Zoom on a 2-month design sprint to simplify citizens' administrative procedures.
I worked as a product strategist within an innovation department that helps project teams solve citizen problems through user-centric solutions.
The social declaration upgrade was one of these accelerated projects.
The challenge: Simplify for citizens the declaration of home-based employees' remuneration and financial aid recovery.
I ran a 4-day design sprint to take up the challenge, answer critical business questions, and rapidly progress to a tested solution.
Overview of my process to lead the design sprint:
#1 Scope.
My goal was to make the investment in time worthwhile. This step enabled me to ensure effective outcomes from the design sprint.
First, I defined and ran a UX research plan, including discovery interviews with citizens, data analysis, persona development, and existing user journeys formalization. Then I worked with stakeholders two weeks before the sprint to select the right problem to solve.
As a result, I defined a challenge by looking at the entire citizen context and linking it to the organization's overarching goals.
Finally, I established the sprint team, defined the sprint schedule, prepared the place, recruited end-users for the testing day, presented the design sprint brief to stakeholders to share a common understanding.
#2 Facilitate
I made few changes to the standard design sprint to meet the outcomes.
Participants learned about the context, the problem, and the insights, and identified the challenge areas where a solution would make the most impact.
Workshops: Lightning talks; Long-term goal; Map to map; Ask the experts; How Might We; Pick a target.
Participants got inspired by demos, sketched creative solutions, decided which one to prototype, and built the storyboard.
Workshops: Lightning demos; Solution sketch; Sticky decision; Storyboard.
Participants prototyped the selected solution on Figma, a collaborative and comprehensive prototyping tool.
Workshops: Plan roles and pick tools; Build the prototype; Interview guide; Dry run.
Participants tested the prototype with users to validate the solutions and gathered precious insights to determine what to do next.
Workshops: User interviews; Insights and analysis; Planning of the following steps; Sprint design conclusion.
#3 Implement
The challenge with a design sprint is not to leave the results at the state of ideas after the sprint. My goal was to bring the ideas the team generated during the sprint to life.
So I coached the product owner to turn the prototype into a story map, which is the presentation of features through the target user experience. For each step of the user journey, I helped him prioritize the features and include them into successive consistent releases, thus creating the roadmap and initiating the product backlog.
A design sprint is not an excuse to never talk with users and test ideas again. So, I also helped the team apply agile best practices, including discovery, user-centric, and design thinking approaches to build things close to user needs.
Some project managers consider the design sprint a black box that enables anyone to solve anything. It's crucial to share a common understanding of what a design sprint is.
It's essential after an ideation session to follow up and support the teams in executing these ideas. Without this effort, ideation sessions may lose interest and create frustration.
Innovation is about upsetting the status quo. One has to be ready to face challenges and be resilient.
Book a 1-hour free remote workshop to co-design an innovation experiment plan.
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