Visuospatial Financial Planning

Design Sprint Details

 
 
 

The design sprint consisted of numerous human-centered design exercises that I, in partnership with another designer, established the curriculum of. These exercises followed the double diamond framework for design which consists of four phases:

  1. Discover the context influencing our problem space

  2. Define our specific design challenges

  3. Develop and explore solutions

  4. Deliver a solution for testing and iteration.

Discover Phase (1/4)

The discovery phase was where every sprint team member reviewed our prior research findings to foster a shared, user-centric understanding going into ideation.

Following the adage ‘to see is to believe’, we shared these findings using a highlight reel of the ethnographic interviews that were part of our research. Along with watching this highlight reel, I guided everyone in an exercise called ROSE/THORN/BUD to outline the good (roses), the bad (thorns), and opportunities (buds) we all observed in the interviews (as related to holistic financial planning). This combination of highlight reel and rose/thorn/bud connected everyone directly with the research process and engender trust in the research results we shared.

 

Define Phase (2/4)

With everyone on the same page regarding research findings, the define phase established what design challenges we sought to address.

For the sprint that created our visuospatial financial planning design, the problem space was already focused on a digital means for updating and managing holistic financial plans. To further explore the numerous challenges in address this problem space, I outlined two creative thinking exercises for the team to complete:

Statement Starters where everyone outlined issues and opportunities in a short phrases that began with: "How might we...".

Abstraction Laddering where everyone took the statement starter phrases they wrote and rewrote them as answers to the questions 'why' and 'how'.

Statement starters facilitated ideation that is solution-oriented, open-minded, and collaborative. Abstraction Laddering encouraged broad, divergent-thinking when answering ‘why’ and ushered concrete solutions when answering ‘how’. These two exercises helped us overcoming our cognitive biases and direct ideation constructively. Ultimately, these exercises curated a list of design objectives for us to pursue in our ideation.

 

Develop Phase (3/4)

Primed with insightful design objectives, the develop phase spurned creative thinking and helped us converge ideation towards a solution that we could test with users. To achieve this, I produced a design-thinking curriculum that fostered broad ideation, encourage unique perspective, and ultimately refine our focus onto a unified design direction. The curriculum was composed of a mixture of individual and collaborative exercises that included:

Creative Matrix as our starting exercise produced extensive creative fodder for our ideation. This exercise is is a superb method for encouraging lateral thinking and producing radically divergent ideas. For this exercise, the team brainstormed ideas that fit the cross sections of a 5x5 grid. Columns consisted of our' How Might We' statements and rows consisisted of solution enabling concpets (e.g. notifications) and alternerative word prompts (e.g. Superhero Powers).

Affinity Clustering was used to discover meaningful areas of focus for our teams continued ideation. Collaboratively, everyone aranged the ideas across all of our creative matrices into logical groupings (e.g. conversational UI or recommendations)

Crazy 8's as an exercise that blends storyboading and schematic diagraming, was were the team began to flesh out solutions that arose from our creative matrix. Everyone folded a white sheet of paper into 8 boxes and sketched solution from the creative matrix and/or an affinity cluster as a workflow of user interactions. To further encourage user-centric thinking, I asked each sprint particpant to use the first box to show the context that triggers the user to interact with a solution and the last box to display the context a user returns to after using the solution.

Visualize the Vote (round 1) served to help the team converge our broad ideation towards a single solution by utalizing the groups collective itelligence. In the exercise exeryone silenetly reviewed all crazy 8 sketches and voted (with 5 stickers they were provided) on the solutions (or parts of solutions) they saw as most impactful. Afterwards, everyone explained their votes. However, if your design was being discussed you had to speak last. In this, we often discovered completely unique ideas stemming from an interpretation of crazy 8 sketches in contrast to their original intent. Many of these interpretations were extreamly valuable.

Concept Posters helped the team create clear, succinct vision of potential solutions and understand why it matters and how it works. Each collaborative group (groups of 3) took a solution that received votes during visualize the vote and drafted a concept poster to include the following details: What the solution is called | Who it is for | What problem/challenge it solves | How it is unique | How it works | Why it might fail | What about it needs testing | How can success be measured | What is the process for making the solution

Detailed Sketching was we finally got into the nitty gritty of our ideas now armed with a clear picture from concept posters. In this exercise, everyone individually sketched the solution they felt best addressed our 'How Might We' statements. These solutions could incorportate numerous aspects drawn from any portion of our previous exercises.

Visualize the Vote (round 2) was our final ideation exercise and was conducteed the same as the previous 'visualize the vote'; however, this time the team voted on detailed sketches and, following the process, our project's primary stakeholder (a fellow participant in the sprint) choose which solutions we would pursue.

 

Deliver Phase (4/4)

With a clear design direction set, our sprint team collaborated on the details behind the design and built a mid-fidelity digital prototype in the deliver phase. This process involved extensive white-boarding in a vigorously iterative cycle to create detailed schematic diagrams of the design.

As a UX designer in this process I endeavored to translate ideas from our non-design partners into visual sketches and guide them in navigating the nuanced design decisions that were crucial for delivering an intuitive experience. Additionally, I supported the needs of the designer we had staffed to created the digital prototypes from these concepts and sketches.

Additionally, because I was responsible for facilitating a usability study of the prototype created during this sprint, I documented our design questions and concerns during this phase. With these questions and concerns I developed a script for the usability study and consulted on the functionality the prototype needed to reflect.