Sprint Case Study:
Finance Fox
Sprint Overview
What is a sprint?
A sprint is a process made to efficiently ideate, design, and test a solution to a problem within a short timespan. This cuts out unnecessary discussion and decision-making in order to find the best solution with minimal time, money, and effort wasted.
Sprints are broken into phases that guide the team’s ideas from conception to creation.
Planning
The first part of the sprint focuses on planning. The team comes up with a long-term goal that will guide the entire project. Next, they create a map showing the process users would go through with the product. With this visual laid out, the team can choose the most crucial area on the map as their target goal, the specific issue they will address by the end of the sprint.
For our planning, we created a Miro board and wrote some How Might We questions. These questions let us know what we aimed to achieve with the sprint. We wanted our product, an app, to look different and be unique, appeal to our target demographic, and convince teens to engage with the content.
We then created maps of potential features to include and inspirations for finance themed games.
Sketching
The next step of the sprint is sketching out ideas. It starts with rough sketches for ideation. Then the best ideas from that move on to an exercise called Crazy 8s. Here, everyone folds a piece of paper into eighths and has 8 minutes to fill each box with a variation of an idea. Finally, the team members choose the best idea and create a detailed final sketch to present to the group.
Using this guide, we turned the words into visuals on a series of screen-shaped frames.
Prototyping
With the idea chosen, the next part of the sprint is starting the actual prototype.
Before that, though, our team needed a brand: a name, logo, and colors that we could use throughout the app.
Sprint by Jake Knapp et al.
Deciding
With multiple interesting ideas, the team must vote and decide which one to move forward with.
Our team took turns presenting our sketches and used star emojis to vote on what we liked best. After that, we took these features and put together User Journeys to show how we thought a user might travel through the app. We discussed these journeys and used them to lay out a storyboard.
Introduction
I took part in a team design sprint over the course of six weeks, following the process created by Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. The goal was to create a product that would teach teenagers financial literacy and learn about the sprint process as we did.
Branding
For the name, we considered finance related words, currency symbols, and alliterative animals. We decided on Finance Fox with the Fs and E being replaced with the old French franc and the euro.
The team found fox logos for inspiration and incorporated elements to create our final logo.
Prototyping
With our brand decided, we were ready to turn the plain storyboard into our app screens.
The screens were taken and put into a Powerpoint presentation. This would be how we would present the app to teens in the next phase.
Testing
The moment of truth comes with the final stage of the sprint: user testing. Participants will try out the prototype and provide feedback on what works and what needs to be improved to make it better.
Finance Fox is focused on teen finance education. Therefore, we gathered some teens and had them sign consent forms. We met the three teens in a Zoom meeting and asked them some pre-test questions to gauge their experience. Then we presented our screens, walked through the content on each one, and asked some post-test question to gather their feedback.
Results
The teen testers provided valuable feedback that helped us look at our design in a new way and understand what we needed to change or add to make it most effective.
UI/UX
Reduce amount of information onscreen and redundancy of buttons that can be accessed in multiple places
Taxes
Add information on how to understand and manage taxes
Real World Component
Integrate tracking of real, personal stock portfolios to make it more than just education
Rewards
Rethink rewards received for earning achievements or reaching goals