Using Design Sprints to kickstart corporate innovation

Introduction

Using a Google Design Sprint to explore product innovation

A Design Sprint is a process that aims to facilitate and orchestrate the exploration, ideation and decision making needed for product innovation. It requires designers, system architects and stakeholders to be available for two or three days, depending on role. The team follows key activities which all work towards one objective. Understand the problem, pick a direction, come up with solutions and test those with real users. It’s a great way to get feedback in a very short space of time.

By day two the team had storyboarded ten or more ideas

Each part of the product is discussed and the team votes

Specific ideas can bubble up to the surface with dot voting

Ideas and solutions are diverse, just like the team that participates

How we used the process

Woring together

Innovation projects are filled with optimism. That’s the point.

Trudon wanted to explore product concepts to promote trusted local services. We worked with their innovation team, Connecto Labs, to produce the first prototype and test it with users using a Design Sprint. We continued all the way from name generation, logo design and interface design to produce the minimum viable product. Now we’re actively involved in feature selection, optimization of processes and implemented the rebranding of the MVP to become the Yellow Pages App.

Design sprint outcomes

We started on Monday. By Friday we had feedback from home owners.

While the Design Sprint only takes 5 days, preparation is crucial. We started the sprint with research, data and discussions with business owners about their goals and objectives. During the first 3 days of the sprint we had many compelling and promising ideas – using the process, we refined those into a single storyboard that could be built and prototyped in one day.

The beauty of fast tracking feedback is that it creates momentum, something which many organizations struggle to do. Established businesses are being disrupted by small teams with skills, ideas and the ability to deliver or change direction quickly. A design sprint can kickstart the innovation process inside your organization.

The beauty of fast tracking feedback is that it creates momentum, something which many organizations struggle to do.

Innovation needed a new name

The prototype resonated with users – which opened up the pathway for the next step

Our studio moved the product from the prototyping phase to Version 1.0 by providing our name generation and logo design process – Yapp was created. The word Yapp was a play on the chat paradigm, and by using a new pilot name it allowed the team the freedom to explore and innovate without the legacy of any existing brand name or product.

Rebranding for scale

In less than a year Yapp was rebranded to spearhead the Yellow Pages brand in SA

After about 9 months of feature exploration and product validation, Yapp was rebranded to The Yellow Pages App. The product is now in active development and on the journey to critical mass under the new brand. AUX Studio continues to use rapid-prototyping and UX design to explore and test product features before including them in the live product.