Umbel Design Sprint

WHAT IS A DESIGN SPRINT?

Popularized by Google Ventures, it’s a 5 day process that uses design thinking to reduce risk of failure when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market. Each day consists of a specific set of goals to accomplish with the final day used for testing a prototype with your users.

WHY WE DID IT AND WHAT WE DID

We needed a way to show the value of the Umbel product to our users more easily and potentially all in one place. We wanted to make sure to show how many different parts of Umbel can show ROI, both from a financial standpoint of how much money we have helped them make as well as how the data they collect from their fans is valuable as well because it helps them know who their fans are and what they like. We thought we might want to test some sort of dashboard, but were not sure exactly would be the most impactful information to display or how to display it.

We had to come up with a mission statement to guide us as we went through the process. It was “We help clients understand their data to encourage action that drives measurable value over time.”

We ended up testing a rough dashboard view focusing on our Sports/Entertainment clients to see which parts of it would appeal the most to users in those industries. We made all the areas the same size to try to minimize any influence visual prominence might have and shifted the squares around each time so they weren’t always in the same place aid in placement not being the key driver for things they liked or didn’t like.

RESULTS FROM TESTING

We tested with 7 users having them walk and talk through the static dashboard based around what they thought they were seeing, what appealed the most to them, what didn’t appeal to them, etc. The middle 3 widgets and the “Opportunities” widget appealed the most to our users by far.

NEXT STEP

I began to ideate more on the concepts for a dashboard with only those elements most liked by users from Design Sprint testing sessions. After a few days of ideating, it was clear we needed to create aggregate data for two of those sections on their pages in the app before we could successfully summarize that data on a dashboard view. Not to mention, without first summarizing and testing data on those two pages, we would have no way to have a baseline for recommending actions like we provided in the “Opportunities” widget of the mock dashboard tests. It was fantastic to see the Design Sprint yield a direction towards practical and impactful features within such a short amount of time.

MY ROLE

UX reference for how I’ve seen them use the product
Participant
User Research organizer & conductor
Took results and ran with them to come up with practical MVP

KEY TAKEAWAYS

By attempting to create a dashboard view for our users and testing it quickly, it showed us we needed to improve other parts of the application first in order to synthesize that data for such a view.
Through testing, we also realized that many of our clients weren’t quite ready for a dashboard based on their understanding of their data that exists in Umbel and how to leverage it to generate Return on Investment.
This did however, led me on a path to create MVP versions of the Campaigns and Engagements overview sections as well as what could be step 2 and 3 of feature iteration of each of those pages if users found the metrics interesting.
It was great to show others in the company (that aren’t on the product team) all the steps it often takes to create a product from idea to testing and beyond.
But above all else, it introduced me to my new favorite design program Figma. It’s simply a wonderful, intuitive, easy to pick up design app that all the members of our team were able to use and work on the same design at once to quickly create our prototype for testing with users.

SCREENS