Thursday - UX Course by Wizeline. (4)

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. Thursday is a very busy day; we have to create a prototype of the product.

This time around, we are going to divide the day in two: The Dali & Picasso version of our prototype and the Manet one. In the morning, we will have to change our surrealistic expectations to prototype expectations. So, without further ado, here I present our philosophies for the next hours.

We can create a prototype with almost anything. When I took my User Interfaces course we created a prototype only with a card board and some post its. Prototypes are disposable. We can’t fall in love with them; our project is too young for that! Create only for learning purposes. We are looking to get data, we can go full façade, and it doesn’t have to be functional just yet. The prototype must LOOK real. It has to be like the actual product, so the users can imagine how would that work.

Then, for the rest of the day, we will have our hands busy. The team will be joining forces for the last time to choose the tools to be used. When this is defined, we will call our inner-Cersei Lannister, because we will divide our team and conquer the project. Some will work only on the prototype, and we don’t need any fancy tools to prototype. If we want to develop an app, we can use Power Point to sketch it. Others will be in charge of getting assets, stitching everything together, and that it makes sense. Don’t forget to document everything, so you know what we did right and what we did wrong.

Thursday may be the most tiring day out of all. The team’s project is becoming a “reality” and we will have a model to understand how people would use it. By changing our mentality to a more flexible one, and defining how we are going to be working, we are set to start a great idea to work on.