Design Sprint – M?ller Digital – Team neXt

This is a follow-up article of the Preparing for the Design Sprint. We arranged our design sprint over 4 days, at the Startup Lab in Oslo.

Day one

At day one we started out by gaining deeper insight into the selected focus/problem area through interviewing experts. We had arranged for an insight session with one of our car dealers, M?ller Bil Oslo Vest - Volkswagen. From our side we had a team of experienced designers and sprint facilitators from Northern Beat, as well as members with deep insight into the customer journey, also technical resources from Netcompany and Genus. Before starting the expert interview, we defined the various roles of the participants, e.g. who should be the decision maker.

We had prepared some questions before the interview, and during the session the dialogue provided us with in-depth information. Each and one of us did Post-it notes during the session, every observation on its post-it note. The purpose of using this technique was to enable us to extract information for processing later in the sprint.

Each of us presented our findings from the expert interview as we placed the Post-it notes on the wall, we grouped them into various areas. This made it possible to see contours of various stages in the business process we were diving into.

The next step was to generate a sprint goal and some sprint questions, questions that need to be answered to reach the sprint goal. This was done as individual work, and we discussed the different suggestions for the sprint goal in the group. This resulted in a definition of the combination of the groups understanding of our mission.

Although I cannot disclose the sprints detailed theme here, I can share that the vision is a future picture of the redefined business process.

After having defined the vision we continued to challenge ourselves. The vision was summarized on a big sheet of paper, then placed on the wall.

We worked individually with themes such as:

·       What must be in place for us to have success?

·       What can possibly go wrong?

·       Creative thoughts around customer value/experience on the form: what if we could.....?

After a long day, with lots of questions, insights, ending with some creative first thoughts, the participants almost had reached a mental saturation point. 

During the sprint everything is put on the wall, so was our first draft of the customer journey. At the end of day one we placed our grouped insights along this process. While doing this we reframed the insights into problem questions, leveraging a technique known as HMW (How Might We). This makes it easier for the team to leverage the insights and move forward.

Knowing that our minds also would 'sleep over it', we knew it was beneficial to close the work for day 1.

Day Two

Day two started out by reflecting over the work performed on day 1.

The second day we were challenged on that of creating idea sketches. We leveraged a technique named the Four Step Sketch.

·       Notes

·       Sketches

·       Crazy 8s

·       Proposed solution and critique

Notes

We were first tasked by having a look at our interview notes, the sprint goal, and the how-might-we questions, for us to recall and refresh our insights.

Sketches

We were then tasked with sketching three different ideas per person (12 in total), related to that of enhancing the customer experience along the customer journey. The ideas were sketched on a piece of paper.

Always when doing sketches, we made assumptions, e.g. assume that a car buyer would prefer to listen to voice rather than reading text. Based on this we raised some more sprint questions, e.g.: Do car buyers prefer listening to voice rather than reading text?

The participants had to present the different idea sketches, assumptions and sprint questions. Some of us realized we were challenged on that of sketching something for the first time in our career. Quite fun.

 Crazy 8s

After this first round of ideation we were challenged to create 8 new ideas per person. We did that by folding a sheet of A4 paper enough times so when unfolding, 8 squares were uncovered. In each area a new idea was sketched. The new individual ideas were presented for the group, and again placed on the wall. We generated between 40 and 50 ideas in total for the group.

Proposed solution and critique

Having all this new insight of ideas from the other members of the group, we were challenged individually, to create 1 final, anonymous, idea sketch for the new concept. We put together all the learning into the compilation of a "golden idea", an idea for a concept that we also had to put a name on. The idea had to be presented graphically/sketched, summarized in three steps, and we could also make some textual overall descriptions for each step. As always these were also put on the wall.

The sketches had to be self-explanatory, as they were to be presented by a person not being the creator of the idea. The creator could supplement the presentation if some details were forgotten, furthermore the group could ask questions and discuss.

Dot Voting

We then voted on the different sketched ideas, by putting a pen-dot on them, we had 5 dots each. We were also allowed to put a dot on idea-elements as well, so that we could take idea elements and insert into another idea, if we found that appropriate in the sense of building a better customer experience and journey.

In our case the various ideas were centered along the same basic core. We selected one idea, and added some elements from other ideas to get a better result.

While doing individual work around ideation it was of great value to be at the Startup Lab environment. The atmosphere, and the fact that one had plenty of space, so that one could work undisturbed in a more informal setting.

Storyboarding

At the end of day 2 with got challenged on that of sketching a storyboard for the winning solution picked in the previous step, in the sense of how the end users/customer/sales person would interact with the solution along the customer journey.

The facilitators prepared a storyboard template on the wall with multiple empty squares. We rotated on the task of being the one drawing. This job started by deciding what should be the opening “scene”, the customers first touchpoint with the changed service. We then followed through with the sequence of events of the customer journey. We named the frames of the storyboard, and all key phazes were included. We always verified up against the sprint questions.

In our case this became a storyboard of a customer experience containing a mix of that of entering a web site, provide some information, and that of interacting with an App. While sketching the storyboard we were challenged to think that this could work for real, e.g. showing what data each interface should contain. 

It was a demanding session as it required us to bring in concrete things that were much more detailed. Sanity and reality checks in every step, e.g. do we have the data, is this crossing the "creepy line", do we break regulations, do we believe customers will understand and value this etc.

The result was a storyboard on the wall, and a group that needed to get lots of new energy for the upcoming day. As usual we did a debrief of the day, and we were quite happy with the result so far. 

Day 3

Day 3 started with a debrief of the work so far.

Then we knew a concrete prototype should be built during the day, and we discussed if the whole, or just parts of the storyboard should be prototyped.

This was an important discussion, parts of the storyboard had nothing new and innovative elements over them, e.g. sub-processes in the customer journey, were we had previous experiences. Since we had limited time, and since we wanted to focus on the new and innovative parts, we decided to narrow the scope to these parts. Parts that answered the major sprint questions.

This proved to be a smart decision, as we could focus, and get things ready for user testing. We created a prototype in a prototyping tool (like Principle and Adobe XD) - basically it looked like a real solution, except it had no live linked data in our case. We did a discussion during the morning session if we should go for a prototype with real data, but concluded this was not necessary, and could also be waste if the tests signaled thumbs down for the concept.

During the prototyping some resources not directly involved in the prototyping itself worked on the next step; recruiting test users for the prototype test on day 4.

At the end of day 3 we had a working prototype, also supplemented with a paper-prototype for a separate part of the proposed solution (seller statistics, backend system).

We debriefed the day, great teamwork, great facilitators, and lots of energy from all participants had brought us to the next level.

Day 4

The user testing started with a prototype, recruited customers, a car, and we were of course very excited about the feedback.

We exposed the solution for the customers, they experienced it for 15 minutes, and we had a 15 to 30 minutes follow-up discussion after the experience. Asking for how the experience felt, the value of it, what changes we should do to enhance the value, if anything was odd/not acceptable.

A similar test was done at the dealer site, were the test was more related to explaining the concept, using the paper prototype to show the generated backend value.

After the design sprint we created a presentation of our work, to document the design sprint, share the learning with co-workers and present for the business side.

 The presentation

The structure of the presentation was like this:

-       An explanation of the current situation for the customer journey

-       The challenges during the customer journey

-       The insights we had gained

-       The vision for our new concept

-       The numbers in terms of expected business value

-       The why-we-are-doing-this, rationale behind

-       The design sprint process and our work products

-       A value proposition

-       The solution

-       The future potential

-       A sketched feature implementation roadmap towards a MVP

-       An estimated cost budget

-       A risk list

-       A proposed next step for getting up to speed with the implementation, and how we see this gradually rolled-out in the organization by leveraging pilots so that we can adjust.

The feedback we got from the presentation (1 hour) was positive, but we were also challenged. We were asked to gain more customer insight with respect to how they would value the transformed service, as well as verify the scalability of the concept.

Our plan now is to test more, and also verify the scalability. If the customer feedback is positive and the scalability verification shows positive results, we will continue to build the transformed service. The service will also be aligned with some new enterprise level strategic plays.

For more information regarding the design sprint, I would like to refer to GV - The Design Sprint.