Virtual Meeting Room Redesign
Sector
Research Project, Industry, Office Communcation Tool
Challenge
Redesign of a virtual reality Meeting Room
My role
Workshop Facilitation, Workshop Organisation and Coordination, Applying the Design Sprint 2.0 by Jake Knapp
Workshop time
4 days
Monday
Objectives of the day: Make a map & Choose a Target; Sketch Competing Solutions
Experts were invited to join us in the morning to present their vision of the project. During the interviews every participant noted down questions.
Through voting, Sprint Questions and a Long Term Goal were picked. They were pinned on the wall of our "war room" so we would never loose sight of our target.
When you go on a uncertain journey like a design sprint you should never forget your map! The map shows a very simplified flow of a user that uses our system.
Critical moments in the flow of the user could be identified by pinning How might we questions to it. Those questions every participant thought of as worst case things to solve.
Time to collect potential ideas on how the solution could look like. The excercise is called Lighning demo, every participant has 20 minutes to search for inspiration online, and then 3 minutes to present it.
The participant that is idealy good at drawing sketches down all the presented inspirations with a catchy title so we do not forget them.
Two more excercises were conducted, the 4 step sketch and the crazy 8's to really have enough ideas to sketch a solution.
The rest of the afternoon every participant could sketch out their solution approach which will be presented the next day.
Tuesday
Objectives of the day: Decide on the bestAfter a peaceful night of sleep, it is time for the art museum in which all the sketches created by each participant are hung up all over the room. See an example to the right, the others can be seen in the galery on the bottom.
Everyone needs now to walk around with post its in their hands to note down questions which are pinned to the sketch, and some points which are glued to the sketch to create some sort of heatmap.
Now it is time to discuss every solution as a group. One person has to present the solution, the other takes notes. Only at the end the painter is allowed to reveal himself, that keeps is without bias and is more fun.
The decision fell on the solution sketched above. Now it is time to create a storyboard for the prototyping on the next day.
Everyone fills out the boxes with a post it to describe step by step how they invision the prototyping procedure to be. Then through voting the preferred one is chosen.
Wednesday
Objectives of the day: Build a realistic prototypeTasks are divided and the whole day is spent on building a prototype that seems realistic, but which is just a "wizard of oz" prototype (fake funtionalities).
Prototyping in VR is very challenging, and not a lot of official "good practices" are established yet, but we managed well.
Thursday
Objectives of the day: Text with target customers
Target customers are invited to come over and test the prototype.
A laptop is set up in one room with a webcam, and all the Workshop participants see the testing through a livestream in another room and take notes. Me I am with the user and guide them through the testing procedure.
Afterwards we come together and organise the comments in a matrix which we then summarize. Strengths and weaknesses of the prototype are discussed. Everyone is tired from the previous days, but it was also the most rewarding day to see people interact with our prototype.
Conclusion
Objectives of the day: Text with target customersThe design sprint is about creation of ideas and testing them in a short amount of time to avoid spending too much time on something that does not work for the customer.
We are very happy with our result. The idea for having multiple virtual screens which show different content and can be tailored to different meetings was taken very positively by the customers.
The results of the design sprint gave the project a new fresh direction and provided ideas even outside of its scope. For sure something to be repeated!
