Test Design Sprint prototypes with customers

Day #5 The day of reckoning arrives*

This is the day you’ve been working towards. The day when your theories and ideas will be proved or disproved by potential customers. Typically, five qualitative interviews are used with customers. To create an objective environment for testing, one person from our team interviews the user, while the other members watch the interview – which is viewed on a monitor in another room – and take notes. After each interview, key data from these notes will be posted on the trusty whiteboard.

Each interview follows the same pattern. Make the user feel welcome and comfortable. Establish the user’s behaviour in relation to your challenge/solution and the market in general, and discover more about the user as a person. Introduce the prototype and nudge the person to use it as naturally as possible – i.e. if it’s a website the best way might be to ask the person to imagine they came into it from a Google search so were already looking for this topic. Once the user has walked through the prototype – you can ask questions about their actions to get them talking aloud –it’s time for a quick debrief.

This is where you find out if the user likes the prototype, if they would recommend it, and how it compares to previous or competitor solutions.

Start sketching

When all the interviews are done, it’s time for the group to review the findings from the day. It’s here that you search for patterns from the interviews. What did the customers collectively like or dislike? What were improvements and what weren’t? What customer needs became clear that we did not address or meet?
Which prototype provided the best results? It’s this data that you will take with you when you’re making decision about the future of your challenge.

With that done your Sprint has reached its end. Your team has done something amazing in just one week, something that they will remember for a very long time, and something that could drive your organisation in a new direction.

An external facilitator ensures the interviews are objective and makes sure the interviewees share all the relevant opinions and insights.

*Much of this information can be found in “SPRINT – how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days”, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, from Google Ventures. We’ve just tailored it to find a way that we think works best for our clients and delivers the best results for them.