Design Sprint 2.0 — Ucook
An idea to help spanish local restaurants stay afloat after the pandemic.
Introduction:
This article is about our first Design Sprint 2.0 at Barcelona Code School.
If you have never heard of this incredible problem-solving process, created by Jake Knapp and recently updated by AJ&Smart, you can read about it here.
Our first project focused on a problem that emerged from the coronavirus pandemic: the survival of the local restaurants and bars. Here we are addressing the issue in Spain by creating a service that allows :
- customers to experiment a new and inclusive way of dining at-home.
- restaurant to keep working outside of the limited opening hours and use their space until regulations enable them to reopen completely.
Here’s how we tackled this topic during this 4-days design process:
Day 1: What’s the problem? Research and define the challenge.
On Monday, we directly dug into the problem through Research. Each member had to gather and present information and data on the current problems within the restaurant industry in Spain.
As you can imagine, the coronavirus pandemic has mostly hurt the small businesses. And government aids are not enough to cover the losses (at the time, they covered about 1.5% of losses).
This situation has forced consumers to adapt and change their behavior regarding eating out. Since restaurants shut down and you can’t (almost) eat there, there is a HUGE demand for home delivery.
Our research had also shown that even though people ordered more food delivery, their overall experience was not at all satisfying, as the food arrived cold most of the time and the delivery cost a fortune.
At this point, there were so many challenges to solve. So, we started brainstorming ideas. We had to define the most critical challenge to solve.
First, we used the “How Might We…” method (HMW’s). The objective was to turn our problems into opportunities.
Basically, you need to write one question per sticky note. It cannot be too broad, nor too narrow. To give you an idea, this is what our first HMW’s wall of fame looks like:
We regrouped similar ideas together, organized them into 3 categories and selected the 2 most important HMW’s questions:
- HMW…Design a product/service that can help the restaurant owners reuse their space or reopen?
- HMW…Create a similar experience at home as in the restaurant?
After the HMW’s voting, we decided that the long-term goal of our solution would be to introduce a new and more inclusive way of dining to our users while helping local restaurants stay in business post-Covid.
Additionally, we made Sprint Questions to think about the difficulties and constraints that we may meet while creating our service/product.
The selected Sprint questions were:
- Dinner rooms disappear because people don’t eat there.
- Bad execution and frustration of the food box.
We also realized that several parties were involved in our solution: the restaurant owner, the client and the rider.
Determining our target came to us naturally through the process:
We discarded the rider as delivery services already existed (For example, Just Eat, Deliveroo or Glovo). And even though solving this issue would have benefitted the restaurant owners, it was not our priority to design a new process for that.
While our initial focus was on the customer (avoiding cold food and delivery cost), we shifted our focus to the restaurant owner and made him our target audience. After that, it would be logical to pursue the process and design the customer’s side of the service but here we will skip that part.
We drew the journey map of both restaurant owners (B2B) and customers (B2C) to identify their potential reactions to our service/product.
For the restaurant owner (our target audience), the most critical moment of the customer’s experience (pain point) is clearly at the beginning of the process because he has to install the gear, create lots of content (cooking instructions and videos)and prepare all the boxes for this idea to be successful.
For customers, the paint point is presented later when unboxing and understanding the cooking instructions, which could be frustrating at first.
As a result, we had to take all of these information into account while designing our idea.
DAY 2: Map & Sketch.
On the second day of the Design Sprint, our main goal was to put the ideas that we had on our first day on paper. We were focused on the visual functionality and the feelings that we like to evoke.
We achieved this goal by learning and using few techniques, such as: Heat map, Crazy 8’s, Storyboard, Sketching and Mood board.
1) First, for our heat map we had to turn our ideas into rough sketches. Then, we presented our thoughts behind the sketches and by using stickers we voted for what we should prioritise for prototyping.
2) Second step of this process was the Crazy 8’s. For this exercise all you need is a pen, paper and a timer. We got 8 minutes in total for roughly sketching 8 screen ideas. This meant we got 1 minute for each screen. Later on it was quite interesting to observe on paper and see how the mind can come up with new ideas and solutions in such a short time.
3) Third and final step that required the magic of the pen and paper in this process was the Storyboard.
We came up with a possible scenario for our user and each of us drew 15 screens (rectangles) on A4 paper. By doing so, we had new ideas on how our service should look and work.
4) To be able to do a sketch (low fidelity wireframe), we opened up our laptops and started to work on Figma.
Even though it was our first time using it we haven’t struggled when we were sketching on it. The process was different because our previous sketches on paper helped us to get the main visual concept. Then we had to work with web grids and design something that is practical and easy to navigate.
5) The last task for day 2 was to create a mood board.
This meant we had to choose our color palette, fonts and design a logo. We researched about our possible competitors and found out that they all had considerably bold and bright colours for their brands. So our decision when choosing colours was supported by the idea that we need to stand out like them.
All of these exercises that we completed on Day 2 of the Design Sprint were extremely dynamic and important for the process. This proved to us that putting ideas on a piece of paper without any judgement or restriction can have beneficial results.
DAY 3: Prototyping.
On day 3, we have decided on the logo and which colors to go with. According to our research we have seen that all delivery start-ups were using bright colors. We have made a quick design on the logo as well. As soon as we have made decisions, we focused on the digital prototype on Figma.
We wanted to focus on the “ordering process” of our idea but also wanted to put onboarding page for the tester to have an idea of Ucook.
DAY 4: Testing.
On day 4th, our testers started arriving from 10:30.
After testing first 3 people we have applied changes on our prototype according to their feedback.
In the afternoon we have tested the second version of our prototype from 14:00 till 15:00 with 3 other people and we have seen that the changes we applied had a positive impact. When one of us interviews the other took notes and then we put it on the board.
After the testing we have decided to apply last changed to our prototype and make the final version of it.
You can access to our prototype with this link.
Designers that worked on this project: ay, Akyolalmila, Marie Attinot.
