Hack Day
Rapid ideation, Prototyping, Journey mapping
Introduction
I love a good hack day! It’s a great chance to get together with colleagues outside of your own team and step outside of our collective comfort zone. It’s also competitive, which inspires me to go the extra mile (not gunna lie). This year we were given a series of briefs from stakeholders to try and solve a business problem in 24 hours. My team consisted of — three product designers, a service designer and a content designer. We picked up a project that was focused around personalisation.
The brief — “We begin gathering data about our players the moment they land on our site and continue to do so as they fill out the registration form. Yet, our current approach provides a uniform post-registration experience for all players. How can we enhance personalisation and tailor this experience to meet each players unique needs?”
Workflow
In order to deliver on time we had to work fast, so it is was tempting to ‘skip to the end’ and jump into UI Design. However, we all agreed that the real value would come from solving the user problem (not just the business problem). With this in mind we decided to spend half of the day on research and ideation. Design / prototyping would start after lunch. It is more desirable to deliver a ‘solid concept’ on paper rather than a ‘half baked solution’ in hi-fidelity. So we opted for ‘substance over style’. This approach allowed us time to reach out to stakeholders, ask questions and gather insights. Once we had defined the problem we started to map out potential solutions in low fidelity.
The concept
The concept came in the form of a post sign-up journey that allows users to customise their account from the very start. Our proposal welcomes them properly to Unibet and allows them to set up their preferences, making them feel like they’re in control in their account. This process allows the user to specify their way of play, pick their favourite games and sports, and get a welcome bonus that really reflects their interests.
We also provided alternative journeys for users who don’t want to do this straight away, by identifying other touch points across the site.
Presentation
We gave our presentation as a team, by dividing it into sections. This included the working process, initial concepts and a hi-fidelity prototype (I have friends in the brand team, so it did come out looking quite polished in the end!). We managed to deliver all this alongside real feedback from usertesting.com. In order to do all this in time, we had to submit the prototype for user testing by the end of the day. This really came down to the wire, but we felt that including validation from users would give us the edge (and it is good practice of course).
So we won obviously! Actually no, but it was a great experience. Bring on the next one!