Kyle Adams POV

Tag: business

  • How Purposeful Practice Produces Progress

    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.

    1. Determine what problem your goods or service solve.
    2. Think about who’s most likely to benefit from your product or service solution.
    3. 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.

  • Walk Before You Sprint: The Overlooked Phase That Makes or Breaks Your Design Sprint

    Image Source: Generated by Google Gemini


    Where it all Started


    Before you and your team begin a Design Sprint, you need to take the necessary measures to make sure everyone is ready. With Design Sprints, there’s no such thing as overpreparation. Connecting with your team and client to onboard each person, define who is doing what, review the “run-of-show,” double check you have all the materials you need, and create several team agreements that are honored through the Sprint will guarantee its overall success.

    Let’s delve into a few of the steps I mentioned above to better understand the role each of these play in the preparation phase of the Sprint and how you and your teammates can contribute to each these tasks to get on the same page before beginning the Sprint itself!


    A Goal Without a Plan is a Wish


    If you want to achieve a certain outcome, you need to have an idea as to what your specific “challenge” is, and understand what and who it is going to take to solve it. With the Sprint process, you and your team use guard rails that serve as ground rules over the course of four days. Each day has several mini workshop sessions and the day itself has a theme, or an even better way to think about it is each day is broken out by one of the steps of the Design Thinking process. See the picture below to better understand what I am talking about.

    Image Source: Mindful Marks


    Why a Craftsman Needs to Sharpen Their Tools


    Before you, your team, and client begin the first day of the Sprint, make sure you have all the supplies all of you will need for the next four to five days. If you are running the sprint virtually and everyone is remote, you can rely on tools like Miro for digital whiteboarding, otter.ai to transcribe notes from each day of the workshop, and Zoom to host the meetings virtually and record all of them. If you are doing the workshop in-person instead, you’ll need to have lots of office supplies to whiteboard and brainstorm in-person including but not limited to stickie notes, sharpies/markers, masking tape, and time (to name a few).

    Image Source: AJ & Smart


    Roles & Responsibilities: Everyone Has One


    I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase teamwork, makes the dream work. As cliché as it may be, this is especially true when you’re working with a group to facilitate a sprint. Everyone’s role and the responsibilities that come with it need to be decided ahead of time for the Sprint to run smoothly. As explained in the Sprint Handbook: a step-by-step guide to planning and running innovation sprints, each of these roles play a unique and critical part in the success of a Sprint. See below for just a few!

    • Notetaker:  Captures essential information during interviews and discussions.
    • Lead Facilitator: Guides the overall direction and maintains focus of the sprint.
    • Sprint Host: Ensures a comfortable and productive environment for everyone.
    • Prototyper: Translates ideas into tangible prototypes.
    • Interviewer: Conducts user interviews to gain insights.


    Image Source: Workshopper


    There’s No “I” in Team: How to Compromise


    The most impactful concept I learned in this stage of Design Sprints is the importance of creating Team Agreements. During the mini workshop we conducted this week as a team, this was one of the three exercises we had to complete together. Doing this collaboratively, enabled each one of us to learn more about what each person in the group enjoys about teamwork, what they find challenging, and then create several agreements that we can all use to bring clarity, focus and good vibes for the next 6 weeks of work we will do together. Here’s a few of the agreements we made.


    Team Agreements

    1). Be on time to our weekly Friday meetings starting at 1 p.m. ET and let the group know by Wednesday if you can’t make it due to an extenuating circumstance.

    2). Keep phone on silent and/or do not disturb during our team meetings.

    3). Dedicate the first five minutes of the team meeting to “catching-up.”

    It’s not possible to over prepare for a Sprint Workshop. Preparing for a sprint Workshop is just like walking to warm up before running a race. Walking before running is often overlooked and an afterthought, but without it you’re ten times more likely to cramp up or maybe even pull a muscle. Metaphorically speaking, the same goes for preparing for a Sprint. Without all these layers of preparation you, your team, and client aren’t going to have a successful sprint. After preparation is complete, it’s time to move into the first phase of the sprint. Map + Sketch.

    Sources

    Belle Hastings, P. (n.d.). The Sprint Handbook: a step-by-step guide to planning and running innovation sprints.

    Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., & Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Bantam Press.

  • The Infinite Iterative Loop

    Image Source: Generated by Google Gemini


    When it comes to problem-solving, regardless of the issue, you must think creatively to come up with a solution. Usually, your first step is to get a grasp of the situation. After that, you move on to creating a hypothesis. Once you’ve created a hypothesis, you start generating ideas. Next, you develop a demo of what you are trying to produce, and lastly, you release a version out into the world for a set audience to test and utilize.

    These steps I just listed are the core components of Design Thinking, a type of problem-solving that focuses on human-first design using an iterative process. To better understand Design Thinking, we are going to look at its origins, examine the guiding principles of the sprint process, and uncover what types of problems sprints are great at solving.


    Where it all Started


    The roots of Design Thinking go back to the 1960s. What started as a novel concept grew into a widely embraced strategy that could not stop accelerating. Design Thinking became mainstream and solidified as an approach to innovation in the late 20th century. Several people and institutions played a role in its mass adoption. David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, a global design company, is credited for shaping and promoting the version of Design Thinking that millions of people use today.

    This new movement sought to redefine the design process, including how interdisciplinary creatives collaborated, the emphasis on empathy, and shifted focus on iterative problem-solving. After Design Thinking had proven its value through popularization and widespread usage, companies and individuals at the cutting edge of technology and innovation created the “Sprint.”


    This Time it’s a Sprint, not a Marathon


    One of the biggest byproducts of Design Thinking is the Sprint, a method that solves problems quickly and validates ideas in a compressed timeline of five days instead of several months. A Sprint is comprised of four guiding principles.

    • Working Together Alone: Sketch, ideate, and create on your own, then come back together.
    • Tangible Things Over Discussion: Focus on discerning, deciding, and getting ideas into the world as tests.
    • Getting Started Over Being Right: Embrace ambiguity. Become risk-tolerant.
    • Don’t Rely on Creativity: Leverage time-based exercises that use frameworks to ideate and create.


    When at a Crossroad, Which Path to Take


    When it comes to developing innovation and solving problems, many companies struggle with deciding when to run a Sprint or if it’s even worth doing so from a timing and resources perspective. The best thing to do, is remind yourself that running a Sprint allows you and your team to test ideas and learn quickly while minimizing the risk.

    Here are a few examples of when it’s best to run a Sprint!

    1. When starting a new project.
    2. When seeking to improve an existing product or process.
    3. When seeking user validation.
    4. When fostering collaboration and team alignment.


    Design Thinking and the facilitation of a Sprint are iterative processes that are infinite, just like a loop. Even after you launch your product to market, even if you solved the original problem that was defined, it’s more likely than not you’ll have a new problem to solve or a specific thing your users want to see improved. Starting the Design Thinking and Sprint process all over again.


    Sources

    Belle Hastings, P. (n.d.). The Sprint Handbook: a step-by-step guide to planning and running innovation sprints.

    Knapp, J., Zeratsky, J., & Kowitz, B. (2016). Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days. Bantam Press.

  • New Haven Pickleball’s Brand Promise: More Than Just a Game

    Image Source: Photograph taken by Steve Walter

    At its core, all brands are a promise. Usually, the first thing that people picture when they hear the word “brand” is a logo, colors and some type of slogan. Gathering all these components together to tell people a story and effectively communicate whatever good or service you are selling is how you succeed in creating a successful brand that changes someone’s life. Taking this visual design course taught me to think about branding holistically from the perspective of a designer. Specifically, how every little decision whether it’s using a chunky serif font to evoke an assertive tone, choosing a balanced trio of colors, or creating a certain style of illustration on product packaging to target an audience; all these decisions add up to the total sum of what makes a brand memorable.  

    The culmination of these design skills I learned over the last seven weeks is on display in the new brand guidelines I designed for New Haven Pickleball. This is a community to connect with local, fellow pickle-ballers. No matter if you are brand new to this brilliant game or prepping for the day it is in the Olympics, you are welcome! I discovered this community in the summer of 2024 and almost one year later, have met many incredible people that I play Pickleball with regularly. Creating brand guidelines for New Haven Pickleball was a fun, yet challenging process since the brand had no foundation to work off besides a name and a few social media pages. I’m going to take you through an aspect of the brand guidelines that is one of the most vital components to making this brand what it is.

    Verbal Brand

    Regardless of the company or organization, the anatomy of all brands has a verbal brand component. For New Haven Pickleball, all it had was name. When you really think about it, a verbal brand is so much more than a name, it’s your company’s slogan, personality, tone of voice, and style of language.

    After reading a chapter on branding from the book “Graphic Design For Everyone” by Cath Caldwell, I understood what all of these parts of a verbal brand meant. After thinking, research, and some trial and error, I decided to change the name of this company to NHV PB, created the slogan “Community > Competition”, and established its values are inclusivity, positivity, learning and passion.

    These decisions about NHV PB’s verbal brand set the tone moving forward for the copy I used on marketing collateral including an event poster, brochure about the spring league, and a home page design comp for a website mockup.

    The slogan, “Community > Competition” might be the most important aspect of NHV PB’s verbal brand. This company is mainly a community. The “good” it sells is the sense of belongingness, camaraderie, and the opportunity to consistency play pickleball. Using this phrase as a slogan that appears on print collateral, merchandise, and digital properties echoes inclusivity as a brand value and welcomes players at all levels while still validating the legitimacy and opportunity to progress and get better at pickleball.

    I look forward to learning more about visual design and the opportunity to potentially work with the league manager who created New Haven Pickleball to implement some of these brand guidelines.


    Sources

    Caldwell, C., & Skene, R. (2019). Graphic design for everyone: Understand the building blocks so you can do it yourself. Dorling Kindersley Limited.

  • Evoking Emotions Through Writing: Why Typography is Branding’s Unsung Hero

    Image Source: Canva Dream Labs AI Generator

    Every day, the average person reads about a dozen different typefaces. Whether it’s a billboard for a new business that opened in your neighborhood, the recipe for a meal in a cookbook, or a television broadcast of your baseball team. Typography is one of the most powerful tools to convey emotion. Although it’s something most people seldomly think about in terms of understanding its core components and how to use it to convey specific moods, it is one of the most powerful tools a designer can have in their arsenal.

    After thinking about this week’s readings, videos, and assignments, I’m going to delve into the anatomy of type, explaining how several core components make up a typeface and ultimately the mood it conveys.

    Every Major Cog in the Machine

    After reading the first section of chapter 2: building blocks in the book, “Graphic Design for Everyone” it started to click for me. Just like the technology we have that uses lots of parts to make a device work, Typography has a nuanced anatomy with various components that make up its structure to create different typefaces. I’m going to teach you about three different components that make up the structure of a Typeface for you to better understand how designers can manipulate these things to create different typefaces.

    Ascenders

    The first component I want to examine is the ascender. An ascender is the part of the lowercase letter that extends above the x-height (the height of a font’s lowercase x). If a designer selects a font with high ascenders, it’s usually because they want a letter to be easily distinguishable. You’ll see this often with book titles, such as the example pictured below which would be used as a font for a fantasy book.

    Image Source: Creatype Studio

    Bowls

    The next component we’re going to look at is a bowl. This is the curved stroke that creates an enclosed space. This is a significant element of type design because the size, curvature, and proportions of the bowl can vary significantly depending on what typeface you’re using. A great juxtaposition to look at to better understand the bowl, is comparing the letters R and B and this article titled “Typography design 101: a guide to rules and terms” explains it perfectly.

    “The letters B, P and R are sister shapes, one being derived from the other. However, that doesn’t mean they have the same proportions. The bowl of the R needs to be slightly thinner so that when we connect the leg to it, it won’t become super thick. While the upper bowl of the B needs to be smaller than the bottom one, so that the letter appears more stable.”

    Image Source: 99Designs

    Serifs

    One of the most prevalent components in all typefaces is the presence or absence of a serif, a small, decorative extension at the ends of some strokes. This component defines whether a typeface is a serif type, or sans serif type. Serif types have this decorative extension and sans serif types do not. When you compare the two next to each other you can immediately tell a different mood is set. Serif typefaces typically look authoritative, professional and serious. Sans serif typefaces are usually quirky, whimsical and fun. Choosing these your typeface wisely based on your brand’s essence and expression can make or break your brand in terms of how it resonates with your intended target audience.  


    Although typography is the unsung hero when it comes to what the average person thinks of when they hear the word branding, understanding it and mastering it is one of the most useful skills a designer can build.

  • The Anatomy of Brand DNA

    The Anatomy of Brand DNA

    Staring at a blank canvas is overwhelming. Usually, we have an idea but taking a concept and turning it into reality to “get started” is where we have the most difficulty.

    This week, I learned about the different components of understanding your brand and why spending countless hours planning and researching will save you agita in the long run during the design phase.  Two concepts stood out to me the most and I want to emphasize why I think each of them is equally important in the world of branding.


    Brand Expression

    When it comes down to creating a brand plan there are four main stages in this process. Understanding the difference between creating your verbal brand and visual brand is paramount.

    When defining your verbal brand, you need to answer questions like:

    • What’s your brand’s summary line descriptor?
    • If you would describe your brand like a person with personality traits, how would you describe your brand?
    • If your brand were a person, how would it speak?

    Going through this consideration set with the New Haven Pickleball League, a small organization I am re-branding, I was able to establish the fact its tone of voice is chatty and informative, its values are inclusivity, positivity, an always learning mindset and passion, and its summary line is “Community over Competition.”

    Completing this exercise gets you one step closer to defining who your brand is and what audiences you want to connect with. After this, you can start to address the other side of the coin, visuals.


    Brand Essence

    Creating a visual language to convey the identity of your organization is a meticulous process. Collecting colors, images, and typefaces to make a mood board helped me organize my thoughts and start to think through what is central to the branding of the New Haven Pickleball League and figure out what’s that common thread that holds it all together.

    Selecting visuals that connect to your verbal brand and convey the words you chose that represent your brand is how you move forward in the design process to the fourth and final stage, development.

    Adaptable Aesthetics was at the top of mind while I was creating several versions of my logo. I used a combined mark with typography that conveys motion and unity (two constants in the world of Pickleball for all players). I also prioritized simplicity for my logo to work well in any context (business cards, water bottles, backpacks, apparel, etc.).

    Learning about the juxtaposition of a brand’s expression (verbal Language and positioning) and essence (visual language) has taught me how to use brand and design terminology, conduct research, and design brand components.

    An important distinction I took away from everything I’ve read and created this past week is that a logo is not a brand. It’s a unique design or symbol that represents an organization. A brand distills the nature of the experiences that consumers have when they come in contact with your business.

    I’m looking forward to delving deeper into typography over the next week and learning how it influences branding and visual design.