Friday - UX Course by Wizeline. (5)

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, Wednesday talks about evaluating the ideas, and choosing the best solutions proposed by the team. On Thursday, we have to create a prototype of the product. And Friday is the grand finale: We will interview people to know their points of view. After that, we will learn what we have done right and what we have to modify.

This time around, the book starts talking about how we will plan our interviews. We have to be prepared to observe how the people that will help us with the validation react to it. You will become Sherlock Holmes in this day; getting all the information we can from the interactions of our validator. Before anything else happens, we will take a detour to Orlando, because they have the Magic 5 on their city (I’m sorry for the bad basketball pun). According to Knapp, 5 is the perfect number of interviews to get good results.

Now we are ready to interview people! And we will go back to our favourite number (5, like the week days). The interview can be divided, starting with a warm welcome, then we will give our user some context by asking them some related questions, we will present our prototype to them, and after it, we will ask him to do something specific. The fifth element (not the futuristic one) of the interview is to create a brief text of the impressions of our client.

Sometimes the user will be a little lost when they are using your prototype, so you can guide them through some questions, to see if they can manage the tank you gave them. Another important thing is to never forget to be a good host, just as Lumière was to Belle. You should not cut a conversation if it’s not relevant to your app, make him / her feel relaxed with your interview.

Now you may be in one of two scenarios. First scenario: when you get all the feedback it may destroy everything you liked about your prototype, and make you re-evaluate every part of it, to make it a better app, of course. The second scenario is that you get some positive feedback, which means you did something wrongly in your interview. This is just a joke, but probably, you will get more bad comments than good, just as in the Internet.

We have to learn about this experience, we will find patterns, or comments that were repeated in more than one interview. We will embrace the good and fix the bad for the next time we have to share our project.

With the end of the Friday, we come to the end of the Sprint as well; Knapp found out that this was the most effective way to use our time to develop an idea. I learned so much from this experience and I’m thankful for it.