In Lean UX, a Sprint is a way to bring together all key stakeholders on a new project. The team works together for five days (a design week) and works their way through ideas for the project. Each Sprint was done virtually. We met on Discord voice call for stand up meetings to discuss what we needed to do in the next two days. Each Sprint has 12 stand up meetings. We also used Miro as a tool to test our assumptions and to create our wireframes. You can read more about what we’ve done in Sprint 1 below.
Design Week 0
For the first design week, we had no stand-up meetings. We did, however, work together to create a problem statement, list our assumptions, fill out the product backlog, create proto-personas, and fill out the sprint 1 backlog.
The goal for week 0 was to create a product problem statement. Stephanie Meneses elaborated on her app idea with the rest of the team. We then had a discussion about the problem statement. Together we filled out the problem statement template and ended up with this statement:
The current state of skincare tracking products has focused primarily on external skin stressors such as sun exposure, environment, stress, etc. What existing products/services fail to address is hormonal factors such as the menstrual cycle and how it affects skincare routines. Our product/service will address this gap by considering factors of external skin stressors as well as the internal factor of the menstrual cycle. Our initial focus will be on creating an app catered to women that wish to monitor and understand their menstrual cycle and the effect of hormonal changes on their skin.
After creating the problem statement, we had to get all our assumptions about what we were going to do on the table. We filled out the assumptions template on miro and split our assumptions between business and user assumptions. Business assumptions are things that we assume to be true in order to develop a strategy, make decisions, and plan for a product. User assumptions are simply what we assume to be true about the potential users of the product.
Next, we filled out the product backlog template. The purpose of this was to identify our hypothesis statements. The table columns are divided into statements such as “we will achieve [blank] if this person can achieve [blank] with this feature”. We came up with 11 hypotheses in the end.
After the backlog, we started our proto-personas. The purpose of this was to figure out who the personas were going to be for our service. They are called proto-personas because these are done with less research and because they were to be updated over the course of our Sprints. These are all based on our assumptions as mentioned before. This part was actually done after completing the first column of our Sprint backlog since the next column was dedicated to the proto-personas.
Through various interviews, testing, and research, we determined that this product has 3 main types of users. The beginner, the intermediate, and the expert. By creating these personas, we were able to understand who we were creating our product for and we could make sure we were not designed solely based on our assumptions. Our personas are named Claire Mueller, Dorothy Stewart, and Christina Ayer.
Claire would like to track her menstrual cycle to create a personalized skincare routine. To do this she needs an app that allows her to track both her cycle and skincare routine together so she can learn how her skin behaves during each phase of her cycle. Knowing this will help her find better products for her skin type.
Dorothy is now on birth control and would like to track its symptoms. She would like to be more knowledgeable about how it affects her skin as she noticed her skin getting drier during the process. She is also familiar with many ingredients commonly found in skincare products and common side effects and would like to know more about the current products available in the market that best suit her.
Christina is a skincare enthusiast and enjoys bingeing YouTube videos on the latest beauty products. She loves to try new products and change up her routine but needs somewhere to keep track of it and find personalized product recommendations. Knowing her menstrual cycle is important too so she can know what phase her skin is in and test new products in the phase where her hormones and skin are most stable.
Through various interviews, testing, and research, we determined that this product has 3 main types of users. The beginner, the intermediate, and the expert. By creating these personas, we were able to understand who we were creating our product for and we could make sure we were not designed solely based on our assumptions. Our personas are named Claire Mueller, Dorothy Stewart, and Christina Ayer.
Lastly, for Week 0 we began our Sprint 1 backlog. This was done to figure out what we could accomplish in Sprint 1. We used our assumptions for this and had a discussion to guess what the most important, riskest, and valuable features would be. After the discussion, we believed that creating a product recommendation feature would take the highest level of effort.
Sprint Week 1
In our next design week, we had three 2-day stand up meetings to discuss what we needed to do for the next two days. Most importantly, this was the week in which we created our low-fidelity wireframe. We decided that an app would be the best way to address the problem statement that we created before. The goal was to validate and invalidate a concept. We first used Miro to create the wireframe, then we moved to Figma to create the prototype based on the wireframe. The prototype on miro looked exactly the same as the wireframe because we did not focus on the visual design of the app. We wanted to lay out the information and understand how the pages would interact with each other.
We also interviewed three participants: Emily, Neva, and Cady. We did this to get an understanding of what people would be looking for in a skincare/menstrual cycle tracking app. When creating the questions, we split them into five groups: skincare routine-related, skincare products, website/app-related, menstrual cycle-related, and personal-lifestyle related questions. After completing the interviews, we also had to analyze the responses of the interviews as a team. Each participant turned in a consent form as well.
Sprint Week 2
In this week, we conducted a lean experiment. We wanted to figure out if people would want to know their cycle phase and what is happening with their skin every day, and if that would be helpful to them. Thus, the experiment was sending daily reminders to two people every day for a week. The notifications would remind them what phase they are in and what their skin was going through, plus tips to care for their skin. The “notifications” were done through texts.
We also did user testing of the low-fidelity prototype with two participants, Emily and Sheila. We sent questionnaires and a document with instructions on how to navigate the prototype. Here is what we analyzed from their questionnaire responses:
Push Notifications
We were unsure whether daily notifications would be too intrusive and whether users need to be reminded of their phase so often. Accounting for this we sent reminders every day but kept Phase notifications to every other day. Based on our feedback, daily notifications are intrusive however users did like certain reminders such as routine reminders and phase reminders. We can implement various notification settings that users can manually toggle on and off to customize what type of notifications they receive and how often they receive them.
Info and Tips
We did not include tips in all of our notifications as we wanted to keep them relatively short, but the ones we did include were geared towards the users’ phase and the day of the week. Based on our first participant’s feedback, the expert level persona, she did not find the tips useful as it was general knowledge that she already knew. The second participant however found the tips helpful as reminders. Though she didn’t save the ones we sent specifically, she believes this section would be useful to her. We plan to add tags to tips so users may filter what tips they would prefer to see in the app and as notifications.
Cycle Phase and Skin Complexion Tracking Features
Unfortunately, one week was not enough to fully predict users’ cycle as we would need more data. However, by asking some initial questions prior to the experiment, we were able to get an idea of what phase the users were in and what info might be beneficial to them. Based on the feedback, both participants liked the idea of knowing their phase and expressed interest in knowing more about the phase and its symptoms.
Overall Conclusion
We believe our three points were validated and will be beneficial to users. Based on our findings from this lean experiment we will maintain the features and improve them based on the feedback.
