DESIGN SPRINT 2.0 | STORYBOARDING HACK | Aj&Smart

Key Takeaways

hello everybody this is Brittany from aging smart today is super exciting because we have a design sprint pack for you we've been doing designs friends for I guess a couple years now we've done hundreds of them we started using this sprint book by the lovely Jake Knapp and since then we've come up with all these kind of like little hacks to the process that basically just make it a little bit more efficient don't worry these hacks are all Jake approved and hopefully they'll make your design sprint experience just all that much better so Michael from AJN smart one of our founders is now going to walk you through a design sprint of 2.0 hack that we like to call the user test flow take it away Michael [Music] so you're usually at this point in the sprint where you've got a winning concept look something like this right and you're about to embark on something like storyboarding so you've got these cells here these empty cells and you're thinking let's jump into it but it's often the case when you're storyboarding that your team is super excited they've experienced levels of alignment that they've never experienced before in the sprint right this is the beauty of the sprint right you get everybody on the same page we all know where we're going the problem is it's often the case that the concepts and not drawn in a linear storyline and the user test when we test them is almost like a comic book certain actions happening one after another so the user will read a Facebook post or then he will click on a Facebook post and go to an article and then you'll read the article and go to a website so these are all these little action steps that a user takes to travel through your prototype on user testing day so if you're following the Sprint book you've got your winning concept and you'd be going straight from these winning concepts into storyboarding what we've found over doing hundreds of sprints over the years is that these sessions can get a little bit wayward these sessions can sometimes turn into these unstructured discussions where the team loses all of this alignment we just had in the early part of the sprint there's a lot of temptation for the team to put in new ideas they're so excited it's so tangible right look at this concept finally my ideas have coming to life and I can almost taste the product because we're on the verge of bring it to life in a prototype if right at this stage of the sprint it's very hard to keep everybody together and focus on just getting the storyboard done so this exercise helps keep your team focused on answering those questions and it also helps keep the storyboard session a lot shorter and structures some of the discussion so we're making a lot of the decisions for the storyboard up front before we start drawing and this is called the user test flow this is how it goes step 1 everybody on the team writes 6 action steps what are action steps think about action steps as the individual clicks or taps or movements if you're prototyping a physical prototype that your user will take to get to the next scene in your storyboard now the way to do this is take a block of posters and a sharpie Laura Shafi each posted has one action step on it for example the prototype might start on a Facebook page or a Facebook feed so I would write user reads Facebook page and clicks on article that would be my first poster and then I will write all of my six action steps to get to the goal a great tip here is to write the first action step and then write the last action step and then fill in the blanks a good tip for writing the first action step is go and look at your map and a good tip for write in the last action step is take into account the map Bing but also your sprint questions and look at that for a reference because it could be a good tip as for what your last step is and now you need to fill in the middle step2 every person on the team reads out aloud his six action steps as they put them on the board in a row and we take it in turns to read it out very quickly just give a minute 30 seconds to a minute for every team member the good tip is that the decider should either go either go first or last and this is just so he or she can hear all of the other test flows [Music] so now everybody has put up their flows and this is their idea about how the users gonna move through the prototype so we're up to voting now this part of the process is very similar to how we vote on the concepts or to choose our winning concept everybody in the team gets only one dot except for the decider of course he or she gets two dots now give your team about five minutes as with all of the voting the team can choose any road that they would like they can also vote on their own row of course the great thing about seeing all of the flows up like this is that you again start to see where your team is really aligning on their understanding of the concept so you might see that three people think that the prototype should start on Facebook then the decider and the team can sort of see okay there's a strong indication that we should start on Facebook for the prototype because it feels like a natural place to start so now everybody has one dot vote and they need to go through and just place it on the row that they feel like is a very good foundation for the prototype to flow through the decider gets two votes now he or she also probably is looking at a little bit of a heat map so much heat over here right now with a little bit of a consensus from the team which of these flows could be the basis for our prototype and our user test now the reason that we give them two votes is one vote should confirm the baseline flow but we also want to see if there's something else that's happened in one of these flows which would be really interesting to put into the prototype or into the storyboard and therefore into the user test they choose a baseline user test flow but they also like one of the action steps over here that would be really interesting to add into the prototype right so they can also choose one of these and this would then be brought into the test flow step for circle the winning float [Music] so now the team sees exactly what steps the user will be taking in the prototype or in the user tests actually and this is going to save you a bunch of time when you're looking at your empty cells for the storyboard now you have your user test flow you can begin your storyboarding sessions by simply placing up the post-its inside the empty cells like this and now the first part of your storyboard session has already shown to all of your teammates exactly what's going to happen in each step this is a great time-saving and also a great alignment tool so that your storyboarding sessions don't just carry on to ever ever ever storyboarding sessions as you may have experienced could sometimes last the whole day or even a whole afternoon up to three hours in in our case but using the user test flow we've managed to get this down to around one and a half hours and now your storyboarding thanks for watching keep watching our channel to watch more of these amazing little exercises and that's not a camera [Music]