Experiencing a design sprint as an engineer — Part I
By: Maham Shahid
Tags: Software Engineering, Engineering, Design Sprint, Creative Process, Product Workshop

I recently got to be a part of a design sprint, which was held to define how our platform will look like and behave in the future. I will not go into details of what a design sprint is (because you can find so many well written articles on it already) — but essentially it’s a week-long sprint which brings together stakeholders from different domains together to solve a certain problem.

In this story, I will mostly talk about the structure that we followed, the steps involved and what we did in each of those steps. So, lets get started…

The Participants

In our design sprint, I was representing the tech chapter. Other participants included fellow team-mates from the design chapter, customer-experience, financial and product teams.

Defining The Problem

We started with defining the problem areas so that we could figure out what we wanted to focus on. This was facilitated by lightning talks from “domain experts” — during which, all the participants added their personal notes about what they thought worked well and how we could improve certain areas and experiences.

Defining the problem statement in the form of “How-Might-We”

This approach gave us a wide variety of areas that we could focus on but to take something meaningful out of this, the scope needed to be further defined and narrowed down.

Therefore, we set out to define the “sprint questions” and our opinion of what the product would look like in the next 2 years. This helped us narrow down the area that we really wanted to focus on — and this conclusion was reached with the input of many different stakeholders.

Lightning Demos

Keeping in mind our sprint questions and the vision we had defined for the product, we were now supposed to draw some inspiration before moving on to the next step. This involved some research. Each of us was tasked with drawing up 2–3 examples of products that we felt were doing a great job with some of the parameters that we also wanted to focus on. For us, this was a combination of a great experience and other strategies that made customers keep coming back — or in simple terms, how they managed to have a healthy number of active users. I will discuss my picks in the following paragraphs.

Product 1: Spotify

My first pick was Spotify as I absolutely love this app. It’s a part of my daily routine — be it listening to music while working, during commute, or simply while chilling at home. I believe the following reasons helped Spotify have a pool of regular active users:

Spotify was one of the first platforms to bring songs from so many different artists on to one platform — the great thing about this (in my opinion, as a consumer) was that users didn’t need to buy songs from each individual artist, but rather they could buy a subscription and listen to all the songs they want. Or just use the free version with ads

The ability to filter songs by mood or genres is great (you can create playlist of songs for your own specific mood as well)

Spotify creates personalized playlists and mixes for you based on your listening patterns (recommendations)

The ability to share songs with your friends in the form of collaborative playlists is really awesome!

The web-app and mobile app can easily sync with each other and lets you control what’s playing from either of your devices

Product 2: Star Wars Battlefront II (Multiplayer — live service)

Disclaimer: I know this game was very controversial but everything I write here is just my opinion — others can agree or disagree with it.

Notes for lightning demo examples

Star Wars Battlefront II was released in 2017 and was met with initial controversy over their use of loot boxes. However, they recovered from the initial shocks by following a very good multiplayer content strategy. They managed to keep gamers actively involved by releasing frequent new content packs. The release of Star Wars movies — episodes VII & IX was met with new maps and skins for heroes and villains in the game. They also introduced a lot more game modes than what the initial game offered. Star Wars era specific content was also executed well such as the clone wars series update with new maps and heroes + villains introduced — as well as new skins for existing heroes, villains, troopers and vehicles. Having an active community manager who listened to the gamers and communicated with them about the game's plans definitely helped in keeping them engaged and actively coming back to enjoy what the game had to offer.

Sketching

After drawing inspiration from the previous exercise, we set out to sketch possible solutions that we could think of for our product. This was divided into 2 phases: the first one was “Crazy 8's” where we made rough sketches of concepts that we could think of. And the next step was to pick one of the concepts and really focus on it, creating UI in the form of wire-frames.

I struggled a bit with the “Crazy 8's” because when I start sketching, I usually dive directly into the details. The way I approach problems is to first write down my thoughts, assumptions and possible solutions (instead of sketching rough concepts, I usually visualize them in my mind and write down how it should work before moving to detailed sketches). So that's how I approached this as well. I wrote down my thoughts and ideas & then drew some rough sketches for 3 different ideas. And hence, the Crazy 8’s was complete.

The next step was to create detailed sketches for one of our concepts. I decided to focus on the concept of integrating the community within our platform. So, my concept had 6 screens and most of them represented different ideas on how we could achieve this in our product.

Sketches for a concept

Voting and Storyboard

The next step was for all the participants to review all the concept sketches (the sketches were anonymous so no one was supposed to know whose sketch they were looking at — to remove bias). Everyone had a number of votes to emphasize what concept seemed feasible and we should work on.

Voting for concepts

After picking the concepts, the next step was to come up with a storyboard. For this, we defined the starting and the ending step (starting from a specific place in the platform and ending at the end result we all agreed on). The steps in between had to be formulated by each team member and then presented.

What followed next was discussion on the different steps presented and what everyone felt should be the flow/behavior that should be followed from start to end (which would be most effective). After this, we brainstormed together and defined the basic UI/requirements that we needed for each step of the storyboard to be able to come up with a testable prototype.

Discussions ongoing after the creation of a storyboard

Prototype and User Research

The last step in the design sprint was to come up with a testable prototype and interview users to get feedback on the prototype. This part was handled by the design chapter and this was where I returned back to my squad.

This was the structure of the design sprint. I want to talk about my experience and takeaways from it as well but that is discussed in the second part of this story 😊.