Cara Skikne

How to Sprint through your Design Process

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At Studyportals we believe in building the right things for the right people. Explaining our process in a few sentences goes as follows: developers and designers work together in small teams with the product vision as a guiding principle. This is based on user feedback and formulated by product owners with the help of the designers and developers. All features are developed during two-week sprints and tested with students. Even if we like the way we work, we are always on the look for improvements!

By trying to improve even more we decided to try a Design Sprint. The Design Sprint was developed by Google Ventures to help startups to set their vision. This is a five-day process that includes defining business goals, sketching, prototyping and testing the ideas with users. It’s the fastest innovation process we’ve ever tried, and even we were not sure we could pull it off in such a short time frame.

Before we could start our own Design Sprint, we created the team and picked a date. This step was not easy as it demanded 35 hours of precious time from every team member. With a little bit of magic and meeting rescheduling, we managed to clean up the agendas of the future team, which finally consisted of 8 members of six nationalities from five different departments. We included business developers, UX experts, product owners, front-end developers, engineers and marketing professionals.

We started off the Design Sprint by defining the long-term goal of the project. After some good debate, we decided on our goal: ‘Empower our clients to be self-sufficient’. We invited five internal experts to decide on the feasibility of the project and its direction. This helped us to create a map with the steps customers have to take to reach the goal. It turned out that a client-facing dashboard would be a perfect area to explore for this sprint.

We spent time fine-tuning our ideas about what a client dashboard should include that our clients would appreciate and use on a regular basis. Being inspired by reviewing the industry’s best practices, every team member started sketching possible solutions individually. After that, the most difficult stage of the sprint commenced: deciding on preferred sketches and listing all user steps we would like for clients in the interaction with the new dashboard. By the fourth day, we were excited to start building a prototype client dashboard from scratch and prepare the user tests. On the final day, we did five user tests to test the prototype we created and collected very useful feedback testing our assumptions.

Whilst normally we test our prototypes with students, we were fortunate enough to have some great clients providing valuable insights this time! After gathering amazing feedback from our clients we could start reflecting on the Sprint and draw conclusions. The combination of the client feedback and the dashboard prototype resulted in formulating a strategic vision for a new product. The Studyportals developers are already working hard on creating a user-friendly dashboard for our clients!

It was a great and a busy week running our first Design Sprint: in just five days we decided on the direction, sketched, prototyped and tested a new product vision with five users!

If you are interested in participating in future user studies feel free to contact us.

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