruition with the team working together to bring the vision to a real prototype,” said Dustin Opheim, senior engagement manager at EffectiveUI. “It’s very rewarding and motivating to see how quickly a team with a shared understanding could bring the vision to life.”

To be productive and efficient on prototyping day, we divide out tasks from the asset collection, copy writing, wireframe creation, visual style and framework, and Invision setup. Everyone is heads-down working at the same time, including our client team members, creating an energetic experience.

It’s like a well-oiled machine: the asset and copy people give their elements to the wireframe creator, who incorporates these elements and then passes to the visual designer. The visual designer works their magic in Sketch and saves it so that the designs are automatically uploaded into Invision, where our Invision person creates the interactions in the Invision prototype.

What did you learn from the test?

User testing is powerful and often illuminating. Sessions can reveal the true needs and desires of the customer — something that was intended to drive value may not resonate and vice versa. Client see and hear the feedback real-time and participate by capturing their findings to share with the entire team.

The user testing on day five has helped us evolve the product to the next level and informed the roadmap and backlog that is created at the end of the first week.

What’s next for your project?

The structure of the week-long design sprint instills confidence in the team of the direction we took to determine the best solution to the right problem. Using all of the work from the first week, we’re able to create a product roadmap and prioritize and simplify the concepts into backlogs and sizeable work. Clients comfortably move into the more detailed design and build phase with a solid roadmap. Clients use the Effective Labs engagement output to build their business case for additional funding, drive organizational buy-in and align cross-functional teams to a common vision and understand of implementation.

What worked/didn’t work about the sprint process?

We are still figuring out how to best transition from storyboarding into prototyping without losing any insights or design ideas. Since the team is working simultaneously, one person starts building wireframes while another person starts creating the visual style and framework. The storyboard is translated into wireframes by one person and we’ve seen some of the discussions and ideas get lost. We continue to explore how to transition most effectively in this part of the workshop.

Did you make any modifications to the process?

We conducted 15-minute retrospectives at the end of each day and 15-minute “ready, set, go” sessions at the start of each day. We made several modifications to incorporate our design thinking approach and data strategy framework, including:

• Added protopersona’s on day one to help frame who we are designing for and facilitates our recruitment efforts for user testing on day five.
• Added user interviews on day one to allow for additional generative research to build empathy, uncover unmet needs and drive innovative thinking.
• Added a data strategy discussion on day one to integrate metrics and KPIs that the support the long-term and short-term goals of solving the challenge. We use various tools, such as the System Usability Scale, to measure against KPIs on day five and provide clients with a KPI scorecard/dashboard.
• We created an idea island that captured ideas from day one’s Ask the Experts section, which helped us not get caught in the weeds, move beyond determining solutions too quickly and stay focused on goals. We used this idea island during sketching on day two.

Will your team sprint again?

Yes, absolutely! This team sprint has become an invaluable asset at our company, allowing us to move quickly with clients but still provide meaningful insights that help clients determine the best solutions for the right challenges. We’d love to partner with more companies who are looking to solve their biggest problems — contact us today to learn more about Effective Labs.