Image Source: Generated by Copilot
We have reached a significant turning point in the Design Sprint; it’s time for the ultimate test. Our PennyPal prototype is ready to move through the test and collect phase. This phase of the Design Sprint is an opportunity for our team to determine if PennyPal is a viable app for Gen Z users to learn about personal finance through education and entertainment. The goal of this phase is to ensure we selected the right participants for user testing, created the right types of questions and scenarios, and can analyze the data in an actionable way.
The test and collect phase of the Design Sprint turned our concept into a reality and required all of us to go from the kitchen to the table by defining the ideal target audience and the ingredients to success, assemble and clearly brief the A-Team, and unpack the truth.
From the Kitchen to the Table
The amount of preparation, attention to detail, and speed that is in the kitchen behind closed doors to create that incredible meal and deliver it to a table successfully is not easy. It is the same case when creating a prototype in a Design Sprint and getting it to external user testing. To do this, you need to start by defining your ideal target audience. To define our target audience for PennyPal, we separated the large gamut of our potential Gen Z users into three buckets: high school students 16-18, college students 18-22, and “early career starters” 22-28. For each of these audiences, we took time to learn their key traits and needs. Doing this led to successfully recruiting five participants, and then, we did what any good restaurant does: we sourced our ingredients for success. We created clear logistics, location, and duration for user testing and shared that with all five of our participants. Doing this eliminated any potential confusion, so they were ready to have a great experience that would give us rich data.
To get this great meal to the table, aka get the prototype to the participants and begin user testing, we needed to “serve success,” which is making sure our team has created and can facilitate scenarios that reveal insights to define an actionable path forward for the following priorities: PennyPal’s growth, PennyPal’s strategy, PennyPal’s Brand DNA.
This process reminds me a lot of the first step in the five steps to finding your target audience. According to this article by Adobe, audience targeting starts with a close look at your business’s products or service offerings and there are three steps to get your answer.
- Determine what problem your goods or service solve.
- Think about who’s most likely to benefit from your product or service solution.
- Define your unique selling proposition.
Image Source: Adobe
Assembling and Briefing the A-Team
To set up your participants for successful external user testing, you can’t just put the bat signal out and hope for the best. If we wanted our participants to be the best version of an A-Team they could be, we needed to establish a recruitment plan and brief them on what user testing is. Explaining to our participants the value of user testing and that it’s important because it reveals underlying issues with the app, improves the user experience, and builds empathy helped make this experience enriching for everyone. One of my teammates also did a great job of establishing a recruitment plan by creating a consent form, communicating with participants via succinct emails, and sending out a calendar link to book a time to participate in the user test.
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp talks about a concept called “The Five-Act Interview.” This is a structured conversation between the facilitator on the Design Sprint team and user testing participants to get comfortable and establish some background. Act 4: Tasks and Nudges, asking the user to do realistic tasks during an interview is the best way to simulate real-world experience. The facilitators on my team for the Design Sprint really leaned into this concept during all five of our user tests to create this atmosphere.
Reflecting on the value of user testing also helped me realize that it really is priceless in the end. Many companies try to skip corners and take shortcuts by de-prioritizing user testing due to time, budget, or resource constraints. But skipping it altogether would be a massive shortcoming. If you don’t want to take my word for it, a research blog written by a revered prototyping app company named Marvel put it perfectly. “It’s a great chance to get to know your users. Learn who they are, what they want and why they need this product. How do they need it to function? How will it fit in to their day to day lives?”
Image Source: Marvel
Unpacking the Truth
After we completed the external user testing with all five participants and they all finished a post-test survey we provided, we were left with rich data to dive into. Post-test survey questions revealed to our team great insights such as:
- Overall, the app does a good job of incorporating education along with all its other qualities.
- PennyPal’s core features prioritized Gen Z’s key traits and needs, with features like Daily Trivia and Goal Setting.
- There’s a resounding connectedness to education, but room for improvement on the entertainment side of things.
These rich insights connect directly back to the Design Sprint questions and long-term goals we established at the beginning of the process. Questions like, “Do our gamification features drive repeated engagement? And long-term goals, such as enabling users to set and achieve personalized financial goals.
Identifying patterns and themes to connect these insights to decisions we can make about PennyPal, reminds me a lot of the reflection process we do at my job after one of our annual campaigns. I work with a team of development professionals at Quinnipiac University’s Development and Advancement office. My role is specifically focused on digital engagement (social media, email marketing, event registration webpage building). A team of eight people including myself held a retrospective after one of our annual fundraising campaigns and I brought to the group a few slides identifying a pattern of looking at our emails year-over-year and seeing how we changed the send address to use personal names instead of a general email alias, and the emails using personal names performed significantly better. This occurrence was me identifying a pattern to connect an insight for our group to react to and make a decision.
This final stage of the test and collect phase of the Design Sprint reinforces why you should conduct a sprint early in the lifespan of your business or product launch. I came across an article by Fast Company that expands on this idea and explains the reasoning further in a very comprehensible way.
“The ROI of customer research is greatest when the risk and cost of building the wrong product are high. But even when it’s easy to build an MVP to launch and learn, sunk cost fallacy can undermine a team’s objectivity and willingness to scrap their work. Why risk making a bad first impression when it’s easy to find and fix problems before launch?”
Getting stakeholders to understand the truth behind this statement could make or break your Design Sprint.
Image Source: Fast Company
I’m looking forward to packaging all the work my team and I did over the last seven weeks to present the impact of a Design Sprint in a professional, understandable, and actionable way.
Kyle Adams POV 
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