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Hexagon Community Design Sprint Workshop

Hexagon UX Houston is a women-lead chapter of the global Hexagon UX non-profit. Since I co-lead and co-founded the Houston chapter in 2017, we have been providing events, mentorship programs, and community for women in Houston with an interest and passion in UX.

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I was part of the co-lead team that developed program content and lead activities for the design sprint workshop with an actual client.

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Final mobile application for the Blue Chip Scholars Mentorship program

The Client

Blue Chip Scholars was founded by a woman Crewed Spaceflight Operations Instructor at NASA. The program's mission is to enable young women (ages 13 -18) in the acquisition of the skills, experience, and network needed to become innovators and strategic leaders through group mentoring with professional women and college students in STEM.

The Challenge

Blue Chip Scholars wants to provide a better experience connecting their mentors and their mentees, called Scholars. And they needed help understanding what it takes to scale as an organization.

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Our high-level goals with partnering with Blue Chip Scholars were: 

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  1. Provide real-world projects for our community to learn design skills through

  2. Provide the client tangible deliverables that she can take forward and develop

  3. Create a relationship with another community with our mission of creative diversity in technology

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Workshop breakdown

We started brainstorming the workshop at the beginning of 2020. The plan was to have a full 2-day weekend design hackathon that covered all 5 stages of a design sprint.

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Original Plan Break Down

Then COVID happened, and we had to quickly pivot the events to all virtual. We split the workshop into 3 parts to run once a month for 2 hours each and additional volunteer sessions between parts 2 and 3.

 

The workshop portion of the project went from May - July 2020.

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Pivot Plan Break Down

Roles & Responsibilities

I lead the "explore" portion of the design sprint by developing exercises for the workshop, leading additional sessions to design out the user features wireframes, and turning those wireframes into high-fidelity prototypes for testing.

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In addition, I worked closely with our research speakers in finalizing the testing workshop and my co-leads in presenting progress during client touchpoints.​

Discovery

Blue Chip Scholars needed our help to understand their program needs and where the opportunity lay. So we did market research, conducted a stakeholder interview with the founder and customer interviews with 1 professional mentor, 2 college mentors, and 2 scholars.  

IMG OF WORK

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Interview raw data

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Competitive analysis

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High-level opportunities

Personas & Customer Experience Maps

Due to the limitation of the number of mentors and mentees we could interview our persona is defined by each participant type:

 

  • Nicole Knowledge (Professional Mentor)

  • Madison Motivated (College Mentor)

  • Emma Explorer (Scholar)

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We created personas as well as current customer experience maps as assets for the rest of the workshop.

Professional Mentor
College Mentor
Scholar

Personas

Customer Experience Map

Day 1: Understand & Define

In the 1st workshop, we shared the discovery findings and taught the best practices of doing research at this stage of a project. Then we broke participants into break out groups where I facilitated one group in exercises of empathy mapping, writing 'How Might We' statements, and generating the problem statement to solve during this design sprint. 

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3 teams' 'How Might We' statements

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Mentee focused problem statement

Day 2: Ideation

At the start of the 2nd workshop, we recapped everything about the customers we learned through research for both new and old participants. We narrow down the scope to focus on the mentees. Then I led them through the ideation exercises:

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  1. Crazy 8

  2. Storyboarding

  3. Dot-Voting and super vote

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Storyboards with voting complete

At the end of this workshop, we had specific features to work through for the product solution. I also learned from this workshop that the next prototyping exercises will take longer because of both the virtual nature of the workshop and the limited duration of each session.

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The features that were voted forward

Confirmed features:

 

  • Easy to follow steps in setting up a new project

  • Mentor and Scholar communication between weekly sessions

  • Gamification on earning new skills

  • Project progress tracking

Between event Sessions: Wireframes & Prototype

Luckily there was a lot of enthusiasm in getting involved with these between event sessions. Our participants were both engaged in the project and excited by the opportunity to grow their UX skills.

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There were 5 weeks before the testing workshop, and I lead design sessions with 5-6 participants once a week.

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For the first 2 sessions, I lead an exercise of creating a 7-steps verbal storyboard for both the Scholar persona and the Mentor persona. This aligned the participants on all the steps needed for the design to create a satisfactory user experience.

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The happy path of both the scholar persona and the mentor

Then we followed the defined experience covered in the storyboard and created wireframes for each persona. 

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I split the team into two groups - each focused on a persona - and jumped between teams to facilitate the design discussions and resolve blocks.

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Final wireframes at the end of 5 sessions created and collaborated on MIRO

We were now a week out from the testing workshop. I took it upon myself to turn the wireframes into high-fidelity prototypes while fixing some obvious interaction issues so the test participants can focus on giving userful feedback that would benefit the client.

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Day 3: Testing

The 3rd workshop was lead by senior UX researchers from our community partner, PROS. As preparation for this workshop, I was responsible for sharing and walking the team through the prototypes and providing scenarios of activities that the test could ask participants to perform.

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The workshop taught participants:

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  • Test script writing

  • How to interview without leading questions

  • Affinity mapping findings to find insight

  • Using learnings from the user feedback insight to provide high-level recommendations

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Scholar testing work board

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Mentor testing work board

Client Deliverables

From this partnership, the founder of Blue Chip Scholars now has access to all the deliverables including:

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  • Research insight deck

    • Persona

    • Journey Maps

    • Non-active Scholar survey results

    • Usability test report

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  • Design 

    • MIRO board (Sketches, wireframes, usability test findings)​

    • Scholar prototype

    • Mentor prototype

Impact

Our mid-year event survey showed us that this design sprint workshop series was our community's favorite in 2020.

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Participants in the workshop shared that they feel like they have learned a lot and feel more confident in their design skills.

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The client was extremely pleased by the experience and our deliverables. She also felt that this experience had taught her the value of design thinking.

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By watching how we led our organization by tapping into our participants, the client was inspired to scale her own organization model. 

VIEW

OTHER WORK

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