Case Study: Project X Design Sprint
Build high fidelity mockups in 5 days
We took on the challenge of building the look and feel of a new product in 5 days. We didn’t have an official name yet, so we called it Project X. I worked with one other designer on this project. We had a project manager who facilitated our meetings.
Context
Every day, thousands of domain names are registered, and thousands more expire. Our company analyzes these domain names daily. We were challenged to build a product that provides value to customers using this data.
Monday
Monday morning’s discussions outlined the goals for the week:
We define the project goal, to ‘Quickly build the information architecture and UI of a brand monitoring site’.
We define actors and use cases: "As a stakeholder, I want to discover what URLs (websites) use my brand name, so that I can police my intellectual property."
We define stakeholders as lawyers, marketers, product owner, domainers and brands.
Tuesday
After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for the sprint, on Tuesday we focused on solutions. We spent the day creating user flows. Tuesday afternoon we started creating paper prototypes.
Wednesday
Wednesday was spent refining the user flows. We critiqued what we had done on Tuesday and made revisions. By now, we had a good understanding of the project.
Thursday
Thursday morning we presented to company stakeholders and got approval on the work done so far.
We spent the rest of Thursday creating low-fidelity mockups, using the paper prototypes as guidelines. These are intentionally basic, without color or detail, allowing us to focus on design and flow.
On Thursday afternoon, we began collecting inspirational images and color palettes, laying the foundation for our design. We then moved on to creating high-fidelity mockups.
Friday
On Friday morning, I felt like we were completely in the zone. After a week fueled by coffee and energy drinks, we had created mood boards and stylescapes to visualize the site’s potential look and feel. Along with these, we included high-fidelity mockups for three key pages of the site. We presented everything late Friday afternoon.
The team approved one of our color schemes. We had more work to do but the hard part was done.
For the sprint, we didn’t have content for these pages. I added the copy later.
Next steps
The following week, we finished creating the high-fidelity mockups. I started writing copy. We handed the site off to our Angular developer three weeks after the sprint had started.
We also now had a name for the project, BrandTrace. Over the next few days I created some logos and got approval. I spent about twenty hours on this logo. Six months after the sprint we launched the site.
