Tuesday - UX Course by Wizeline. (2)

Sprint is a methodology used to find solutions to problems in just five days. Jake Knapp divided the chapters of his books by days of the week; Monday is all about planning, defining the problem, and choosing an objective, Tuesday is the time when we start looking for ideas to solve the problem.

The day is divided in just two sections. The fist part is all about mixing and improving actual solutions that exist to similar problems. If the problem you chose is about the medical industry, you are going to have to research about actual hospitals and clinics that already cover your problem. When you have identified some references, you will have to try to make it better somehow. The next step is to find a way to get all these good ideas and try to apply them on your project. What we’re looking forward is to get a functional prototype. After focusing on a specific part of the problem, and looking through all the possible existent solutions we can start designing some possible solutions.

The second phase of the Tuesday talks about designing possible solutions for the problem. The book shows us that you don’t have to have any expensive tools to start making designs for projects, and how drawing helps you to understand what you really want to achieve with your solution. We learned about the Crazy-8 method, where in only 8 minutes, you have to draw 8 sketches of possible solutions and make them as different as possible, this will help you to understand what are the most important features of the solution you want to implement.

In the next phase, you have to draw a story, so you can see how an user would interact with the solution, if it is not easy to understand, it will be useless, and we want our solution to be adopted.

It is important to design before starting to implement, maybe you don’t have a clear idea of what you are really looking forward, or maybe it would not help to solve the problem you wanted to. It is cheaper to correct a design than to correct a finished solution.

Monday - UX Course by Wizeline. (1)

I had the opportunity of taking a course given by Wizeline team members as one of my last subjects in my major. I had to do some summaries of the Sprint book by Jake Knapp.

The book covers some of the same subjects we discussed last class. It touches on some similar examples, using the serving robot as the introduction example and the Apollo 13 and the maps for the Monday chapter. The book lets you to understand the problems by guiding you step by step. The Monday is all about planning. I agree with the concept that if you want to develop a real solution for a problem, you have to start by defining the end points and goals of it. If you have all the goals well defined, and the population determined, it becomes easy to map all the steps you will have to take to get to the solutions.

Right now I am in an Honors Social Entrepreneurship course and I’ve been complementing my knowledge with it. I realized how important it is to get advices from an expert. In my course my team and me are covering the topic of child malnutrition, and we went to the Organización de Nutrición Infantil (ONI) to talk to the director about the common, and we got a lot of leverage in comparison to other teams.

I believe that every project should implement a “Monday” on its basis. Brainstorming is a helpful tool that helps a team to be on the same page and to start thinking outside of the box. My UX team decided that we are going to be taking over the mobility problem here at the Tec de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara. When I was in high school, we actually had a workshop where, people from the government and the ITESM taught us about these topics, and the possible solutions they had come for it in the past, so I recalled that talk for our activity.

I didn’t disagree with anything in particular. I just thought that you can be a little more flexible with the schedules, but I loved the idea of using all the designed time to work for working, with no distractions. Nowadays, cellphones, laptops and tablets are more of a distraction than tools.

SPRINT is a methodology that looks forward to use all the invested time in the most effective way possible. The solution of problems should follow a structured order, so the answers given have the ability to transcend and to ACTUALLY solve the problem. Defining the objective is the key for a team to get great ideas and to start the conversation of the topic. I am looking forward to learn more about the SPRINT method on the next few weeks.