UX design sprint accelerates digital product development
When Amadeus, the leading IT solution supplier to the global travel industry, was looking to rapidly take a new business concept to market, we created and facilitated a design sprint to get them off to a flying start.
“The value of the design sprint is that it’s pragmatic and gives you the freedom to try out something really new, and to find out whether it will work.” Isabelle Villevieille, Manager – User Experience Research, Amadeus
Challenge
It’s critical for large organisations to be able to explore the viability and commercial potential of new ideas and opportunities. To enable Amadeus to do this, we were commissioned to create and facilitate a design sprint at the Amadeus R&D centre in France.
A design sprint enables you to get from an initial business idea, to testing it with users, in a matter of days
We ran the Amadeus design sprint as follows:
Day 1: Map On the first day we mapped out the challenge and our objectives, and shared insights from across the business. Then we used ideation techniques to tease out key opportunities and challenges. “The ideation was so powerful… we created a lot of ideas,” says Isabelle Villevieille, Manager – User Experience Research, Amadeus.
Day 2: Sketch On Day 2 core design principles were considered, and we used sketching techniques and ideation development to flesh-out potential approaches.
Day 3: Decide Day 3 was about agreeing and committing to the best way forward. Once decided, we created a storyboard, discussed customer scenarios, and created the prototype plan.
Day 4: Prototype We worked on the prototype screen designs, culminating in a screen demo and roadmap presentation attended by senior managers. Then we began preparatory work for user testing.
Stage 5: User testing Due to the need on this project to recruit participants from across Europe, it was not feasible to run the user testing on the fifth day. After a short gap to allow for recruitment, we completed the user testing.
Benefits
One of the key challenges in running a design sprint is to keep the participants engaged and productive throughout, and our facilitation ensured that this was the case for Amadeus.
Our client Isabelle Villevieille says, “When you ask people to be disruptive, very often they are not. But if you introduce them to unexpected approaches… you generate really new ideas.”
Asked how she felt at the conclusion of the design sprint, Isabelle says, “In the end I was so happy and felt that the outcome was so good.”
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