WOW! Who thought of Design Sprints!

When I read about the concept of design sprints for the first time, I was deeply intrigued. For years in my life, I have often had many crazy and wonderful business ideas. Every time I had an idea I would wonder if the idea had any potential. Talking to friends and family only made me aware of the challenges the idea could pose and hence letting the idea go. Reading about the concept of Design Sprints actually made me think that someone there [maybe in Google Ventures] heard me and came up with this concept. Truth is that all businesses and leaders come across opportunities and ideas that they wonder would be good investments or not and GV coming up with this idea of design sprints for them, in my opinion, is an amazing service done!

Below is my experience with one such design sprints for an opportunity in the home decor space. As usual I was all excited to apply the technique and experience the outcome. So I jumped right in..

Start at the end.

At the END the solution would help NEW homeowners [mostly renters] decorate their homes in their own personalized way and within a specified budget.

Questions to be answered.

I started with a simple hypothesis. The hypothesis was that most NEW homeowners are interested in decorating their homes in their own style and within their specific budget.

The questions were - then why don’t the end up doing it? What challenges do they face? Do they abandon half way or execute the task inadequately?

Discussions with the experts [new home owners included] highlighted that homeowners often know what they want but get over-whelmed and confused by the number of options available in the market and online. So they end up abandoning the idea of decorating their homes or buying stuff that does not do justice to what they actually wanted.

Having moved a fair amount within and outside the country it was easy for me to empathise with these interviewees and I was eager to find a solution to this problem that would help ease down the exhausting task of decorating a NEW home. But solutions needed to wait for Day 2.

Challenges to implementation.

• Adjusting suggestions to individual preferences could become complex and challenging

• Picturing an item with respect to the size of the other furniture in the home could become challenging without any assistive visuals of the actual space

Understanding the problem - User Insights.

Based on user interviews the following insights came out loud and clear.

• The users go online to look for inspirations and ideas! Seeing things together helps them visualise the idea.

• The users know what they want but don’t know how to get it

  • Theme: They know their theme. Example they want to make their dark room look bright and lively. But how do they do that?

    • Sometimes they pick what they think will work but things end up mis-matched.

    • Sometimes the themes are too ambitious to be executed in their spaces.

  • Budget: They know how much they can spend. But what exactly should they spend it on?

    • Sometimes they pick too many small items or too few big items and are left with no more money to spend

• Some users want to be in control of what they are buying – they want to buy what they like from a group of suggestions and don’t want “buy all or none” options

• Some users don’t want to spend a lot of time looking for items

Lightning Demos.

After a short research stint, 3 web-sites were picked up as design inspirations.

“Additionally, the swipe up gesture to eliminate feature [typically seen in iPhone and other phones] was picked as an inspiration to remove an item from the kit.”