Extended Design Sprint to kickstart a new project within the company - No Hitch

Quion – Extended Design Sprint to kickstart a new project within the company.

Extended Design Sprint to kickstart a project

Project

Quion Design Sprint

Client

Quion

Type

Extended Design Sprint

Tasks

Ideation, User Research, Concept, Interaction Design, Visual Design, Prototyping

In collaboration with RTM INNOVATIONS, The Young Innovators, Zeewaardig, Userproof and Pepijn Gieles, I organized an extended design sprint for Quion. During this sprint, we conducted research, held a five-day design sprint and finished with a full week of prototyping. In about 14 days we had 3 days of user involvement. These intense weeks resulted in two Invision prototypes and lots of insights for the next steps in de project.

The hitch

Quion asked us to join the team since they had two major opportunities. The first one was an opportunity to enter a new market. However, to do so they needed to come up with a suitable product. Moreover, they saw a great opportunity in the new PSD2 law, which makes it easier to make use of payment data if you’re not a bank.

To accelerate the project they hired me and several others to form a team and take a deep dive in an innovative way to enter this new market and make use of the opportunities around PSD2.

Step 1

Customer Arena

Since Quion wanted to enter a new market, they had to get to know their new potential customers. To do so we invited eight potential customers for a focus group, led by Karin den Bouwmeester of Userproof. The rest of the team was observing the interview from another room and made notes.

Subsequently, we sorted the results of the observation based on empathy maps. These maps and general conclusions of the focus group formed the input for the Design Sprint held next week.

Step 2

Design Sprint

The following week was all about our 5-day design sprint at the Quion office. During the design sprint, I was part of the sprint team while Adinda de Lange from Zeewaardig was facilitating the process. During this design sprint, we developed a prototype in InVision, which we tested on Friday with five potential customers.

Since we were trying to make the process as easy as possible for customers we skipped some important steps, as we found during the user tests. Due to the easiness, users got distrustful towards the product. Moreover, sharing data felt like a ‘black box’ for people. They couldn’t trust the company since they couldn’t follow how their data was used within the company, even if the company was open to how the data was used.

Some important findings to fix during the prototyping week thus.

Step 3

Prototyping week

We started the prototype week by analyzing all input from the user test of the design sprint. Based on all the important findings, we decided which important parts had to be improved. Moreover, we took a look at the earlier made sketches and ideas since they may contain useful solution directions.

From Tuesday till Thursday, Pepijn Gieles and I were working on the next iteration of the prototype. We started with an ideation session on Tuesday, followed with solution sketching on Wednesday morning. Subsequently, we started with a new storyboard, so we had a stable basis for the new InVision prototype. We build the prototype on Thursday.

The new prototype was tested again on Friday so we could validate the new assumptions. This new prototype was perceived as much better than the first by all potential customers. A very nice result for the second iteration and we got enough input for eventual further improvements.

Post-it Customer Journey - Quion Design Sprint

The end result

In about two weeks we learned a lot. We had three customer feedback moments and build two prototypes, which we validated with the potential customers of Quion. In this short period, a lot of energy was gained and although I like to share the prototypes and sketches, it is not possible due to an NDA.

Besides the tested prototypes and lots of insights, we defined some next steps with Quion. One of the important things was a good market validation before the product can go into the next iteration in which also the development team should get involved.