Role
Product Designer
User Experience Designer
Client
Tools
Whimsical - low to mid fidelity wireframes, Team oriented tool that makes getting feedback easy.
Sticky notes - great for jotting down ideas and facilitate discussion
Whiteboard - those who control the whiteboard controls the flow of the conversation
Results and learnings
Everyone agreed on an initial wire-frame for engineering to test and build. Because of this sprint, we were able to re-start a project that has been on the back burner for months.
Many would tell me that great designers are great talkers, however, through working in a multi-disciplinary team, I have come realize that the ability to listen is also an invaluable tool for a product designer.
By participating in this design sprint, I learned how to mediate between different interests as a designer, by listening to their opinions, and involving them in the process.
Overview
SeamlessMD is a health technology company that provides digital recovery care plans for patients. They provide patient engagement platforms for hospitals to keep track of how well their patients are recovering after surgery.
In the last week of March 2019, the sales and engineering teams have come together to decide on the re-design of the customer facing dashboard.
Due to severe time constraints and over lapping priorities, we have adapted the standard 5 full day design sprint plan into just 5 hours.
Through the course of the week, team members brainstorm on their challenges, ideas and approach to this project. We then focus on 1 solution to hash out and build for our clients to test in the following month.
Monday: I listened more than I talked
Since we only had 1 hour on Monday, the team members quickly got to work on talking about their perspective on the dashboard itself.
My responsibilities were to note down those inputs and organize them in a coherent way. As I start writing down points on the board, people gravitates their speech towards the whiteboard itself instead of talking to each other back and forth.
For example, when I wrote down “Success Metrics” down on the board, one team member would take notice and say “So in terms of success metrics, have we decided on one?” This allows me to steer the conversation into a more organized discussion, that hopefully will produce something in the end.
I expected that I would talk quite a lot during the first day, but it turned out for the most part, I find myself actively listening and writing down ideas. But I was still able to conduct the general direction of the meeting, by directing people to the whiteboard as needed, and summarizing other’s viewpoints.
Tuesday: Everybody got sketching
Next day we re-convene for another hour of discussion. I went over the previous day’s results, once everyone is on the same direction, I then proceed to go over today’s agenda.
People begin to relax once I introduced today’s session as “just sketching, drawing stuff, fairly light”.
Before we get to the sketching part, I went over some existing dashboard designs by other companies, this is to set a foundation for what is possible in the current market today. Ideally we would like to go as wild as possible, but given the 1 hour window, we would want to start with a good foundation first.
Now we get to the fun part, each team member was asked to sketch out their idea on how the dashboard will look like.
The sales team was hesitant at first when presented the pen and paper, but they quickly eased into the process as soon as they started sketching.
The engineering team took a bit longer to get used to the drawing part, but they were able to express their ideas by jotting down words on the paper.
Wednesday: I used the dot voting method and it worked wonderfully
Wednesday came, our little team of 5 was reduced to 4 due to a member fell sick to illness, but the process continued. We had to decide on a set of components for first iteration and general layout of the dashboard. To prevent the voting process from turning into an endless shouting match, I decided to employ a technique I learned in school.
I gave each team member a black marker, and asked them to imagine they each had 4 dots on their hands. I then asked them to use these dots to vote on the components that they think is most important in the dashboard.
Thursday: This is where we deviated from the plan
Many readers would assume that this is where we got together than hack out a working prototype for our users to test on, this was only partially true.
Our primary users were surgeons and hospital administrators, who would take up to 2 weeks in advance to schedule a call with them, we decided that the designs would have to roll out at the same time as the user testing was done, and that the feedback would need to be incorporated into the live product instead of at the prototype stage.
At that point, the engineering team had more urgent issues to attend to. Given that the dashboard design was a completely new approach to a 6 year old system, we have decided that it was better to have some visuals on the re-design itself before committing everything to code directly.
It was mostly me and the product manager working together on coming up with some initial wire-frames, it would be a visual representation of the concept, not a working prototype.
Friday: I presented the process in front of the entire company
I also took a bit of liberty when it comes to usability best practices, having realized that aesthetics was also contributes to the overall user experience, I have decided to add icons to indicate the content of each tab. This way there was a visual distinction between each of the 4 main tabs on the top.
As for the rainbow colored bar chart, it would not actually be rolled out in the live version, but it was a nice touch for the purpose of demonstrating a novel concept, and for gaining buy-ins from the sales team, who had a deep appreciation for visually appealing images.
