Workshop - Search

Step 1. Brainstorm Customer Needs

Full team completes a brainstorm of all the possible needs a customer has relating to the problem we are trying to solve. In this example what do users need from a search function?

This helps us to better understand the problems we are trying to solve and decide on the most important parts of the problem.

Step 2. Affinity Mapping and Voting

Collect the needs into common themes and vote on importance to ensure we focus on the right things; this helps when developing the MVP (Skateboard) ensuring the most valuable features are delivered first.

Step 3. Review Competitor Solutions (Sometimes this is the first step)

Each participant reviews a solution from a competitor in the same problem space and shares findings with the team, what is good, bad and should be borrowed.

Competitor review

Step 4. Create a Customer Journey Map

Picking a person and crafting a typical scenario we flesh out a customer journey to find the opportunities and pain points during the search process. We also use this journey to think about the pre- and post-journeys, and to some extent red paths, e.g. if a customer didn’t find their solution they might then go to google and search there.

Step 5. Sketching Ideation Workshop

Using Crazy 8’s to warm up then a longer sketching session 30-40 mins we captured each participant’s ideas as sketches, each person has 3 mins to explain their ideas to the group.

Step 6. Feature prioritisation

Based on a long list of all the features we like we crafted a strategy for roll-out based on cost versus value to users.

Prioritisation matrix

Step 7. Into Design

After these stages the design work then moves into higher fidelity design work, taking the best idea from our sketches together with the MPV roll-out plans the full solution designs are crafted in Figma, once these have had a few reviews with the team. The final stage is to create the reduced MVP version for first stage development.