Design Sprints: FinGrow
Process
In order to help teenagers (13 - 19) better understand financial literacy & the importance of saving, three Interactive Media and Communications Master’s students at Quinnipiac University, Taylor DiLisi, Sean Formantes, and Drew Sokolowski, were tasked with the assignment of running a sprint to create a prototype that would help with this. The Design Sprint is a a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers (Google Ventures). By performing a modified sprint over five weeks, the team was able to create the concept of FinGrow, a multiplayer virtual world where users can complete games and watch videos with the incentive of GrowthCash, FinGrow’s currency.
Phase 1
In the first week of the sprint, our team discussed the elements that we would want in a minimum viable product (MVP). After this conversation, we conducted a lightning demo activity, in which each member independently researched concepts for a solution. The purpose of this activity was to find existing products that could inspire new ideas for our own solution. The individual component lasted for about 15 minutes, after which we reconvened to share our findings. Each member shared three different concepts found during their research, and all of these were listed into our Miro board.
Following this, we each individually completed a 4-Step Sketching activity. The steps within this activity consist of (1) notes, (2) ideas, (3) crazy 8’s, and (4) the solution sketch. This exercise provided an opportunity for out-of-the-box solutions to originate. After taking notes based on the lightning demos and sketching ideas based on the notes, each member proceeded to create eight different sketches for potential ideas at the rate of a minute each. The final step of the process was for each member to create a sketch that would serve as their proposal for a potential solution in phase 2.
Phase 2
Phase 3
Building upon the work set in Phase 2, the focus on this phase was building the prototype of our app. We met twice throughout the week in order to create a high-fidelity prototype in Figma. Our first meeting was on Tuesday. To get started, we created a board in Miro to organize everything that needed to be created by menu item. We then split up the work amongst ourselves; each member was made responsible for building certain sections of the app. For about 45 minutes, we all stayed on the Zoom and began to design our sections. After the time had passed, we ended the meeting on the agreement that we would each continue to make progress on our sections before the next day’s meeting.
On Wednesday, we all logged onto the meeting and worked on our sections. At the end of that hour, we conducted a trial run, with Taylor as our user. Through this activity, we were able to note any errors or design flaws that would need to be corrected prior to the user tests in Phase 4.
Phase 5
On Monday, Taylor and Sean worked to divide sections of the report to be written. We decided to have all of the copy for the report completed by Wednesday, so that it can be fully designed on Thursday. Sean was chosen to design the report. After the report had been compiled and designed, the finish product was shared with all group members.
Pre-Sprint
Before we proceeded with the sprint, our team met to conduct introductions, discuss agreements, and discuss all the information pertaining to our objectives for the sprint. We then came up with a list of agreements we would all stick to throughout the sprint, so that everyone would know the expectations. We then practiced active listening by allowing each member an opportunity to discuss their positive and negative experiences with working in a group. Their responses were documented in Miro. The meeting ended with a review of the project brief, and time for additional questions and discussion. This meeting allowed for our team to get organized and ready for the sprint.
Our team began our meeting by uploading our solution sketches into Miro and conducting the Art Museum exercise, where we all simply looked at the sketches with no discussion to prevent groupthink. We then began a series of voting activities to determine our solution sketch without bias.
The first was a heat map activity, in which all members took an unlimited amount of voting dots and placed them on concepts for about three minutes. After this first round of voting, we completed a speed critique, in which concepts were discussed and questions were asked. We then proceeded to a second round of voting, where each member was given one dot to make their decision known. Drew was appointed as the decider, and was given two dots – one for a solution, the other for a concept.
For about ten minutes after the supervote, we each created a user flow consisting of six steps. A vote was then conducted with dots; Drew was given two dots again as our decider. The results of the user flow served as a basis for our 8-step storyboard, which we created collectively on Miro.
Phase 4
Similar to the last phase, this week included more than one meeting. The team initially met on Wednesday to discuss how we would go about recruiting participants for our user tests. We would conduct these tests in order to get actual feedback on our prototype from real-world users.
During this meeting, it was also determined that it would be best if each member conducted one user test each, as our schedules did not allow much flexibility for all three of us to meet together with the interviewees. Before our user tests interviews were conducted, Taylor created a Google Form and a series of questions that could be used during the interviews.
All three of us on the team conducted an interview. On Saturday, we met once again to discuss the results of our user tests. User feedback was placed into a Miro board and organized into “positive” and “negative” categories. Sean’s user test was scheduled to occur after this meeting, as his interviewee was not available until then. We discussed the information that was already made available by the two interviews, and results from Sean’s user test were added to our Miro board after it was conducted.
