16. Our hypothesis: end of day 1
“Could we get indirectly affected users...
...to take a campaign action
By showing:
- a high level overview
- -the banking culture that preceded it
- Choice’s position and stories of individuals impacted?”
28. - Whole team involved
- What will you learn?
Day 5: Test it with users
29. I sign them
automatically
without knowing
what they’re
about
I didn’t even
realise banking
was in the news
I did not know
banking could
cause that!
30. What we learnt
- Stories
- Keep it high level
- Faceless concept
What needed work?
- Clarity on the ask
- Financial jargon
31. Our hypothesis: validated but...
“Could we get indirectly affected users...
...to take a campaign action
By showing:
- Background/Timeline
- -the culture that preceded it
- Choice’s position and stories of individuals impacted?”
41. Thoughts from the team
“Writing content in the same room working
on the same problem was daunting at first.
The structure meant at the end of the week
we had a prototype to test with real people,
and in contrast with other content creation
processes I've been involved in, we kept
testing the content until we got it right.”
Siobahn - content specialist
42. “The best weeks are the ones you walk away from feeling
deeply satisfied that you've been on a journey with a great
crew and come up with a cracking idea that customers
connect with. Our design sprint was that kinda week. I'm
already planning our next one. I can't wait! “
Chris - Product Manager
Thoughts from the team
Hi I’m Adam UX Lead at CHOICE. I’ve been at CHOICE about for 3 years.
I’m really passionate about how the ux of words and visuals come together to form ‘content’ and how we can help organisations shape content to help users with their tasks and needs.
So what I’m going to talk about today?
I’m going to talk through the opportunity we had to work on a microsite for a very important issue, the banking royal commission.
I’ll give you a run through of some of the tools we used, and we’ll deep dive into what the ‘design sprint’ looked like
I’ve had some time to reflect on this and hopefully you’ll get some take aways if you decide to follow the process on a project in the future
Ok let’s go..!
So who is CHOICE?
Well 60 years ago it was started by a single mother called Ruby Hutchison who wanted to create fair, just and safe markets for Australian Consumers.
This started CHOICE’s content journey with a magazine your parents probably had a subscription to at one point.
The magazine is still produced and our mission hasn’t changed - but I’m proud to be part of the new generation helping consumers with that content online.
There’s 3 main areas to CHOICE.
Our Lab Testing Team - They run the tests on all the products we cover.
Some of them wear white coats and we have a mysterious room in our building called the calibration room.
Journalists & Content producers.
And the third arm is our Campaigning Team - These people campaign for change.
Their goal is to put pressure on the government and businesses to make things fairer for Australian consumers.
They mainly use the media and grass-roots supporters to apply pressure on decision-makers.
Which brings me to my story - In August last year, A cross functional team that normally work on the product reviews section were seconded for 3 months to
Work on a digital campaign.
- We formed a team and were guided by our spririt animal - the panda.
The campaign we chose to help them with was their involvement with the Banking Royal Commission.
It’s in the news right now but (as we found out during user testing) it’s easy to gloss over what it’s about
It aims are to investigate poor conduct in the industry and put forward solutions to help make the system work better for all Australians.
CHOICE has been involved since day one when the commission was first called.
We submitted 3,000 of people’s bad experience with financial services to the commission
We were also asked to put forward our suggestions and our team have just got down to canberra to talk through the report outcomes.
Originally incubated at Google by Jake Knapp.
Over the course of years and hundreds of sprints, Jake eventually honed the process to the point that multidisciplinary teams could spend 5 days understanding, ideating, prototyping, and testing big business problems, before launching into full-blown product development.
There’s 2 main rules from the book -
Follow the process, some of the steps loop back on one another, so try to resist skipping stages,
Some of the times decisions will be forced and it’s important to push for a decision.
2) No burritos - there’s some quick rapid fire thinking and after lunch sloth like carb load isn’t encouraged for quick thinking!
Here’s a high level of the 5 day design sprint played out, with the goal being on day 5 you’ve got rough but real content to test with users!
It’s an energetic full on 5 days and you can see below I’ve mapped our snack timeline, starting healthy with hummus and carrots and ending with the favourites box.
One the first day you’ll be doing some typical ux activities
Understanding who your users are
Mapping out their journeys
Interview the “experts”
Finish the day with a hypothesis and a goal
Two of the journeys we looked at was, a user who had been directly affected by banking misconduct and someone who has been hearing about banking misconduct in the news.
We felt people who had been directly affected by banking misconduct were not lined up to our goals, with the ‘indirectly affected’ user someone that we would target to join our campaign.
Our internal experts were our campaign team and our financial journalists
This can create a speedy version of desk research as hearing their work is inspiring and helps you frame the challenge
Our hypothesis that would be tested with real users on day 5 had been set!
Day 2 was all about getting creative with those ideas:
What’s our external inspiration
How can we steal the best bits and what can we iterate on together
Everyone gets involved with regardless of drawing skills - not just the creatives
Lightning demos from koala rescues to boxing stories
The general ‘best bits’ from those ideas get added into a board for remixing
After deciding your best solution, you’ll storyboard it up ready to present it to the group the next day
The idea above in a sketch is a mug shot line up - called the ‘usual suspects’ by our front end dev Matt.
The ideas of the group varied in ‘wildness’ which is cool as the next day you’ll get to take the bits you like from each one!
Day 2 was all about getting creative with those ideas:
What’s our external inspiration
How can we steal the best bits and what can we iterate on together
The dot voting allows everyone in the group to have a voice and participate, actually we found little bits from everyones sketches we liked.
It wasn’t one dominant idea or sketch that got all the votes.
Making a storyboard from all those sketches is taxing and will challenge the team - but a path emerges and the chaos turns into clarity.
Go content first, don’t use lorem ipsum - this is your chance to really gauge how users will react to your real content.
Don’t worry too much about fidelity of the design but stretch your team to hack it together!
We took a content first approach, for the words side, we used google docs and as ux I gave a rough break down of the panels in ‘proto copy’
While our content specialist thought about which parts of the stories we had would collected would resonate best
We looked at noun project for icons and placeholders
We used stock photos to convey a tone of seriousness and ‘not looking too much like stock photos’ as this was a key part of stories having impact
Our designer was updating the copy live and showing us where we needed to chop back and at the end of a stressful day we had a clickable mobile prototype
The 1 day clickable prototype
Our prototype had a high level overview of the campaign ask, the change we want to see, a rough timeline of how we got there and some stories. We repeat the call to action on the last panel.
We kept it on one page but at a very high level as we wanted to build for scanning and keep the task of joining the campaign the central part.
This was the day we were all waiting for - Test our prototype with real users!
Would it meet the hypothesis?
The process has freed everyone up so we had the whole team observing, facilitating and writing notes together -
Would they like it?
Whole team was involved in user testing - 3 campaign supporters from our database and 3 people who were unaware of CHOICE.
Our campaign supporters love CHOICE and a warm audience.
We got to talk about how they’d like us to communicate with them on the topic once they’d joined
What would they share with their friends?
The real insights came from people disconnected from the news cycle, how are we going at explaining at a high level what is going on to them?
We felt our short and simple format and stories had some potential
Our content was on the right track but we needed to get more clarity on the ask and get financial jargon paired back to the core questions. We could talk in more detail if a user engaged with a particular section.
We took the framework we’d set up and kept an iterative rapid testing loop.
Some of this happened at our local coffee shop, testing quick mobile screens until we were confident we’d paired the jargon back and got our messaging clear.
Content development worked parallel to development effort and was a full team exercise keeping the spirit of the 5 day design sprint
As the report has now been delivered and actions are being generated, we know if a direct action such as calling on MPs or tailoring for a specific action, we have a strong website and background context set up ready for the team to deploy
Some of the user tested outputs from our team played key roles in emails and facebook posts.
One of the sketches from our earlier days ended up being the highest performing post on facebook, which originally came from our front end dev!
We worked as an agency model with the campaigns team as our client. I felt rather than checking in and explaining decisions and direction as we went, we would have benefited from having a member of their team in the mix generating and refining our ideas.
Secure their time - at a minimum on the ideation days ( day 2 & 3) to get live feedback with their subject matter expertise.
It’s not just 5 days - Take the time to identify if the design sprint methodology is right for your team.
Our team used an opportunity canvas to get a sense of which problem we might look at solving.
We felt the 5 day process was right for our timeline and how open to ideas we were.
You need to brief the team and secure people’s time, as well as finding your users for day 5.
Post the design sprint you’ll have learnings and you’ll need to think about what happens next.
When thinking about if you should use the method, the 5 day design sprint WILL open up new ideas. Some of those ideas might prove not to be the right approach, you might learn quickly what NOT to do.
Are you prepared to go down that path? Is your scope already defined, just requiring execution? It’s worth thinking about the context of your problem before thinking this will be a silver bullet.
If you’re a uxer you’ll know that the best insights are when the whole team is in on user testingWe crafted the usability sessions as a team
I guided other members of the team through their first contact in a room with a user
Got busy with coaching the usability testing ‘doing’
I neglected the ‘how i write notes and how i synthesis’ section
The take out here is:
Give a breakdown of your process for example: if you’re good at sketching, help others that might be less confident with some warm up exercises.
Your team is going to be working in close quarters!
Find your spiritual panda!
Visualise your goals
Go to lunch as a team
Bring people in with some background before the design sprint
It could be a stressful time for people not used to working this way, build trust early
Build working relationships post the process and you’ll reap the benefits