[Music] have you ever designed and developed products for users who are very different from you well today we are going to go over some tips and strategies to deeply understand your user and to create effective products for them at speed using immersive design sprints I am Sameer Falcao I'm a design lead at Google Station and Google Station is a product that's building high quality public Wi-Fi for users and next billion users markets and I'm Burgin I'm a designer on the chrome team focusing on our next billion users all right let's jump right in and talk about there we go what is a design sprint so we'll do a brief recap of design sprints so we define a design sprint as a framework for answering critical business questions through design prototyping and testing our ideas with users to dinner eight actionable feedback and insights the design sprints were created at Google and they have evolved over time they're a mix of methods from design thinking business strategy psychology and user research that were all selected and ordered specifically to support divergent and convergent thinking and to drive towards a targeted outcome so what's different about a design sprint is that we set clear goals and deliverables up front we time box all of the activities so that we not only speed up the learning and development process but we also drive the right behaviors from our users and then finally we enable a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to participate in the design and development process now design is not an individual sport and design Sprint's are a highly collaborative process we want to be able to include multiple perspectives and points of views and to that end we leverage Sprint's to include all participants voices the design spring is a highly flexible framework and you'll want to flex it and adapt it to your particular challenge or scenario one of the advantages of the sprint is you can reduce the risks of downstream mistakes by getting to insights that lead to a better understanding of your user and your problem space quicker so today we're going to talk about a way that we have flex the design sprint to really get a better understanding of users that are very different from ourselves through immersion intercepts and co-creation we're bringing actual users instead of representatives of those users in to the center of the design and development process now those a phenomenon known as the CRO creation effect and it shows that when organizations and consumers create something together both parties are more invested in the outcome so what does this look like in practice we're going to start by bringing a team together of very different disciplines including UX inch p.m. to create a powerful team we're looking for a good representation of roles and skills and this is going to allow us to dramatically reduce the amount of time that we spend communicating and increase the number of viable ideas that we generate so once we have our team together we're going to walk through the five Sprint phases understand sketch decide prototype and validate now we have a mix of structured individual work and planned group discussions that support a clear diverge and converge process that will guide the team to get on the same page around the artifact that it's going to produce to test with users now the ideal design Sprint is going to provide time for team members to reflect on the challenge and also opportunities to validate or disrupt those ideas so the goal for the first phase the understand phase is to gather all of the relevant data and information at hand we really want to create a shared brain and a line around a new world together and a new understanding of the problem space then we're gonna move on to the sketch phase and this is when we're gonna generate tons and tons of ideas tons of potential solutions and we're going to use a couple of exercise the exercises that are designed to get the ideas out of your participants head onto paper and to really push them to go beyond their first idea they get better and more innovative ideas now once we have all of these ideas we're in the middle of a sprint we have tons and tons of solutions it's time to start narrowing down and making hard choices so the decide phase is all about those hard decisions and selecting what you're going to prototype with users once you've narrowed down you want to create a prototype that you can test your hypothesis and validate or invalidate your assumptions because you only have a really short amount of time you have you have a couple hours maybe maybe you have a day to build that prototype you it should only be as high fidelity as needed to answer your questions and nothing more finally we're going to validate the goal of the test phase is to confirm that the product that you have prototyped is good and also that you prototyped the right thing so today we're going to discuss two case studies to show you how we've used this framework to give users the tool to engage in the ideation and creation process and now that you understand the structure of a sprint when's the right time to sprint really you can sprint at any point in the lifecycle of your product you might be at the very beginning and want to use a sprint for visioning or creating a roadmap you may have a mature product and you're thinking about adding a specific feature whatever point in the lifecycle of your product that you run a sprint it's important to remember that involving users early and often can really help validate the problem space and create better ideas and there are a couple of outcomes from us friend so I like to say that there's never a failed sprint because you always learn something but we have defined three potential outcomes and the first is an efficient failure so it can be a little disparaging that something didn't work but it's really useful to know and you've saved all of that time money and resources that you might have spent building out the product and then learning that it didn't work so you've learned quickly now most friends fit in this middle bucket what we called flawed success some things worked some things didn't but you have a path forward you know what you need to do next and sometimes you have an epic win maybe you have a couple things you want to tweak but you're ready to move to production you'll need to set your expectations with stakeholders at the beginning of the sprint so that they everyone is aware of this and they know what the outcomes might be now let's talk a little bit about immersion great so really comprehensive recap of a very complex topic there and the reason that we rushed through that is because we're assuming that if you're here then you've heard of a design sprint before you have most likely taken part in a design sprint before and maybe some of you have even run your own design sprints so we're gonna jump right into immersion now before we talk about immersive Sprint's let's try to understand what immersion actually means so to think about immersion I went to Google and I looked up the dictionary and here's a definition of the term immersion immersion is instruction based on extensive exposure to surroundings or conditions that are native or pertinent to the object of study now this is a lot to take in so I kept googling here's another definition much simpler immersion is a deep mental involvement here's a third one immersion is a state of being deeply engaged or involved absorption alright so there are some common themes emerging from all of these definitions let's bring this back to UX how can emerge guide your interaction with users especially users that you don't know very well I like to think of it in terms of three steps step one immersion is about awareness so first doing the background research and study that it actually takes before you go into a new environment and users then bringing those learnings with you into these new surroundings so that they can provide you the context that you need to process that correctly and then when you're in this new environment just being very keenly aware observing without preconceived notions or bias or judgment so that's awareness step two immersion is about listening so you're going to hear a lot of new sounds process a lot of new sites you're going to talk to a lot of users that you haven't interacted with before and these users are going to tell you about their lives about their problems problems that you haven't faced before so it's really important to listen attentively and this is actually pretty hard to do if you try it yourself right now when you try to listen to someone speaking it's very easy to let your mind wander and think about what you want to say next it's very hard to mindfully listen I hope that's what what you all are doing right now by the way but it's really important to listen attentively so that's step two and then step three is taking awareness and taking listening and bringing it to empathy and this is when you are actually stepping into someone's shoes and experiencing what they experience understanding their their needs their pain points their hopes and dreams and even things that delight them so when you have awareness listening empathy all of these three things together that's when we consider it immersion so how does this relate to design Sprint's and design now when you're in a design sprint you're making a call and you're designing solutions for users based on what you think is going to work well for them now where does this come from it comes from intuition right and does intuition get built it comes from a lifetime of experience it comes from knowledge and study it comes from trial and error like launching a lot of designs and seeing what works and learning from success learning from failure it's a constant loop of learning and tweaking but when you're designing for users that you've never interacted with before you don't have this intuition so what happens in the context of a sprint all of this gets amplified in a sprint you're time boxed so you're doing things really fast it's a high-pressure situation it's not just you but probably you and a bunch of sprinters who were all in the same boat as you you don't understand your user really well so we're gonna and I are often placed in situations like this because we both work on products where we're distant from our users we don't understand our users very well that often so what happens we've seen that in Sprint's like this there is analysis paralysis because you're sprinters are not confident about deciding how to move forward with your design you end up making safe choices so your design solutions are not strong sprint outcomes suffer you just don't see that big leap that you want to see at the end of a sprint so we need to help you and your sprinters build intuition how do we do this so we think immersion is a great solution to doing this good design in Sprint's is about making educated and informed decisions about how to solve a problem that your users are facing so with immersion you're helping your sprinters gain the foundation to confidently design solutions so let's bring it all together immersive Sprint's create a realistic environment to guide your sprinters drive great outcomes and then validate sprint outcomes if you don't understand your users really well and you want to design solutions for them in a fast-paced sprint environment then immersion is a great technique to set you up for success so how do we do this we're going to go over a few techniques today first we're going to talk about doing pre and post sprint research so actually incorporating research as part of your sprint then creating immersion during the design sprint itself third participatory design sprints so this is when your core designing with your users you actually asked your users to come to the sprint with you and take part in it as a sprinter and then last instead of saving validation for the last stage in corporate validation at every stage of the sprint make sure that you check in with your users at the end of each day so that you know you're on the right path so to give you an understanding of how all of this works in practice we're going to walk through two case studies of successful sprints that both Bergen and I have run so first I'm going to hand it off to Bergen to talk about a really interesting sprint she ran in Kenya all right I'm excited to tell you guys about a sprint I ran with an app called after Scout now we were kicking off this app to help hurt her survive ongoing drought now pastoralists are nomadic or semi-nomadic people who move their livestock between pastures depending on the season and now with the emergence of climate change rain rainfall patterns have shifted forcing herders to find new routes new pastures and new sources of waters and their traditional methods of finding good grazing lands like word of mouth scouting ancestral knowledge have proven insufficient to maintain healthy herds in this changing landscape an organization called Project concern international a non-profit based in San Diego and a Google or grantee created a program that relayed satellite data to pastoralists that showed current vegetative conditions now this gave the pastoralists critical intelligence about where to move their herds the proof of concept was highly successful we saw 50% reduction in herd mortality and an 80% adoption in the local populations that it was tested with but the delivery system was cumbersome and inefficient the maps were auto emailed to the PCI field staff who would print them out deliver them to district livestock officers who would then pass them on to the locals so this process was slow and difficult to scale so our question was would it be possible for us to cut out those middlemen and simply deliver the maps from the satellite straight to smartphones as we plan to the sprint we recognize the difficulty in properly understanding the cultural societal and usage scenarios encountered by populations so different from ourselves but we knew that the community as experts of their own experience would have the historical context and the knowledge of what was and wasn't important to the community so rather than just consult the community we decided to involve it now as designers and developers we often create products for people Co design is the act of creating with stakeholders and users ensuring that the people most affected by the solutions are part of the development process and this is really based on the idea and the belief that all people are creative creative now the design sprint gives us a framework to put this into practice and through the sprint process we can guide users through the ideation and creation process to really give voice to their ideas as you can imagine we had a lot of different perspectives around this challenge so we had to build the right sprint team and we had a quite a large team with a number of diverse stakeholders we had our graphic in for geographic information system specialist who is our mapping specialist we had local developers in a UX researcher from a hub which is a incubation space in in Nairobi we had two staffers from PCI and Sandy and we had UX designers from Google but most importantly we had to pastoralists from different districts in Tanzania and then we had three PCI field staff from Ethiopia and Tanzania who worked directly with the pastoralists and had been part of this proof-of-concept program so it was important to us that this app transcended Geographic and tribal boundaries now this team required the integration of experts and users really working closely together so empathy between our participants was essential and face to face communication was best so we all gathered in ihubs office in Nairobi now co-creation can be applied at any stage of the design development process through different activities and as we created the schedule we thought deeply about how to include our users at each stage of this process and by incorporating user feedback throughout the throughout this process we can avoid the anchoring effect where we're really gonna have really see that human tendency to rely on that first piece of information to make subsequent judgments so during the understand phase we our users helped us understand the problems faced through lightning talks and documenting and sharing how might ways now you can see some of the topics that we discussed were technical infrastructure offline experience battery life traditional decision-making so it was really important to users that these Maps work offline they were not always connected and traditional decision-making was something I don't think we would have talked about if we had run this sprint in San Diego or here in Mountain View it really is something that we learned the elders make a lot of the decisions around where to move the herds but the younger generation are the one with a smartphone so we had to take that those types of things into consideration as we considered the design so to make the pastoralist experience resonate with all of the sprint team members we broke into groups and created user journey Maps these are really important because people are good at thinking in terms of stories about people and the and the things that they do and what happens to them and stories can be useful and generative designed to invoke empathy and imagination and trigger ideas for a more ideal future we used Crazy Eights to allow the team to generate a ton of different ideas based on everything we learned on the understand phase and to help our users with this activity we really gave some structure to it by giving them prompts to sketch around so we did this in four phases and during the decide phase we really gave our users more power in the decision-making process with extra votes and we reminded our participant or our other participants to evaluate each idea considering what our audience experienced and what they wanted so depending on the level of the fidelity that you're aiming for one of the most difficult phases to incorporate users in can be the prototyping phase paper prototypes might be the most inclusive way and those are totally okay we were aiming for a little bit higher fidelity and so we considered letting our users go during this phase but they actually wanted to stay and their participation actually proved crucial when the designers were designing this middle screen they were struggling to come up with iconography that would really represent some of the diverse ideas that we were trying to get across like this location has no water or scary animals were sighted in this location maybe you shouldn't take your herd there but we were able to rapidly iterate and show our designs to the users and get immediate feedback so that we were able to confirm which icons resonated and which ones didn't so for user testing it was important to solicit feedback from a larger and more diverse group than was just the Sprint team if you'll remember we had sprinters from Ethiopia and Tanzania but we were in Kenya so we were able to go about us our south of Nairobi and test our prototype with a group of Maasai and this proved extremely valuable is we saw the validity of this tool immediately that our and that the approach we chose would transcend Geographic and tribal boundaries now the sprint process allowed us to find common ground to share ideas and develop a common language and work together to fully understand the user needs from the very outset of the project next we're going to talk about a case study that Samir did here at Google great what an impactful sprint so cool all right so I'm gonna switch gears a bit and I'm gonna talk about the product that I work on and that's Google Station now just as a recap Google station is a product that's bringing high quality public Wi-Fi to next billion users or markets worldwide now a little bit of a caveat I can't really talk about the actual product that we were designing in the Sprint but I can talk about the process and that's what I'm gonna do here so while ago someone on our team had this really cool idea they wanted to bring in the features that are present in a different Google product into Google Station he got super excited we talked to this team and that team got super excited and we were all like really to have this happen but we didn't know how so we didn't know what this experience would look like it's a great reason to have a sprint we also had never worked together as a team so there was like no working relationship another great reason to have a sprint to bring teams together so they can establish trust now here's another challenge the Google Station team is based largely in Martin view this other product is based in Asia and at the time the user that we were designing for was in India so three different countries really challenging and going back to the slide that Burgin showed earlier we had an answer from the business side how this product would work and we also knew that from an engineering standpoint we could most likely make it work but what we didn't know is is this something that our users care about we didn't know if this was desirable for our users so this big gap was something we needed to address so we decided that we should run an immersive sprint so the Sprint challenge was design an experience aligned with user needs that would combine functionality of two products in a very seamless way but before we could even talk about seamless and the interaction design and all of that I really wanted us to figure out does this make sense for our users so I flex the standard five phase methodology of the Sprint and added an extra phase which is that orange circle you see here for strategy we wanted to figure out is there a strong user focused product strategy for this product and this was critical we didn't know if this would work for our users and this product strategy needed to come from actual user insights we didn't know our user that well so we added two more phases to the sprint before the sprint we added research after the Sprint we added research different kinds of research though before the Sprint we added foundational research and after the sprint we were going to validate the design solutions we come up with with research to validate it so that was also in the field but it was a different style of research now this extended the duration of the Sprint and we invited all of our sprint participants to actually take part in the research we thought this was really important because that would be an immersive experience for them and it would lay the foundation for them to effectively participate in the sprint and come up with great design solutions so this was also a lot of overhead in terms of planning because that meant travel going out into the field for a large group so to recap understand the user context doing foundational research use those user insights to drive the entire sprint and then when you have design solutions as outcomes take them back into the field to validate them with your users so that was the process that we followed so how did we do this research for both the pre and post print research we use a technique known as intercepts now by intercepts I mean going out into the field finding a user asking them that they can spend a few minutes with you and then doing an interview and you can do an interview and ask them about their habits and their lives and you get a lot of foundational information and about them or you can show them a prototype and yet this could be like a clickable prototype it could be a live product it could be sketches on a piece of paper and you can ask them to use this prototype to do certain tasks and observe how they do it and this would be evaluative so intercepts are really flexible in that sense you can use them for different styles of research and it's also in a user's natural environment so instead of bringing a user to you and asking them to come to a lab you're going out to a user so you're putting them at ease and paper prototypes are totally okay so one of the things I really love about intercepts is that they release scrappie you can put them together in a in a really short time and also they're cross-functional this gives your team your non user experience research and design team your PMS your engineers to take part in research and actually come face-to-face with your users it's amazing and eye-opening for them this is why I love intercepts so that was a research part now let's talk about that strategy piece to figure out if we had a right user focused product strategy we do use the technique known as value prop canvas so based on those user insights we asked users who are already using Google Station we made a list of all that features in that product and whether what the pain points of users were using Google station then so we had all the user paints then we made a list of all the gains that users are seeing by using that product so we knew the user gains and then we went to the sprint we went through a lot of sketching we diverged we voted on ideas we converged we came up to a we came out with a few solutions we did the same with the solutions are any of the features in the solution going to relieve the pains that users are facing are they going to boost the gains that uses a scene if both of these boxes map then you know what you're designing is great for your users if they don't map then you have a problem you don't have a strong value proposition and that's when you have to decide whether this even makes sense to move forward with so this is what we used for exploring product strategy all right so what did I learn by running the sprint first the sequence of methods that you use in a sprint really matters and if I hadn't taken the time to think about the Sprint challenge and add a product strategy piece we wouldn't have been successful so think about the sequence of products do a dry run try to see if one method feeds into the other does the output of one method feed into the input of the other if there is a gap then address it make stakeholders your partners especially when you're running a broad sprint like this you want them to be your partners you want them to agree with you invest the time and money and resources and you want to do daily check-ins with them tell them how you're doing what did you do today what did you achieve as a team get feedback work on it I've never run a sprint that is always gone according to plan so things go wrong people have questions they question to be very premise of your sprint things take too long to run methods don't go as they're as you plan logistical issues so be be nimble be agile be prepared to change things around on the fly one of the great side benefits of a sprint is that you're bringing two teams together who have not worked together and you're going to drive a lot of alignment between them and really strong working relationship between them so no matter what happens you're going to get that and we got that and then the last thing I wanted to leave you with for this case study is that this was a super successful sprint with for us not because we figured out this amazing new product that we wanted to launch we actually learned that we did not have a strong value proposition with this new idea this did not make sense for our users at the end of the Sprint we decided we move forward with this so the fact that the Sprint helped us understand very quickly if the time effort and resources required to build this was worth it makes it super powerful for us so you might be thinking I'm not going to Kenya and I'm not going to India why does any of this matter to me well have you ever designed for users in regions different from where you live I bet you have have you ever designed or developed solutions for users who are different from you kids the elderly minorities people who are less tech-savvy than you I bet you have and how have you designed for use cases you aren't familiar with have you made a product for the automotive industry or made a fitness app and you've never been to the gym you know we do this all the time this is our job the immersive Sprint's are perfect for these use cases and why they're powerful is because you now have the opportunity to bring your team with you to learn instead of doing research in a silo and bringing a research report back you can take them with you this is where the power of Sprint's really shines through the cross-functional they're participating and their democratic so now I'm going to present some tips to run your own immersive Sprint's with Bergin so the very first one I went over a little bit in advance is intercepts now intercepts are a great research methods they're very scrappy and fast they don't work well when you need to recreate a lab setting so if you're doing and Internet of Things set up and you need hardware you want to recreate a home intercepts don't work well but if you have an app if you have paper prototypes if you want to do foundational research and talk to users and just learn about them intercepts are great now it's important to know that if you go in a large group of 10 people trying to talk to one user you're gonna scare them off so don't do that try to split up into smaller groups and then split up and talk to people on your own come back regroup and share your notes if you're doing international research there's a couple of things to be aware of be aware of cultural nuances how to talk to people how to address them dressing so do some research beforehand get good interpreters or translators because even if they speak the same language as you there might be important nuances that you would miss if it's possible and if your user is okay with it ask them beforehand if you can take a video if they say yes take a video of your interaction with them because when you take a video back to your team it is super powerful very more powerful than a research report can be paper prototypes and focus groups are okay for this because you're talking to so many users you'll correct for that and then watch out for selection bias we have an idea in our head of who our user is so there's like a bias to go and talk to users that you think would be likely users of your app don't do that you're outside in the field you have access to a diverse range of users so go talk to everyone and then one last tip we try to make sure that we don't prime our users to give us answers that they think we want to hear so we try not to tell them that hey I designed this give me your feedback because they'll be nice to you and they'll tell you this is amazing even if they don't like it so we try to save that information for after the interview those are some great tips and a lot of them will apply to co.design as well now core design is a fundamental change in the relationship between product creators and users traditionally experts have gone out and observed done interviews with mostly passive users in co.design users are deeply involved in the idea and creation process so you really want to prepare your users in advance let them know what to expect in the design sprint talk about the different activities that they might go through and help them reflect on their experiences that they normally perceive as routine so perhaps you ask them to do a diary study beforehand or have them talk to other members of their community to get a wider perspective Logistics are also quite important you're going to want to allow more time for each of the activities and more time to explain them as well do you need a translator similar to ends intercepts it might be useful are you in the natural context of the experience or are you asking the users to come into your space what would make them more comfortable what materials do you need to allow your users to fully express themselves and to and to take their ideas down are they comfortable with drawing would be the more comfortable if you gave them something to build with different components that they could put together would they be interested in role-playing or storytelling so really think through all of the contingencies and the schedule of your sprint now facilitation is going to be key here and you're going to be switching roles a little bit from translator of the user experience to facilitating the users and guiding them through the creative process and finally make sure you include a diverse averse REI diverse and inclusive user set and why do we do this this sounds like a lot of work so what are the benefits of co.design you're really going to get in an increased knowledge and empathy for the user for the full team and that's key you're gonna have all your engineers your PM's face to face with the users you're gonna build better and more innovative ideas you're gonna have lots and lots of more idea more and better ideas your decision-making is going to be more efficient and your sprint participants are going to be more confident in the decisions that they make and you're going to have immediate validation a concepts and ideas just as I discussed with iconography in our app for Africa our we were able to immediately validate what worked in what didn't and you'll be able to establish a deeper and long-term relationship with your users now what if you can't bring users in for the full sprint maybe they have to work they're not able to take that much time off to come in and participate in your sprint we also often do something called extended user participation so this is an alternative where we bring users in at key milestones within the sprint so we'll recruit users to do check-ins at critical milestones or at the end of each phase we'll do cognitive walkthroughs we'll let them look at sketches we'll just show them what we've been working on and get their feedback you might have to pivot but you'll want to plan time to act on the feedback that they give you now what if you just can't bring your users to you at all and you can't go to them what do we do then so that's when remotes printing comes in and we'll be honest with you this has not been very successful and we don't highly recommend it but sometimes it's unavoidable your users are far away you can't go to them so you can use things like slides or Docs to collaborate remotely you can use Google Forms and send out a survey and get your users to take a survey to get insights one of the things that we've done especially when you're doing research from many time zones away is overnight research so an example was we were doing a sprint here for a product that was based in Indonesia so we did a lot of work all day package it up sent it over there researcher and researche for us overnight and we had feedback waiting for us the next morning so that was great obviously this very situation specific so if you can't do this you might want to consider taking a break and instead of doing all five days of a sprint in one go do two days at a time break off to some research come back and then regroup the next week so these are some techniques for doing remote sprinting all right so to recap we talked about intercepts we talked about co.design talked about extend extended user participation and remote sprinting with that we hope that we've shown you the value of immersive design Sprint's and given you the right tools to run your own successful immersive sprint now we'd love to hear from you so please provide feedback for the session by signing in on google.com slash IO / schedule and if you want more helpful resources about design Sprint's put a design sprint get that with google.com that's it from us thank you thank you [Applause] [Music]