Project: The Alteryx UX/UI Team was tasked with developing high fidelity prototypes for our ‘next-generation’ product offering with minimal product requirements or direction (greenfield project), with tight schedule constraints. In order to quickly move from ideation to prototype, the team decided to leverage Google’s design sprint process.
Instead of running the design sprint over five days, we opted to for a 3-day sprint in order to run this ‘experiment’ as an Alteryx Innovation Days project (conducted four times a year – our development organization has the opportunity to spend 48 hours working on an innovative project or idea with a final company-wide presentation required).
Role: Design Sprint Facilitator and UX/UI Designer
Tools: Pencil+Paper, PowerPoint, Sketch, Prezi
Process:
- I worked closely with Product Management, key development stakeholders, and the UX/UI Manager to schedule a 3-day Design Sprint – identifying our key challenge, core sprint team members, goals, and deliverables in a formal sprint brief. Our key challenge was: “To own the analyst’s day, by providing a seamless end-to-end experience for our Next-Gen unified platform.”
- In preparation for the design sprint, I conducted an affinity mapping exercise to help validate our existing personas and to identify strawman personas needing to be developed for the Next-Gen platform – specifically the new “IT Analyst” and “Consumer” personas.
- I collaborated with my fellow UX/UI team members to gather all available research to inform the design sprint process – selecting our target primary persona (Ivan the IT Analyst) for our design sprint and generating a strawman customer journey for his experience within the next-gen platform.
- I Identified key-stakeholders from each existing product domain to participate in lightening talks, and scheduled them to present their goals for the next-gen platform together with risks they had identified during Day 1.
- Prior to the Design Sprint, I developed a design sprint deck, based on Google’s Design Sprint Kit, to help facilitate the design sprint process and setup the design sprint room with all the necessary equipment.
- Over the 3-days, I facilitated and participated in the design sprint, which included:
- Coaching sprint team members in writing “How Might We (HMW)” statements to capture ideas and problems during lightening talks.
- Leading affinity mapping exercise to group HMW’s into key themes that might benefit our users, and conducted voting exercise to identify key opportunities.
- Guiding sprint team members through the process of researching comparable problems and gathering design inspiration, in preparation for a Crazy 8’s sketching exercise – where each member (including myself) was challenged to quickly sketch 8 different solutions to HMW statements that appealed to them.
- Conducted a voting session on our Crazy 8 sketches, resulting in a single key idea being selected by each sprint team member for more focused solution sketching exercise.
- Leading sprint team members through solution sketching exercise – after voting upon the “best” parts of each solution, the team opted to move to prototyping all the solutions identified.
- Coaching the sprint team members through storyboarding and prototyping their final solutions.
- Finally, in collaboration with sprint team members, I developed and co-delivered a presentation outlining our 3-day sprint process and a demo of our final Invision prototypes to the entire Alteryx Development organization.
Outcome: Four next-gen prototypes were successfully developed as part of our design sprint – two have since been further refined, and usability testing with internal and external participants was conducted to validate the designs. Feedback is currently being used to further inform our design process.
