Design Sprints & Prototyping
Jump start the process of building an app by answering the most vital questions to your application success with design sprints, then test those features by prototyping your application.
A quick sprint out the gates...
Design sprints are a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. Once more, the sprint solves larger goals allowing you to foucs on solving only the most crucial tasks rather than the entirety of the application.
A sprint can condense months of debating time into a single week. The greatest benefit is the sprint concludes with a few actionable tasks that can be realistically prototyped and presented to customers. No more guess work, do you have a new idea or a feature addition and need to know if it works? Is your focus on the right things? This process will let you know quickly.
Phases: Small steps, big results
Monday: understanding
Starting off the week you’ll bring together core team memebers within your company to focus on an end goal. Starting at the end then jumping to the beginning, we’ll create a map of this challenge, identifying risks while outlining plans to reduce them. This produces what is referred to as a target, the goal we’ll ultimately focus on.
Tuesday: solutions
After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for your sprint you’ll get to focus on solutions. This process involves looking at what potential competitors are doing as well as a review of existing ideas to revamp and improve upon. The final step of this sketching out a stack of potential solutions you’ll later evalute and disect in an effort to find the best one.
Wednesday: wireframes
By this point you’re team has come up with several solutions, at least that’s what we’ll push you towards. On Wednesday, you’ll need to look at which solutions are both feasiable and resonable. The end goal on this day is to have a detailed solution from which we’ll wireframe the final concept. The wireframe process is basically a storyboard that helps map out and details what we will produce in the prototype we build Thursday.
Thursday: prototyping
Come Thursday we‘ve set your main goal, composed solutions, then narrowred those down to a single solution while creating a loose sketch of what we’re needing to build. Now we take that and produce a working model, or prototype, that is a tangible interaction your customers can use.
Friday: testing
To finish out the week, you’ll invite in existing and even new potential customers to see how they interact with you application. It is important to test with existing or potential customers because they are the ones you want your product to work for. We also encourage a mix of the two as existing customers are familar with context of the app while potential customers offer a different experience, which is usually based on exploartion/discovery.