5 days to finish the product design is what kind of experience

The product design process has a relatively fixed cycle. But if you can increase the speed of the entire process and get better results with more frequent feedback, will you still use the current design process?

To get more iterations in a shorter time, this rapid design process is a very different kind of design idea. The rapid design process is not about getting all the links going in a hurry, we're going to make each link work the best way to make sure the whole process is fast and efficient.

First, we need to explore why the design needs to sprint.

What is sprint design and why is this

This design was proposed by Google Ventures and their design partner, Jake Knapp, designed to test your ideas as much as possible through quick research and rapid prototyping.

In general, Sprint design takes about a week, focuses on different activities each day, and requires a preparation period. At the end of the week, what you get is not only a very high degree of completion of the prototype, but also a large number of user data. Even in the regular design process, you can use sprint design to speed up almost any aspect.

As the best UX design practice, Sprint design efficiency is mainly reflected in three aspects:

• User-centric: Make sure that you don't do anything outside of your user's needs before conducting a usability cycle test

• Natural collaboration: When you work quickly, you need the support of your entire team

• Perfect and efficient: if your ideas are good for users, you can build just enough products with the support of rapid prototyping

With just a week's time limit, the team itself can only focus on the most important issues and not enough time to think too much about it. In this stressful environment, the goal of Sprint design is to improve speed rather than pursue perfection. According to Knapps's introduction, this method has achieved good results in some enterprises, such as Nestle and Blue bottle of coffee.

Sprint Design Preparation Work

All work that needs to be done before should be ready in advance. Previous experience has taught us that it is the only way to keep the team focused and efficient in the sprint design. According to Google Ventures's recommendation, we should try to complete the following sections on the first morning:

• Review existing research: Although the goal of Sprint design is to have a better understanding of the user, it is clearly not a reasonable choice to start completely from scratch. Collect all relevant data, consolidate previous related documents, and distribute to team members to ensure that everyone is in the same line of progress. Accelerate the use of research, and then analyze the description, this will be faster to achieve all of this.

• Plan User testing: Yes, you now need to plan user testing for a nonexistent prototype. For speed, you should at least prepare 5 testers on the last day to test the prototype. In order not to waste time and opportunity, you need to set a reasonable standard for the test results.

• Recruit the right members: too many participants can cause the entire process to be paralyzed, so you just need to identify the right person. According to our proposal, in the first days of Sprint design, the Uxpin team was limited to CEOs, product managers, visual designers, developers, and user experience designers.

• Select the project leader: Considering that all members of the sprint design process are in a highly busy state, you need to choose a leader who can control tasks and time in full. This kind of leader's participation in the actual design process does not need to be too high.

After dealing with these things, the team will save a lot of trouble during the sprint design process.

Five day plan

The sprint design process can certainly be modified and customized, but it is based on a five-day plan:

• Monday: Analysis and goal creation

• Tuesday: Concept generation

• Wednesday: User flow

• Thursday: Prototype design

• Friday: User Testing

Next, I'll tell you about each link.

　I. Analysis and goal creation

The most important point of this link is to analyze the situation, with everyone to speed up.

Although documents and materials have been shared before, this link can still explore and integrate them to ensure that nothing important is left behind. This is also an opportunity for the various departments to share their original insights.

Organize the task at hand and the first day is an important time to find the project goals. If the control is reasonable, the team can get the goal set through a simple discussion. However, in order to ensure controllability and efficiency, we think it would be useful to use attractive charts.

This idea also comes from KJ, and the production of the attraction chart follows the following organizational pattern:

1, ask the question: will want to solve the problem in this way to ask questions, such as "what function can packaging users to achieve the goal?"

2, collect ideas: Independent thinking, did not give people to write ideas on the paper, and affixed to the whiteboard.

3, sorting group: After collecting all the ideas, the team logically divided into groups. Group on ideas and ideas, and choose a reasonable name for each group that they can discuss around.

4. Voting order: In each group and category, vote for the most important, and then select the most important class, so as to filter out the priority.

After completing the attraction chart, the team builds a clear structure. The most important categories and groups have the final say. Vote to help the team make decisions, but don't let the design project become a "committee" model.

　Second, the concept generation

The next day's brainstorming is the most important. Most of the products and concepts are formed at this time. Based on the previous day's goal, the team needs to come up with the best solution here.

Design studio to use the mode of operation so that the team can work together to burnish ideas. The solution's approach to discovery is very close to the way the attraction chart is used to find the highest-priority solution.

The process basically lets everyone propose a potential solution, explore the evaluation, iterate, and find the best solution. The process is as follows:

• Statement task: Describe the problem clearly and propose solutions, such as "redesign the shopping process to get more sales".

• Create a team: Divide the members into 2~4 small teams, ideally, each team retains at least one designer.

• Quick Sketch (15 minutes): Quickly sketch out at least 5 solutions, focus on core concepts, and make the necessary annotations.

• Within-team assessment (15 minutes): Feedback and evaluation within the team for each member's program.

• Iteration (20 minutes): By collecting feedback, each team will combine the refined concepts into a mature idea and solution.

• Vote Polish (20 mins): Each group examines each person's iteration sketch and becomes a concept by polishing and adjusting the merge. Once identified, the team can refine and polish it based on feedback information.

• Panel discussions and reviews (40 minutes): Now each group has a unified concept. Several groups can be merged together to review and discuss the main concepts. After the meeting, the team merges, one concept will be as the main body, the other as the alternative, the design team unified.

While this process can kill some of the more artistic expressions, this necessary sacrifice is more beneficial to the team, given the time constraints and project needs.

After the feasibility solution is taken out, it is a good foundation for the next work.

　　Third, the user process

Throughout the design process, user process steps make the collaboration more selective. The consequences of getting everyone involved are often disastrous, and by contrast, designers should be allowed to take over the link and introduce other people's feedback as a complement.

Creating a user process helps us optimize the steps so that users can accomplish the tasks they need to accomplish. Here are two of our most common methods:

A, writing priority law

In the article "No hand-drawn UI-driven app conceptualization," Jessica Downey explains how to use pure writing to present details and create a unified language for identifying applications or pages.

In the following case, the user wants to start the automatic deposit function, and the section in parentheses represents a button or link:

Step 1: Do you want to set up an automatic deposit?

[Set up automatic deposits]

Step 2: Select Automatic Deposit Frequency

[Once a month] [two times per month] [once every other week] [Once a week]

Step 3: Monthly deposit Date

[Select Date]

Step 4: Set the amount

Show Amount Fields

[Set up automatic deposits]

B. Shorthand method

As an alternative, shorthand was proposed by Basecamp Ryan Singer, who presented the process as a dialogue. The process in the above case can be reduced to the following form:

Even complex processes can be shorthand in this way.

　Four, prototype design

Finally to the prototype design of the link. It is much quicker to design a prototype tool directly than HTML or JS. It's not easy to make prototypes, but here are some tips that should help you:

• No need to be perfect: Sprint design needs to complete a prototype of a functional enough test to solve the most important problem, the details can be left to the future.

• Avoid placeholders: This quick design makes it possible for designers to use false-text placeholders such as Lorem, but this may confuse the user. Low-minimum really does not mean that the poor quality, so please use the real content.

• Visual design consistent: Follow the principle of consistency, use grid alignment to ensure that interface labels remain in each page, ensure that the user is expected (external consistency), and not contradictory (internal consistency).

• Delegation and cooperation: when using Uxpin to make prototypes, multiple teams can create prototypes, comments, and feedback together. While the design team will focus on the core prototypes, how to create a simple prototype for a particular interface with the developer and the product manager is not inconsistent, absorbing its core ideas and incorporating it into the core prototype.

• Embracing non-designer criticism and corrections, developers and marketing advocates often bring good ideas. Feedback is controlled in 15-20 minutes.

Five, user testing

The most crucial moment has come. Because of the use of low fidelity prototype, the average medium degree of usability testing is the most effective, and in this process can allow people to properly guide users, to avoid users from the track or give up.

To save time, you can limit the amount of document information, only test scripts, problems, user tasks, and make usability reports. Usability reports can be simple and make a list of priority issues. Then discuss the issues with stakeholders and begin to address them.

After this, you will have more reliable user data and make better prototypes. What you learn can be added to the next iteration, and the entire process is restarted. In fact, Lyft has been able to complete the process in 4 days.