Design Sprint

As a Google Ventures portfolio company, my team at Rocket Lawyer had access some of the best design resources available anywhere. Along with extensive User Research and Data, we used a Design Sprint approach (pioneered by Jake Knapp of the Google Ventures team) to quickly question, define and test core concepts and hypotheses of our new UX.

We surfaced a number of user issues and technical concerns and assigned them relative priorities. With these articulated clearly, and with early stakeholder buy-in, I was able to synthesize and structure solutions to each of the issues. At about this time, to ensure our MVP was not slowed by typical product-debate cycles, working with a core team we internally tested a rapid design/prototyping process. This allowed stakeholders to interact with prototypes of features, treatments, UI components etc. With a supportive Dev team and management infrastructure, this really freed up the process and allowed for creative solutions to quickly become features.

Sketches & Wireframes

With a known set of problems, creating and testing different solutions becomes a joy. Ideas were sketched, shot down, appreciated and some eventually made it to the Wireframes stage. With millions of users and significant revenue at stake, multiple rounds of user-testing at the clickable-wireframe stage helped give me insight into how real people were interacting with the designs.

Prototyping

At this point, we had a number of good ideas, user-data to support the design decisions, and still a number of disparate treatments to test. For me, coding prototypes is a great way to highlight the importance of interaction design.

We built a number of prototypes to showcase and test frameworks, layout options, UI treatments and specific individual features. With sufficient testing feedback and lots of stakeholder debate, we began the Alpha roll-out of the new UX in late 2014.

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