 Hi, I'm Dee, a senior product designer at AJ & Smart, and I'm about to show you, step by step, what happened in a real design sprint that we ran for a product that's now successfully on the market. So let's go into the deep dive of the design sprint we did for the Zero Fasting app, which is all about fasting for general health and well-being. If you don't know what a design sprint is, it's a rapid process for product development that makes sure you validate your ideas with real users to make sure they're going to be successful. You can find out lots more in these videos that will tell you all about the design sprint process. If you have any questions while you're watching this video about design sprints, prototyping, validating with users, just pop them in the comments. So let's dive into the actual case study. The Zero team came to us in 2018 with an app that already existed on the market, and here's what it actually looks like from a 2016 article. The app existed actually from 2016 till 2018 with not too many changes. This is what it looked like here. It was a basic functionality of different types of intermittent fasting with a timer to start and stop the fast and some basic history so that you could keep track of the fast that you've done. So the challenge that the Zero team came to us with was to enhance user engagement and increase retention in their already existing app. They already had 160,000 monthly active users, which is already a lot. The intermittent fasting world was kind of still small at that stage, so they really already had a lot of the people who were interested in fasting on board. And users were mostly happy. So we're starting from a good point, but the big focus of the Zero team was to not only increase the number of users, but also increase retention. So really focusing on user engagement inside the product so that new users that would be attracted to the service would stay and find it an engaging and useful experience. So now we're actually going to look at the record of the sprint and what happened in that first few days of the design sprint. And I'm going to show you our base camp. We use base camp to record all of our sprints. So this is the summary of the first two days of the design sprint with the Zero team. And if we look down here in the sprint, we defined the goal that in two years' time, Zero would be the go-to place for people who want to integrate fasting into their lives to improve their health. And the key questions that we had in the sprint, we had three core questions that we needed to find answers to. Can we create programs that keep people engaged long term? Can we guide users through fasting and eating periods in a friendly, informative way? And can we reward and show progress without making the app heavy and less simple? It was already quite simple and easy to use, but with basic functionality. We wanted to enhance the functionality, but keep it simple and easy. If we look down now at what happened actually in those first two days, there was the sprint workshop really getting an understanding of the topic with how might we questions. One of the core parts of the design sprint is drawing a map of the whole app, the whole system, and then choosing which area we want to focus on. So this was a crucial part of the sprint where we chose as a sprint team to focus on the actual usage of the functionality of the app. This is where the real engagement and interaction with users happens, and this is where retention happens as well. So we decided to focus on this. Then we went through a process of showing each other really interesting ideas from other things that exist in the world. So are there apps that have great retention with users and great user engagement? Ideas that we can remix and a tweak to make them work for us. So we had some great examples here from other services, and then we went right into actually sketching our own ideas. So here you can see the team actually creating their own concept sketches, remixing some ideas that have come up, ideas that they already had as well. And this is where the team really tries to get a lot of thoughts out on paper so that we can really see all the different ideas and then judge and decide which ideas do we think are really going to work for the challenge that we've come here to solve. So then the team goes through a process of voting and deciding with the decider of the sprint, which was the CEO of Zero, Mike, Mesa, deciding on the final way forward, and then figuring out how we're actually going to put those ideas together to show them to users to really validate if those ideas are going to actually increase engagement and increase retention and really solve users' problems. So these things you can see here on my screen are where we're deciding what flow should we put those ideas in front of users to make it a really simple understandable flow so that we can really get their feedback on the ideas that we put in there. After the team has sketched lots of different ideas, they go up together to be judged and decided on which ideas do we really think are going to have the best chance of success to solve our challenge of user engagement and increased retention. And there's some pictures here that we've recorded. All of our sprints, we take lots of pictures to show the process. You can see different kinds of concepts here that were sketched by the sprint team members and the process of actually looking at and deciding on each of those ideas. And this was where the decision was actually getting made of which core parts of the ideas we actually wanted to use. So here you can see the team actually voting and deciding on the different parts of the ideas and then deciding together how should we piece those ideas together into one concept to put in front of a user as a prototype and get them to test it and test all of those different ideas. Once the core ideas have been decided on and we know what things we think will have the biggest chance of success, we put them together into a storyboard so that the concept can easily be prototyped very quickly. So here you can see the team again together sketching and really laying out exactly what should be on each screen. So some of the ideas that were chosen were all about engagement and retention. One was onboarding, how we really explain very clearly in the very first experience of the app, what fasting is, what are the benefits and how is this applicable for you and meaningful for you as a user. And then there was the engagement experience of actually doing a fast rather than just having a timer that starts and stops to tell you when you start and stop fasting, really telling you what you might be feeling while you're fasting and tips that you can use to get through the fast more easily, how many other people are fasting with you to make you feel really engaged and like you're doing this with other people. So these kind of features were the core things that we wanted to test with real users to see if this would lead to higher engagement and increased retention. So that was the first two days of the Design Sprint where it's all about workshopping together as a team, making decisions, deciding what things do we want to test with users to really solve the challenge that we've come here to solve. So now let's jump into day three of the Sprint where we actually build these ideas into a prototype. So on my screen is the original app and what it looked like, which I showed before, of starting a fast and the history of your fast. And then this is the actual prototype that was done in that first week of the Design Sprint on day three. So we've got, we see here onboarding, really showing the benefits of fasting so people really understand what it means for them. We've got some little feature here that's hidden because it's actually still unreleased so we can't show it yet. And then we've got these screens which are still that timer saying when your fast is ending, but the new features that are added, little tips to tell you more about fasting and how it's affecting your body, how many other people are fasting with you right now and a great little more engaging kind of character and walkthrough that guides you through your fasting process. Then some more engagement features, like how did that fast actually feel for you so you can track how fasting is feeling, is it getting easier or harder, how you're feeling about it and some other tips as well, like what kinds of foods to eat when you come out of the fast and choosing the different types of fasts. So this was the full prototype from week one with those features and then we of course actually put those in front of real people to see how they reacted to those ideas and not just watching them use it but interviewing them more deeply and asking them questions. What do you mean by that? Why didn't you click on that thing? Can you tell me more about why you chose that option instead of that one? So then we're really testing these with multiple users and getting deeper insights into what things might work and what things might not. So at the end of this, which is the end of the Design Sprint week, we have a lot of information about what real users think about the new ideas that we think might solve our challenge. So this is going back into the base camp now showing what the process was after we finished that first week of the Design Sprint where we actually iterate for a second week to really take that feedback from users and make sure we're addressing any of the issues that came up. So we did a remote day with Mike Mesa, the CEO, where he wasn't actually in town anymore but we did a semi remote sprint workshop where we analyzed all of that user feedback together and then looked back at our goal and our questions that we needed to answer and made some iteration questions. So as well as the big challenge that we came here to solve, now that we've learned a lot from users, reacting to our ideas, what are some extra big questions, maybe the issues that came up and the things that we weren't expecting, how can we address those to help us really nail this product? So the three new sprint questions that we came up with from the feedback of this project was how can we make the intro onboarding journey even more clear? How can we guide users through really simple steps of their fasting while still allowing them some control over what they're doing and can we give users the feeling that they want to keep fasting, that they want to keep using the product? So again, it's all about engagement, understanding and retention of the product. The next step was creating some new sketches. So new ideas specifically focused on those big questions. So really thinking about the issues that came out of the user feedback and how do we iterate the ideas that we've already got and solve those challenges that we didn't know before. So the user testing is almost in some way a kind of research that we really gather from users what their big challenges are and how do we really align our product to make sure we're making something really valuable for them? So these are the new sketches created by the team, things that we really thought would solve those big new questions and you can see they've been voted on again and some decisions made. And then this is what the second prototype actually looked like. So you can see it's similar to the first one. We've got onboarding with some clearer, simpler explanations to help people really have that feeling of, oh, fasting feels right for me. I want to try this. Then we have more in the prototype, secret feature not released. I hope this is building some anticipation. The features will come soon. But okay, so we've got some similar onboarding but with much clearer explanation to try and make fasting feel like this is really going to be right for people and they really want to get in there and give it a try. We move on with some updated, iterated versions of the fasting screen which came from the new sketches and the feedback that came from users in the first week. And then we have some extra interactions like notifications to prompt people and remind people to come back into the app with things like ending their fast. Your fast is going to end soon. Maybe you want to think about these types of food that you should be eating when you end your fast. So these kind of engagement features as well were really designed to bring people back and keep people wanting to keep going using the app. Then we see some updated, iterated versions of that timer screen showing how long they've got on their fast which were really iterated and improved to be even clearer and simpler showing more information about the time of the fast. And we really wanted to test and see if that really kept people engaged and understanding what was happening in their fast. And then again, an iteration on these screens which are asking about how the fast went for people. Some more secret screens. And then much more detailed statistics and history because we found in the feedback from users that's something that they really cared about and really kept people wanting to keep going if they could see how well they've been going so far. So this was one of the new things that was added in the second week, the iteration week as well. So you can see how much iteration and improvement is done in the second design sprint week after feedback and reactions have been gathered from users. And then all is left to do is test again with some of the same users and some different users to really validate if those new iterations and new solutions are really solving those challenges of engagement and retention. And then actually delivering more detail of the designs that we now know are validated and will work with users. So these are some of the full handover that we gave to the zero team. So you can see how extensive that is. Now you can actually go into the app store and see the current version of zero which looks something like this. So you can see really updated, clear, simple timer screen, the very clear and simple different types of fasts and really engaging features that will keep people wanting to come back. So that was a really quick high level overview of some of the key steps in the design sprint. There's a lot of the detail has been left out because obviously it's a really in depth process but I hope that gave you a really great behind the scenes look at what really happens in the design sprint for successful digital product that's actually out on the market now. If you're actually interested in intermittent fasting you should really check out the zero app on the app store. It's the number one app for intermittent fasting anywhere in the world and it is really great. It's free to download, free to use. So you should really check that out. If you have any questions about the design sprint process or you want to see more content like this, this deep dive behind the scenes kind of stuff just post a comment underneath this video. If you want to hear and see more stuff like this give this video a like and we've got new content coming out every week so you can subscribe to our channel for more stuff like this. We've got a great newsletter you can sign up for. We've got daily vlogs on Instagram and we've got a great product design podcast called the Product Breakfast Club. All the links will be listed in the bio below. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you found this useful. Hope to see you again soon.