Google Sprint, a visual summary

Published in

Prototypr

7 min readOct 18, 2017

Let me tell you about the background we had when launching our first Google Sprint at Ironhack. This was the first week of our course, so the members of the team did not know each other (me included). We were expecting something like an introduction to our course or so, but instead we just got into learning by action, getting to know each other while doing our sprint.

So, this a quick view of how the sprint was, also I wil use some photos I took at the process and some personal opinions.

Monday

Just after we were introduced, we formed two teams of five people each, and set our goals for the first day: Share knowledge, understand the problem, and pick a target.

We saw a case study from the coffee background (Blue Bottle) and jumped into our brief which was Bloom Box Miami, an online flower shop. The customer just wanted a simple, fresh and fun shopping experience.

Caption of Bloom Box Miami working sheets.

We started at the end. As time-travelers we went to the future in our DeLorean and wondered these kind of questions: Why did we fail? Why was our online shopping e-commerce a failure? We saw failure on price, customization, unclear product, forms, etc.

We set a long term goal: ‘Normalise the purchase of flowers’. And we made a list of questions to resolve: Shall we have to improve the communication process with the users? Shall we clarify the message of our product?
Shall we improve the buying process?

Long term goal and questions to resolve.

We made four possible timelines and we decided this was our map: A secretary has a request to send flowers to people of her job. After a search she finally buys a bunch of flowers in the website of the company.

For the expert questions´ we had a special report on the issue, so we could get some conclusions to add to the website pains’.

Next step was HMW: “How might we” questions. We did it first individually, secondly putting in common the questions and grouping the similar ones by themes. There were some really funny like “How might we make Obama buy some of our bunch of flowers? Yes we can”. Then we voted for the most relevant which were these two:

How might we invent reasons for people to buy flowers?
How can we simplify the buying process?

This is Zimon, our TA, looking for answers of our ‘HMW’ questions.

Finally we put these two HMW questions in our target and get ready for Tuesday.

Tuesday

These were the goals: inspiration, sketching and recruitment.

We collected individually some lightning demos. Most of these ideas were taken from usable websites or Apps. Me for example, I got focus in sites and apps such as toyota, Apple, Airbnb, Virgin America, Amazon, Evernot, Cabify, Tinder, Duolingo, Instagram, Zalando and Starbucks.

Each member of the team proposed between five or ten lightning demos, a kind of collective inspiration for our future website.

After this we played crazy 8s, and made the Sketching process, first we focused on important notes related to our project:

We have to show better to the user our product
We hace to simplify and make clearer the buying process
We have to create new reasons to buy flowers
How are we going to make our secretary buy flowers from our site?

Here for example, a personal sketching of some ideas answering these questions: A flower configurator Ad, an Ad Campaign focused on a celebrity, some kind of Flower Power movement, an NGO that donates part of the purchase of flowers to disadvantaged children, etc.

Wednesday

Three main aims for this day: Select a solution, create a storyboard and select the participants.

We made our art museum, then heat maps, critiques, explanations, votes and supervotes.

The Art Museum, get your free tickets at Ironhack

Our solution was double: On one hand we thought about making an Ad in Social Media sites so as to take users to our website, on the other hand was to simplify the buying experience just with a three step configurator.

Here is an extract of our storyboard: “There´s a woman, Alba, working on a office, her boss ask her to look for flowers, she searchs for it on Google and different websites. This search is kept on her browser, so somedays later she is impacted by an Ad on Instagram (by her cross-device id). In this Ad she is proposed a challenge game to a friend. The game goes like this: She has to do three questions to a friend and give him three possible answers, this way she can send him flowers and see how he knows she. In fact, Alba buys the flower pack with the new flower configurator site. Alba decides to play the game with his friend Victor. Victor is working on a dark office, really bored. He receives a notification of the game on his phone. Accepts and plays. Then, a day after, Victor receives the flowers and they discover who wins the game”.

Now I read again about our story, I think we complicated the story too much, it should be easier.

Thursday

Thursday focus was to create a prototype, create an interview guide and get ready for interviews. Here is our Master explaining us about how to prototype.

This was the time when we divided and conquer, so let me introduce you the team:

Up on the left: We had Victor the coordinator, and Alba, the maker.
Up on the right: Guille, the collector.
Down on the left: Ruth, the interviewer.
Down right: That one is the writer and it was me.

These rolls look like a film trailer. I can say we worked well together, maybe the maker-designer had the hard-working part.

All in all, we prepared our prototype and began to do some testing with the other team. Also we got the interview guide ready for next day.

Friday

On our last day of this Google Sprint we focused on inteviews, specially in people´s reactions, opinions, comprenhension, etc. While Ruth was making the interviews, the rest of the team were taking notes. Here you can see a video from the first one.

Video of the first interview.

We made five interviews and found that the opinions were really similar. They detected almost the same mistakes on our prototype.

At the end we made this magic quadrant, putting together pain points’ found in the interviews for our prototype, for example:

They hardly understood the game (or the game was not well explained)
The payment dynamics were not understood correctly either
The Flower Configurator had a good feedback

Finally we joined together and got some conclusions for our work.

Conclusion: It was really a nice process, I really liked the ideation techniques. Also it was relevant for me to see different focus and putting it together in a team.

By now, we will keep working on the next step: UX Research.