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"result": {"data":{"allArticles":{"edges":[{"node":{"excerpt":"","fields":{"slug":"/blog/digital-product-prototyping-what-s-it-all-about/"},"frontmatter":{"title":"Digital Product Prototyping – what’s it all about?","order":null,"content":[{"body":"With over **270 products for 89 clients** over the last 17 years, we think that here at Boldare, we know a thing or two about creating first-rate, innovative digital products. A big part of ensuring quality output is our use of the **lean startup approach** married with the **[scrum framework](https://www.boldare.com/blog/building-apps-using-scrum-development/)** – we are, after all, an agile organization.\n\nA key concept from lean startup, one that comes early in the process and helps create a solid foundation for the final product, is prototyping.\n\n\n\n## What is digital prototyping?\n\nIn the projects we deliver at Boldare, [digital prototyping services](https://www.boldare.com/services/full-cycle-product-development/prototyping/) is the first testing (with users, stakeholders, and investors) of the general concept for the design. **A digital prototype has no engineering behind** **it with few or no working functionalities or real data.** In fact, the prototype is often a front, an interactive visualization or clickable trailer of the product – a means to test and validate the look and feel decided on so far, and the main business concept.\n\n\n\nIn other words, **a product prototype development process is when you validate your basic idea** and the assumptions underpinning it by gathering user reactions. The key is that **prototyping is done rapidly**, and with a minimum investment of time and resource. Prototypes are the initial ‘real-world’ test for your product concept.\n\nA classic example of prototyping was demonstrated by the well-known example of Zappos originator, [Nick Swinmurn](http://fortune.com/2012/09/05/nick-swinmurn-zappos-silent-founder/).\n\nSwinmurn **tested his initial idea** for an online shoe store by going to a bricks and mortar retailer and taking pictures of their shoes. He posted those pictures online and when he received an order, he went to that retailer, purchased the shoes and mailed them to his customer. Although he had a working website, as a shoe store it was just a façade. The process was clunky and slow but in testing the concept, it proved that people would buy shoes online. Testing the idea is what counts, not the actual form of the prototype.\n\nHowever, although prototypes can come in many forms (paper, video, digital, or even simply a question to the right group of people) at Boldare, we’re focused on digital product development and when a project would benefit from prototyping, it almost always has some kind of digital presence or format.\n\n**Whatever format you choose for your digital prototypes, it must be easily understood by the audience.** Even if it doesn’t look at all like the product you have in mind at this early stage, your prototype has to have some element of realism.\n\n*\"Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas In Just Five Days*,\" a book by three Google Ventures design partners: Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, warns against the danger of ‘customer imagination’. Simply put, if you present your prototype audience with a piece of paper, then however clearly it shows your intended product, they have to imagine that product and when people use their imagination, they start thinking about how the product is designed and built and begin to think of ways to do that better because they want to be helpful. In other words, they give you feedback.\n\nThis might sound good but actually, at this stage, you don’t want detailed feedback and suggestions, you want reactions. **How do potential customers respond? What’s their gut-level reaction? To get that reaction, the digital prototype should look as real as possible** but without having needed excessive time and resource to produce it – after all, you’re only prototyping!\n\n\n\n## Digital prototyping principles\n\nIn addition to making your prototype as real-looking as possible, Knapp, Zeratsky and Kowitz offer some other broad principles to follow for digital prototyping.\n\n### You can prototype anything\n\nThis is about attitude. **Digital prototypes are often done under significant time pressure**. In fact, the “Five Days” in the book’s title refers to a single scrum sprint in which the days go as follows:\n\n1. Explore the problem you want to solve.\n2. Come up with a variety of solution ideas.\n3. Decide how to turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis.\n4. Create a prototype to test the hypothesis.\n5. Test the prototype.\n\nAt Boldare, we don’t insist on just one day for prototyping – if we create a prototype, the time it takes is the time needed to build the right prototype for the project, and no more. That said, we completely agree a positive attitude is definitely tool number one.\n\n\n\n### Prototypes are disposable\n\n**The point here is that no digital prototype is intended to be developed into the full product.** It’s a presentation of product features and appearance, not an actual product itself.\n\nAt this stage, you’re testing the idea and too much time spent on prototype development is wasted time. Not to mention the fact that the longer you work on anything, the more attached to it you become. Don’t get attached to your prototype, you might have to pivot 180 degrees, depending on customer reactions.\n\n### Build just enough to learn, but not more\n\nRemember, **a digital prototype** **is not a fully-functioning design**, it’s a test designed to answer certain questions: your hypothesis. In the case of Zappos, the question was, *Will people buy shoes online?* Swinmurn didn’t need to buy shoes as stock for his online store, all he needed to answer the question was pictures of shoes, and a way to fill orders so customers weren’t let down.\n\n## Why digital prototyping is useful – the benefits\n\nApart from their obvious use– testing your product idea with real customers – **digital prototypes can be very helpful when** **gaining commitment from stakeholders and investors**. Any pitch for funding you make will be seriously enhanced by a tangible version of the product.\n\nPrototyping (or more accurately, the reactions to your prototype) **helps you to better understand the proposed features of your design**, its risks, its potential impact on the market, and just whether you have an idea worth pursuing or not.\n\nWe haven’t begun product design yet (that starts later, with the minimum viable product or [MVP](https://www.boldare.com/services/mvp-development/)), we’re still exploring the underlying product idea.\n\nIn addition, digital prototyping has the following benefits:\n\n* It’s relatively quick to do.\n* It’s low-cost.\n* By testing early, your final product will almost certain get to market quicker.\n\n> Sure, you could take a longer time to build a more perfect prototype—but doing so would only slow down the learning process. That may not matter if you’re on the right path, but let’s face it—not every idea is a winner. Whether you’re taking a risk on a bold idea, or you’re just not sure, it’s better to find out early.\n\n\n\n## The Boldare product prototype development process\n\nAs already mentioned, at Boldare we follow the lean startup approach, as first established by Eric Ries’ 2008 book, *“The Lean Startup”*. Our exact development process varies from project to project, but a generalized version would be:\n\n* **Product basis** – using tools such as the business model canvas, the product vision workshop is the first exploration of the product concept, building a strong and shared understanding of the product vision.\n* **General UI/UX** – a user interface (UI) concept is developed (possibly using a clickable wireframe prototype), which then leads to the graphic design of the product, for which options are tested using mood boards. Wireframes are developed to explore different UI ideas and the basic structure of the product architecture is laid out.\n* **Prototyping** – usually, we build a clickable prototype of the product for presentation and testing, using HTML/CSS or JS to approximate a final product experience.\n\nUsually, prototyping is followed by development of a minimum viable product, or MVP.\n\n* [MVP development](https://www.boldare.com/blog/mvp-development-everything-you-want-to-know/) – based on feedback and learning so far, we build a product with just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its further development.\n\n\n\nSome people see the *digital prototyping* phase as being wrapped up in (or even indistinguishable from) the MVP phase, and there are certainly many projects in which the first ‘build’ is the MVP. However, these two kinds of preliminary design are definitely different in principle:\n\n1. The prototype tests the idea, the MVP tests the potential product.\n2. The prototype creates a foundation for the design of the MVP.\n3. At the MVP phase, the basic concept has already been proven.\n4. An MVP is viable, i.e. it works, it is a product (albeit a far from final one), but a prototype is the appearance of a product.\n\n## Digital prototype examples. What we've created for our clients – Cryo\n\nCryo is a web-based platform for cryotherapy enthusiasts and entrepreneurs (cryotherapy includes the use of a variety of low temperature treatments as part of medical therapy). The idea behind this project was to create a one-stop shop that:\n\n1. offers cryotherapy business owners a place to promote themselves;\n2. provides users with information about cryotherapy and cryotherapy services.\n\n\n\n**This digital prototype example offered a rare challenge in that the two different user groups had very distinct needs.** The business owners were effectively looking for a marketing platform, while the customers were looking for a reliable source of information and recommendations.\n\nAs part of the development process, we prototyped key features to ultimately produce a catalogue of services, a review and rating system, and a booking process.\n\n## Prototyping teams\n\nWhen we create a prototyping team for a partner, we take care to match the people to the bespoke product they will be creating. When assembling a prototyping team, we include specialists with the following skills and characteristics:\n\n* able to work in a fast-paced environment\n* openness to change\n* ability to prioritize tasks accordingly to the business goals\n* a laser focus on prototyping goals\n* an ‘out of the box’ way of thinking and problem-solving attitude \n* knowledge and previous experience of working with prototypes\n\n**The digital prototyping team will usually consist of product designers specialized in UX/UI, wireframing and user testing**. Prototypes can be created with low to no-code techniques, so the use of developers can be minimized. The team will also be supported by a scrum master. \n\n## Digital Product Prototyping for a better understanding of your business idea\n\nIn a way, digital prototyping is the art of illusion, creating what seems to be a product but isn’t (or just one aspect of a product) in order to gather reactions that will tell you whether your basic concept is worth pursuing further or not. And if not, reactions to your prototype will point to a new (and better) direction for development.\n\n"}],"job":null,"photo":null,"slug":null,"cover":"/img/Prototyping_what_s_it_all_about_.png","lead":"Prototyping can be used as the first experiment stage in the [product development process](https://www.boldare.com/services/full-cycle-product-development/); the first chance to show your concept to users. Prototypes come in many different forms but each one is created to test the underlying design concept. User reactions are then used to guide the next phase of development.","templateKey":"article-page","specialArticle":false,"isNewWork":null,"isNewNormal":null,"service":null,"settings":{"date":"2018-12-18T12:45:58.553Z","slug":"digital-product-prototyping-whats-it-all-about","type":"blog","slugType":null,"category":"Digital Product","additionalCategories":["Ideas"],"url":null},"author":"Artur Belka","authorAdditional":null,"box":{"content":{"title":"What is a digital product prototype?","tileDescription":"Prototyping can be used as the first experiment stage in the product development process; the first chance to show your concept to users. Prototypes come in many different forms but each one is created to test the underlying design concept. User reactions are then used to guide the next phase of development.","coverImage":"/img/Prototyping_what_s_it_all_about__-_miniatura.png","tags":null},"coverImage":null,"settings":null,"type":"BLOG"}},"id":"e9c5a21b-f2e8-536e-a8b7-80f47bce5e3d"}},{"node":{"excerpt":"","fields":{"slug":"/blog/digital-product-prototyping-it-s-a-team-effort/"},"frontmatter":{"title":"Digital Product Prototyping – it’s a team effort","order":null,"content":[{"body":"So, it should be no surprise that we take great care in how we put our teams together, tailoring each unit’s experience and capabilities to create the perfect mix for each project, and for each project phase. When it comes to [digital product prototyping](https://www.boldare.com/blog/digital-product-prototyping-whats-it-all-about/), both a specific skill set and mindset are necessary.\n\n**The prototyping team’s function is to analyze your product concept** and business goals, ideate the product with you, create low-fidelity or high-fidelity prototypes, and use the reactions of customers to the prototyping to explore the basic product assumptions. All of which allows the team to go on to build the best [possible minimum viable product ](https://www.boldare.com/blog/mvp-what-why-how/) (**MVP**). They use a variety of methods, including [design thinking](https://www.boldare.com/blog/what-is-design-thinking/) and [design sprints](https://www.boldare.com/blog/what-are-design-sprints/).\n\n\n\n## Quick context: What is digital product prototyping?\n\nPrototyping is the first **test of your product idea with users**. The prototype is a presentation to potential users and customers in order to get a reaction. That prototype may be barely functional, it may be a façade of a product, and it may not resemble the eventual final product at all.\n\nIn general, prototypes can come in many forms (including paper, video, digital…) but with Boldare’s focus on digital product development, when we do create a prototype, it almost always has some kind of digital presence or format.\n\nPrototyping is not necessary for every **digital design project** – sometimes the first tangible output is a minimum viable product, or MVP – but when they are indicated, they are:\n\n* Quick.\n* Cheap.\n* Low risk.\n* A way of better understanding the proposed product.\n* The first ‘real-world’ test for your product concept.\n\n\n\n## Putting together a prototyping team\n\nThe accountabilities of the prototyping team can be summarized as:\n\n1. Minimizing the risk of failure in the long run.\n2. Tackling real customer needs, with empathy, in an innovative way.\n3. Conducting small experiments and tests.\n\nIn light of these accountabilities, and depending on the nature of the project and the product being developed, **the prototyping team** typically includes people with experience in a variety of **key roles**:\n\n* Frontend Developer\n* Visual Designer\n* UX Designer\n* Product Designer\n* Business Analyst\n* Scrum Master\n\nEach prototyping team is a unique blend of skills, knowledge and experience, created to fit the requirements of the project, as discussed with the client.\n\nIn light of the roles listed above, this usually means a mix of various **prototyping techniques** (including Design Thinking, Wireframing), KISS techniques (Keep it Simple Stupid), Business analysis, and numerous testing methods and tools.\n\n**The technologies** they may be called upon to apply to the client’s concept might include JavaScript, JS Frameworks like React or Angular, InVision, Flinto, Framer.js, LYMB, HTML, Bootstrap, and Foundation.\n\n\n\nAlongside these more technical requirements, we also take into account our own **team selection criteria at Boldare**, focused on achieving high levels of performance and teamwork:\n\n* People who have already worked together – Familiarity within a team is a key driver of performance and at Boldare, we always include at least two team members who have been colleagues on a previous project. This familiarity can make the forming and storming stages of the team development process much easier (and shorter). From day one, our teams deliver real value.\n* Highly skilled people – Each team has a balance of complementary soft and hard skills, including self-organization so that both individually and as a team, people work flexibly and with responsibility.\n* Mixed seniority – We find that a combination of experience and fresh perspective makes for the perfect team. When prototyping, we bring both to the table for the client.\n\n## The perfect prototyping culture\n\n‘Culture’ is a fancy way of saying, how we do things around here. Every team has one and it should be a perfect balance of the individuals who make up that team and the needs of the project. A team’s culture can be seen in how its members work together, how they collaborate with the client, and in the outputs that they produce.\n\nHere at Boldare, a digital prototyping team works on the **following principles**:\n\n* Balancing the measurable and the unmeasurable (emotions, connotations, habits)\n* Quick decision-making\n* Appetite for bold ideas\n* Learning from failure and risk\n* Essential experimentation\n\nThe one element that takes more of a backseat in this phase of the lean startup approach is product quality. Because we’re not making a product, we’re making a prototype. And a digital prototype sometimes only needs the appearance of a product in order to test an idea, concept or hypothesis.\n\n## Benefits of working with a prototyping team\n\nHaving clarified the underlying concept, needs and business goals, the prototype is the first step into the external world for the project.\n\nBy drawing on the outputs of the [Product Workshop](https://www.boldare.com/blog/product-vision-workshops-toolkit/), the prototyping team follow the **lean startup principle** of build-measure-learn to test and refine your ideas and turn them into a testable design.\n\nThe team then applies its expert skills and knowledge to the customer reactions to the prototype to further support the development process, ready for the next stage. They bridge the gap between the Product Workshop and creating the MVP – the gap between ideas and a functioning product – and lay the practical foundations for a successful product.\n\n## The prototyping team in action – BlaBlaCar, a real-life example\n\nAt the beginning of the project, well-known carpooling platform, BlaBlaCar had 24 million users and an enviable position in the marketplace. However, the goal was to expand into 27 new countries, each with their own unique legal and cultural requirements, while also expanding the design of the company’s app with new and improved features.\n\n\n\nWhat BlaBlaCar was lacking was an agile, self-organizing in-house development team. The longer-term strategy involved establishing a development center in Warsaw. However, BlaBlaCar knew that it would take too long to recruit, onboard and train a new development team and was looking for a readymade external team that could work closely with the company.\n\nWhat made Boldare right for BlaBlaCar? We met their **partnership criteria:**\n\n* Quick reaction times and fast work (the team was ready to start within two weeks).\n* An already high-performing unit that could become a full-time extension of their own team.\n* Skilled developers and product designers (each individual was interviewed separately by the client).\n* Similar organizational DNA (in this case, a mature company but with a startup culture built on trust, accountability, knowledge-sharing and teamwork).\n\nImplementing a prototyping approach based on collaboration and transparency, the Boldare team created 10 new digital products for BlaBlaCar, enhancing the customer offering and now the company is market leader in its chosen regions, having boosted membership from 24 to 35 million users.\n\n> I was lucky to work with these guys for almost a year. They were very professional from the beginning to the very last day.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n## Boldare Prototyping Team - skills, experience, teamwork\n\nPrototyping is a key element of our lean product development process here at Boldare. We have experience with producing a wide variety of prototypes, depending on the element of the project we are testing.\n\nOur prototyping teams are chosen for their specific skill sets and experience, according to the project needs. Our culture of teamwork encourages the right application of those skills and experience, and also ensures close collaboration with the client throughout the prototyping phase."}],"job":null,"photo":null,"slug":null,"cover":"/img/Prototyping_it_s_a_team_effort.png","lead":"The art of the agile organization is collaboration. In other words, teamwork is essential. Between the individual members of our in-house digital project teams, and with our clients and Product Owners, teamwork is the foundation for a successful, quality product.","templateKey":"article-page","specialArticle":false,"isNewWork":null,"isNewNormal":null,"service":null,"settings":{"date":"2018-12-07T13:41:49.238Z","slug":"digital-product-prototyping-team-effort","type":"blog","slugType":null,"category":"Digital Product","additionalCategories":["Tech","Agile"],"url":null},"author":"Romuald Członkowski","authorAdditional":null,"box":{"content":{"title":"Digital Product Prototyping – it’s a team effort","tileDescription":"The art of the agile organization is collaboration. In other words, teamwork is essential. Between the individual members of our in-house digital project teams, and with our clients and Product Owners, teamwork is the foundation for a successful, quality ","coverImage":"/img/Prototyping_it_s_a_team_effort_-_miniatura.png","tags":null},"coverImage":null,"settings":null,"type":"BLOG"}},"id":"f3b97c7c-4034-565a-89af-dd7bdfd33cea"}},{"node":{"excerpt":"","fields":{"slug":"/blog/what-are-design-sprints/"},"frontmatter":{"title":"What are design sprints?","order":null,"content":[{"body":"**From an undefined broad concept to a tested product in just five days? That’s a design sprint.** Okay, maybe not a “product” but a [digital prototype](https://www.boldare.com/blog/digital-product-prototyping-whats-it-all-about/), definitely. A good design sprint means positive and measurable progress for the client, and significant motivation for the development team.\n\nThere are two versions of the design sprint. The first (classic?) version is neatly defined on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_sprint):\n\n> A Design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses Design Thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market.\n>\n> This process helps the team in clearly defining goals, validating assumptions and deciding on a product roadmap before one line of code is written.\n\nThis first version was first presented in the 2016 book, [Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas In Just Five Days](https://www.thesprintbook.com/) by Jake Knapp, with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. In this book, Knapp lays out a method of rapid development that he created while working at Google. Applying the key stages of Design Thinking to a five-day timetable, Knapp’s original model is:\n\n1. Monday – **map the problem**; understand it in depth, including the business opportunity, the potential users of the solution; agree your metrics to measure success.\n2. Tuesday – **sketch out the solution**; individual team members explores ways of addressing the understood problem (note: feasibility is not a criteria at this point, quantity of options is).\n3. Wednesday – decide **which potential solution is worth pursuing**; explore that solution further using tools such as storyboarding.\n4. Thursday – **prototyping**; design and build a prototype for testing.\n5. Friday – **testing**; present the prototype to five people from the target user audience.\n\nStages one to three come with structured exercises to help the sprint team address the issues efficiently and in depth. However, as with anything new, sooner or later improvements are made…\n\n\n\n## Design Sprint 2.0\n\n**The latest version of design sprints cuts down on the time factor, being a four-day process, not five.** The extra time is saved by effectively combining Monday and Tuesday’s activities into a single day, working at a faster pace, keeping the energy and momentum high.\n\n**The new timetable looks like this:**\n\n1. Monday – map the problem; sketch out the solution.\n2. Tuesday – decide on a solution; storyboard\n3. Wednesday – prototyping.\n4. Thursday – testing.\n\nThe time-saving is achieved by fine-tuning the exercises relating to understanding the problem, and devising and choosing solutions. The final two days – prototyping and testing – are as per the original model.\n\n## When is a sprint not a design sprint?\n\n**When it’s agile**. In other words, there is some overlap in terminology and a design sprint is not the same as an agile sprint (using, for example, the scrum framework), though both aim to achieve significant progress in a sort space of time.\n\nWhereas an agile sprint is a part of a multi-sprint process, creating and exploring a sequence of product features and iterations, **a product design sprint is usually a ‘one time only tool’ during your project, focused tightly on understanding the problem in depth and deciding on a way forward.**\n\nPut simply, the focus of the design sprint is to decide what the product should be and whether it should be built. An agile sprint (one of many, remember) is a case of, does this version/feature of the product work?\n\nA design sprint may be followed by a series of agile sprints. Although, if you’re tackling a complex, multi-faceted problem, as the product begins to take shape via the agile sprints, you may also be running another design sprint focused on a different aspect of the problem or feature of the eventual product.\n\n\n\n## Purpose of design sprints\n\nNaturally, a design sprint is not always the right tool for the job. According to sprint originator [Jake Knapp](https://www.invisionapp.com/blog/popular-design-sprint-questions/), design sprints should be used for when:\n\n* You have a big project or big problem to solve;\n* You’re just starting out;\n* You don’t already have the answer to your problem;\n* You’re faced with a potentially expensive project and need a cost- (and time-) effective way of proceeding.\n\n**So, when should you not sprint?**\n\n* When there is insufficient information available – for an effective design sprint, you need information often accessible only via key stakeholders in the client organization, including the overall product vision (though this may already have been worked through in a Product Vision Workshop), user needs and views, details of any previous attempts to solve the problem, and also details of any current version of the product (if applicable).\n* When it’s just not possible to produce a prototype in one day. The prototype should be sufficiently representative of the aimed-for solution for test users to provide meaningful feedback. Sometimes, that can be done in a day.\n\n## The Design Sprint 2.0 process\n\n**Each day of the four-day design sprint process includes the following:**\n\n### Monday (understanding the problem & solution-storming)\n\nUnderstanding the problem is done via a series of exercises and structured conversations. In a nutshell, it’s about ‘downloading’ all the necessary information to the sprint team in as efficient a way as possible. To begin applying this knowledge, key questions and long-term goals are identified, and the product is mapped.\n\nNext it’s time for a solution focus. In place of the well-established group brainstorming method, each team member ‘storms’ individually, sketching their own potential solutions using a straightforward critical thinking process.\n\n### Tuesday (choosing a solution & storyboarding)\n\nAgain using recommended exercises, the team decides which solution will be taken forward to the next phase. Once a decision is made, a storyboarding process is used to illustrate a step-by-step plan for the prototype.\n\n### Wednesday (prototyping)\n\nThe decision-making is done, it’s time to build, to bring the storyboard to life in the form of a physical prototype. This is not a version of the product (viable or otherwise) but a realistic-looking representation that will tell you if you’re on track or not.\n\n### Thursday (testing & feedback)\n\nTesting, testing, 1, 2, 3… Five users are shown the prototype in five different 1-to-1 structured interviews geared to obtaining the maximum possible useful feedback.\n\n\n\n## Benefits of design sprints\n\nEvery time you run a design sprint, you’re aiming to get answers to key questions concerning the problem and the product, a sufficiently-detailed prototype, feedback from users following testing, and a plan for the next stage of your digital product development. **These outputs are the obvious benefits of design sprints.** However, there are more…\n\nFirstly, you’re **bringing people together.** People with different knowledge, experience and expertise who can benefit from working with each other. Not only in the sense of achieving the best possible product at the end of the process, it’s also a collaboration that is a foundation for any future working together.\n\nNext, you’re ensuring **project transparency** across the organizations involved. By accessing and discussing project information collectively, you know that everyone is on the same page and working with the same goals in mind.\n\nThe design sprint process, for all its speed, is a cautious one. You’re **moving fast** but in such a way that you’re less likely to go too far down any blind alleys. Rigorous testing of the key features/functionalities via the prototype reduce risk and mean that when you come to make the big technical and time investment developing the full product, your efforts will be highly focused.\n\nYou’re **involving the target users** right from the start and their feedback is a key guiding influence on the direction of development. As opposed to being an end-of-process add-on.\n\nFinally, regular use of design sprints for the right projects is part of developing a more innovative culture in an organization. A design sprint is a concentrated burst of focused creativity and for anyone taking part, it can be a powerful experience.\n\n\n\n## Design sprints in Boldare – a case study\n\nWhen sister companies XSolve and Chilid were in the early stages of our merger to create Boldare, we naturally used the same business tools for the project that we use on our client projects. The goal was to create a unified entity that could offer the full range of digital product development services. To test that business idea, we used a version of the design sprint method.\n\n**The detail of our process looked like this:**\n\n1. Our designers, developers and content writers got together to analyze the situation.\n2. Having decided to proceed with the Boldare website as the product, the sections and content elements of the site were mapped out using the tried and tested sticky notes.\n3. Having effectively produced the information architecture and a rough wireframe, the developers began coding, creating the [UX](https://www.boldare.com/work/why-design-matters/) and visual elements.\n4. The resulting prototype was tested and feedback received.\n\nThis process was part of a four-week project, ending in a website created to minimum viable product (MVP standards. That MVP is now the basis of the boldare.com website as the merger progresses.\n\nRead [Boldare case study](https://www.boldare.com/work/case-study-boldare/) to learn more.\n\n## Summarizing design sprints\n\n**What is a design sprint? It’s a very specific process for getting from business idea to user feedback within a week.** As a digital product development method, it reduces project risk and expense and leads to rapid creation of a physical prototype (and the consequent focused user input) via the most efficient route possible. In addition to the benefits to the project, design sprints, when used regularly, can be part of creating a culture of innovation in an organization and enhancing the quality of that organization’s teamworking."}],"job":null,"photo":null,"slug":null,"cover":"/img/lean-startup-moodboard.jpg","lead":"The design sprint method is a great tool for [digital product design and development](https://www.boldare.com/services/product-design-and-development/). That’s why, when it’s a fit with a project, we at Boldare use it to create a shared understanding of the client’s product and rapidly develop a useful prototype. Design sprints carry a number of benefits, some specific to the project and other longer term advantages for the organization that uses them.","templateKey":"article-page","specialArticle":false,"isNewWork":null,"isNewNormal":null,"service":null,"settings":{"date":"2018-09-12T12:20:26.000Z","slug":"what-are-design-sprints","type":"blog","slugType":null,"category":"Digital Product","additionalCategories":["Digital Product","Strategy"],"url":null},"author":"Adam Ziemba","authorAdditional":null,"box":{"content":{"title":"What are design sprints?","tileDescription":"The design sprint method is a great tool for digital product development. That’s why, when it’s a fit with a project, we at Boldare use it to create a shared understanding of the client’s product and rapidly develop a useful prototype. Design sprints carry a number of benefits, some specific to the project and other longer term advantages for the organization that uses them.","coverImage":"/img/lean-startup-moodboard.jpg","tags":null},"coverImage":null,"settings":null,"type":null}},"id":"65930467-2328-534f-aa46-090ceb6c826c"}}]}},"pageContext":{}},
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