Winners of Bono’s and CERN’s OpenSeventeen challenge, Promise2030 devised a way to crowdsource data to ensure that the 17 UN Global Goals are being met.
With a white-paper, a lot of high-level thinking and partnership potential, they reached out to Outlandish to help move their project forward.
The Outlandish design sprint
This was a great opportunity to run a ‘design sprint’.
If you’re not familiar with design sprints, they essentially involve a team together in a room for a week, thrashing out the key problem, identifying a target user journey and establishing a series of core questions that need to be tested.
In a traditional design sprint you establish these then collectively design and build a prototype that, on the final day, is put under the noses of real end-users for focused user-testing.
Effective sprints
Anyone can run a sprint, following the process laid out in a very useful and readable book written by ex-members of Google Ventures, where it originates from.
What’s key to making them effective, however, is organisation, facilitation, ensuring decisions get made, and that the design team are able to flesh out an as-real-as-possible prototype before the user testing day.
They’re high pressure and fast turnaround, aimed at validating ideas and learning as much as possible so you can then go on to develop a useful product that people will actually value using.
The Outlandish approach
But we do them differently.
At Outlandish we have a few ways of doing design sprints. One of them involves iterating twice within the week, and these sprints are great for developing an existing product where a lot of user research is already available.
Another way is running asynchronously, pausing the sprint after key decisions have been made about the target problem, user and user journey. The Outlandish design team then works uninterrupted to produce the prototype. We then reconvene to review and amend the prototype prior to taking it into user-testing.
Promise2030’s sprint structure
In Promise2030’s case, however, the product was at concept stage, so we started with a Theory of Change to define core project outcomes. Then we moved into a more traditional design sprint process with some customisation to include sociocratic decision making (a process which we’re passionate about).
On this project the Outlandish sprint team consisted (alongside the client) of:
- 2 designers
- a tech business analyst
- an external campaigning expert from fellow CoTech member The Small Axe.
- our Outlandish facilitator.
We used Adobe XD to create an interactive walk-through, demonstrating:
- an organisation-facing website, allowing charities’ Campaign Managers to create challenges for their supporters
- a supporter mobile app, for the capture and submission of evidence of businesses’ sustainable behaviour
Final user-testing took place at Outlandish’s office with selected testers from community organisations, charities and local businesses.
The end result
In Promise2030’s case – as with all Design Sprints – the ultimate output, was not only a takeaway prototype/walk-through. It was also a mass of actionable learnings and user-insights that Promise2030 can now use to better onboard organisations, to support & guide mobile users in their challenges, and to pitch their challenges at a correct level of difficulty and motivation that will help their product gain traction.
