Solo Design Sprint

An Overview

The design sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It is highly interactive, experimental and user-focused.

The Company

House2Home is a Startup Home Decor company and their aim is to provide users a quick and satisfying home decor shopping experience. Their target audience is young urbanites who have moved into a new home or apartment and would like to give their home a quick, cost-effective makeover by accessorizing their existing furniture items with the perfect home decor to achieve their desired look.

The Challenge

The challenge faced by the users is that they find the experience of shopping for home decor very overwhelming and complicated. They find it hard to find items that are within their budget and would go with their existing furniture.

The Process

Day 1 - Define and Map

Before clearly understanding the problem I performed evaluative research provided by the challenge. User interviews had already been performed for this challenge and I had to synthesize the gathered research and my next step was to categorize the findings according to the similar themes and relationships. I penned the ideas on sticky notes and created an affinity map.

The accumulation of the different insights and common patterns that came from the users’ answers helped create a persona. Focusing on a specific user, the primary persona helps to keep their needs in mind and not get distracted whenever an idea for a new feature or demand pops up.

Defining the Problem

The user is a new apartment owner who wants to give their tiny apartment a quick and cheap facelift. They know what they like but need help buying things that will look good with what they currently have for an overall cohesive look. They get inspiration from Pinterest and Instagram and have an eye for design but get overwhelmed and end up buying nothing. They are also on a budget and want to achieve the look they want for less.

The Challenge

The Questions I wanted to answer:

How might we help them visually see the items they want with their existing decor?

How might we help the user find the items they like for the best possible price?

How might we help them feel they made the right decision?

How might we prevent them from getting overwhelmed?

How might we make the process of buying decor a quick and easy one?

Problem Statement

How might we help the user to buy home decor that will match with their existing home look within their budget and make the experience quick, easy and satisfying?

User Map

Starting at the end by mapping a possible end to end user scenario.

Day 2- Research and Sketch

Day 3 - Storyboard - Creating a Blueprint of the Prototype

Day 4 - Build the Prototype

I built a minimal prototype including the most important screens in the user’s journey so the solution could be tested. I designed the high fidelity screens in Sketch and then used Invision to build the prototype.

Day 5- Testing- Satisfying the Suspense

To test the prototype I conducted 5 moderated in person sessions. During the tests I watched reactions while taking notes. I looked for patterns in the user feedback. The users were given a scenario:

Summary of Test Results and Feedback

Overall the users were pleased by the look and flow of the app. Ideally I would have liked to test the VR feature of the app that lets you view the item in your space while you shop but due to my limited resources I went with the option of a saved picture instead. The option to see the item they chose in a saved photo of their room alongside with their furniture and other selected items was especially appealing to them. They added that they would like to see other features like ‘drag and drop’ items into the picture to add further items. They would also like to be able to share their ‘room’ pictures with friends or social media groups. These features would be useful to incorporate in the future iterated prototype and then run a second round of user testing.

Takeaways

A GV design sprint is a result-oriented process and will force a team to make a decision and test its outcome in a short time. I learnt how to apply convergent thinking and go from rapid ideation to high fidelity design in 4 days and then testing in a day to validate your design decisions or finding out if it was a total fail. However since this was a solo design sprint I felt like I did not get to experience a key part of it which is collaboration with team members and involving the stakeholders.