The 5 Day Design Sprint: Creating a UI prototype for a virtual fashion shopping app
If you’re familiar with the SCRUM framework for agile project management, you probably already now what sprints are. “Sprints” are the SCRUM term for “iterative sessions”, and these usually last for 30 days. Sprints are used to prioritize project tasks and see to it that tasks are completed on time. The core idea of a sprint (or agile project management, in general) is to continually review and assess progress towards a goal. At the end of a sprint, performance is assessed and necessary adaptions are planned.
I recently came across The Sprint Book, that discusses a five-day process to answer critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing. The 5 day design sprint was a concept developed at GV as a way to fast-forward into the future and get a clear picture from a realistic prototype. I found the entire concept quite intriguing and decided to give this battle-tested process a go.
Setting the Stage:
The Challenge: To create and test a UI prototype for a virtual fashion shopping app.
What if you could see how the clothes you want to buy would look on a model with your body shape and skin tone?
The challenge was to create and test a prototype for an app that would allow people to “try on” virtual clothes on a customized avatar. The idea is to add an element of fun to online shopping, and perhaps act as a solution to the lack of diversity in the fashion industry.
Tailoring the Process
Although the Sprint guide strictly recommends blocking five full days for the process, I did take the liberty of tailoring the process to suit my availability. I spent, on an average, 5 hours per day from Monday to Friday, usually between 6pm–11pm.
As this was an individual project, I did not recruit a sprint team. I acted as the Decider (the decision maker) and the Facilitator, managing the entire process on my own.
The Sprint
Monday
6 -6.15pm — Set A Goal: The goal is to create and test a 8-screen (minimum) clickable prototype that focuses on the “trial room” feature, which is the essence of the app concept.
6.15- 6.30pm — Address Potential Issues: No user research was conducted due to time constraints and due to the fact that the focus of the project was to create and test a UI prototype for the app concept. Additionally, as this was an individual project, the lack of team feedback may result in overseeing key issues. To overcome this issue, a first round testing was scheduled for Thursday.
6.30- 6.45pm — Research Similar Apps On The Market: In order to identify the ideal target audience for my app, I conducted research on existing fashion apps and dress up game apps. I looked into the reviews sections of these apps to identify what features users liked and what features they found to be a roadblock. These were recorded to provide some insight during the initial ideation phase.
6.45- 7pm— Identify Target Audience: The app would be targeted at young girls and women between the ages of 15 and 35.
7- 7.30pm — Create Interaction Flowchart:
7.30- 10pm — Create Wireframes (Initial Ideation Phase):
Tuesday
6- 7pm — Start Recruiting Users For Testing: Using the target audience profile identified on Monday, I hand-picked a few people from my friend circle to test the first prototype on Thursday. I contacted 7 people, all of whom agreed to take part in the testing. Out of the 7 participants, I randomly assigned 3 users to take part in the first round testing on Thursday and the remaining 4 users to the final prototype testing on Friday.
7- 8.30pm — Create A Moodboard:
8.30- 11pm — Refine Wireframes:
Wednesday:
6.15- 6.45pm — Choose the best solution: As the Decider, I picked out the solution that resonated most with my initial reason behind conceptualizing this app.
6.45- 8pm — Visual Language & UI Style Guide:
Thursday:
5–7pm — Create A Hand-Drawn Clickable Prototype: I sketched out 9 screens and built a clickable prototype on Invision.
7- 8pm — First Round Testing: The stage 1 clickable prototype was tested with 3 users from the identified target market and their feedback was noted to implement in prototyping stage 2.
Main feedback points:
- An option to add or reject the tried on item from the “trial room” screen
- The ability to see a back/profile view (This feature was included in the stage 1 prototype, but users could not decipher the icons used)
- Can users try different colours/patterns of the selected item?
8- 11pm — Create Screens For A Refined Prototype: Based on the feedback received, changes were incorporated into the stage 2 prototype. The screens were created on Photoshop & Illustrator. Illustrations were sourced from freepik.com
Friday:
5–6pm —Build The Refined Clickable Prototype: The final clickable prototype was built on Invision.
6–7.15pm — Final UI Test: The link to the Invision prototype was sent to the 4 users who were recruited for the testing on Tuesday. Main feedback points:
- Help notes for first time users would be useful
- More diversity in avatars/how will the avatar-building screen look?
- What is the “give opinion”/friends icon for?
7.15- 8pm — Identify Future Direction: Users found the app “fun” and described it as an app they would be willing to try out. Users recruited for testing purposes were between 21 and 26 years of age and associated the app concept with a feeling of nostalgia.
A lot of the feedback received focused on the user experience of the prototype. Based on the feedback received, a more developed prototype, with screens showing the functionality of all the key features (friends/opinion, shopping functionalities etc) will help further define the future scope of the app.
