Prototyping design sprints

Via Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium by Tristan Ferne

As I’ve written about previously I am exploring new digital story formats for news at BBC R&D. We’re trying to explore many possible solutions in this project so we’ve been running through phases that attack the same problem (are there better ways to tell news stories online) from different angles. Phase 1 was about re-using existing content in new formats, phase 2 was about personalised stories, phase 3 (right now) is about increasing understanding and participation. Each of these phases is four sprints (eight weeks) long and each has started with a design sprint. My team has been running variations of this design sprint to refine its effectiveness for us. Iteratively prototyping our prototyping.

Design Sprints are a method developed by Google Ventures. It’s an intense five day process to explore a problem through design, prototyping and testing. Read their book if you want to know how to run a design sprint.

Our first design sprint in October was facilitated by myself, using a rough approximation of Google’s process, but with a couple of extra days. We found it worked pretty well to kick off the project, particularly as we were a new team.

For our second design sprint in January we engaged Cenydd Bowles as an experienced external facilitator to lead us through the Google process and to give the project team less to worry about. This worked better, though the actual problem we set ourselves to explore was quite a lot harder — how to personalise the content or format of stories.

For our third design sprint we worked with Comuzi to adapt the process to better meet our requirements and fit with what we’d learnt so far. We also wanted them to act as external consultants reviewing our ideas and assumptions and getting us out of any project or BBC “bubbles” we might have got accustomed to.

This is the timetable and structure we used for this latest sprint — 8 days over 2 weeks.

Pre-sprint
Desk research on the target users and problem space. That’s mainly getting insights on the audience from internal and external reports, and looking at what other organisations do in the same area.

Recruiting users for the interviews and testing. We use an agency to recruit people from our target demographic, I’d recommend this if you have the time and money. Otherwise guerrilla testing on the street is fine.

Day 1
Kick-off workshop; What’s the focus? How might we fail? How can we win? What assumptions do we have? Sharing and discussing the desk research and drafting some user personas.
Interviewing some in-house experts about the target audience. In this case BBC Three and Newsbeat.

Day 2
We held four interviews with people from the target demographic, talking to them about their behaviours and needs around online news. This is the major change from the Google Ventures structure, but we’ve found it incredibly useful to talk to our users, as well as read about them, before designing anything.
We shared interesting and inspiring examples of relevant applications and ideas from other places, sketching and noting our favourite aspects.
We developed “How might we…” statements based on what we’d learnt. Statements like “How might we measure understanding?” and “How might we help people understand at their desired level?”

Day 3
We started generating ideas on post-its and sketching them (but I’m not going to talk about those processes here).

Day 4
We developed the ideas further and had an alternati ve ideas session led by some colleagues.
We voted on which ideas to prototype.

Days 5 & 6
Prototyping. We’ve got quite a refined process and a multi-skilled team to allow us to make working HTML prototypes pretty quickly. This involved designing, coding and sourcing and writing news stories. We ended up with five prototypes (Simplify, Annotate, Levels, Progress, WhoSaidWhat). I like to give the prototypes simple names for easy reference.

“Simplify” — one of the prototypes

Day 7
We tested the prototypes ourselves and fixed a few obvious things — it’s pretty important to do this to catch easy fixes, and it’s easy to miss this stage when you’re under time pressure. Then we ran testing sessions with six participants in our office cafe, facilitated by a user researcher. Two of the project team sat in on each int erview to observe and take notes.

Day 8
We reviewed the testing notes and wrote down what we’d learnt and our conclusions.
We held a wrap-up workshop where we evaluated the prototypes together, based on our agreed criteria (we use Catwigs cards). Finally we held a retrospective session to evaluate the design sprint process itself.

Newswigs cards for evaluating new story formats

A retrospective

Overall this design sprint worked well. It certainly felt quite fast, with little time to stop and think, though personally I think it’s important to time-box these activities so you don’t get stuck overthinking things. However, this is only the start of our process and we now have six more weeks to develop these ideas and prototypes for this phase. It’s important to note here that the design sprint structure doesn’t give you a chance to stand back and analyse what you’ve done, nor does it give you the time and space to develop more complex ideas or services or approaches to the problem. But it’s a good place to start.

Some other things we could improve:

Spending more time on the desk research beforehand, including having everyone familiarising themselves with it, this would have saved time in the sprint itself.
Day 2 (interviewing users) was hard to schedule and co-ordinate activities alongside the interviews, as throughout the day a subset of the team were in the user interviews note-taking or observing.
Getting more diverse outside perspectives on our ideas throughout the sprint — from outside the team and outside the BBC.

https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href

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Prototyping design sprints

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