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ED COOKE: I'm Ed Cooke.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Memrise.
Memrise is a language learning app.
And it combines a bunch of interesting techniques
for learning into a very gamified experience.
So it basically makes learning any language
joyful and entertaining.
KAI HALEY: Today we are here at Google for a design sprint
with Memrise.
We're going to focus on exploring
a hands-free, eyes-free heads-up experience for their language
learning app.
A Google design sprint is a tool for answering
a critical business question through design,
prototyping, and testing with users.
The benefit here is timesaving.
You don't have to go down a path,
spend six weeks, two months of development time on something
that isn't going to be valuable.
It also increases the viability of the concepts
because you're bringing together cross-functional teams.
ED COOKE: I think a dream result would
be if we invented a new learning mode which could really
take our learners away from the screen
and give us all some new ideas for how to get people
listening to foreign language and spending
more time in the app.
KAI HALEY: On the first day, we start
by building shared knowledge.
Then we brainstorm.
We do how might we post it, sharing an affinity mapping,
and a solution sketch that really
articulates some great ideas for the new experience.
KRISTINA NARUSK: We are using our imagination for something
that doesn't exist yet and trying
to find a solution to that, and obviously a product
feature that users will love.
How can we imagine the user using Memrise?
SPEAKER 4: Most of them use them in bed.
So it could be like a lullaby.
ED COOKE: And over the course of the day,
we collected hundreds of these "how might wes,"
which are which kind of part questions,
part ideas for features.
We were able to categorize them and look
at the different areas of the experience which we're
going to want to design around.
KAI HALEY: We try to generate eight ideas in eight minutes.
And this time pressure really helps
people to get beyond their first idea
and push themselves towards more innovative and interesting
concepts.
ED COOKE: It was quite astonishing how many
ideas people produced.
In fact one member of the team, Matilda, had a list of ideas
so long that it would take a group of 500 skilled engineers
a decade to implement them all.
KAI HALEY: Day two starts with a presentation and review
of the solution sketch.
We follow that with a discussion about assumptions and sprint
questions, what we want to have answered in the validation
phase.
ED COOKE: So, for instance, we had lots of questions
around the interaction design, around how
we make the experience as charming
and fun as the in-app experiences is in Memrise.
SPEAKER 5: So that maybe if you're in the tube,
it doesn't sound so weird, because it
feels like you're talking to someone,
like, hold on for a sec.
SPEAKER 6: There might be a cooking mode, for example.
And you say, can it help me cook Italian?
KAI HALEY: And then once we've listed
out what the prioritized questions are that we have,
we will do a voting session.
We ask them to select the features or the pieces
of the concepts that they're really interested in trying
out and testing.
That's usually followed by a discussion
of what will be included in the prototype and a storyboard
for the user testing.
For this team, we are doing voice control,
which is really exciting.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Now plug in your headphones and click
on the [INAUDIBLE] icon [INAUDIBLE]
to start the conversation.
KAI HALEY: On day three, the prototyping gets wrapped up.
The user interview scripts get written.
And we prepare to put these prototypes
in front of the users.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Welcome to your first Italian speaking practice
session.
KAI HALEY: And this is really the part of the sprint
where we see the most value for teams,
because they are really able to get answers and validation
to their sprint questions that they're working with.
We record and capture all of the content
from the user interviews.
And they're often quite useful later on
for helping to articulate why design decisions are made
or why development decisions are made.
KRISTINA NARUSK: There's so much goodness that
came out of this design sprint.
You also learn that one of the ideas
is very much something that we could turn into a product
feature almost immediately.
I think it was an amazing experience for everyone.
ED COOKE: And more excitingly, I think
we've learned enough about the hands-free mode
to see what it can't do and what it can do.
Ijust really can't wait to see the impact of this adventure
not only on our ideas but also on our communication and just
the general kind of energy of the team.
It's rather like Meister Eckhart's approach
to spirituality.
Where most kind of spiritual gurus talk about a long,
winding painful path to the top of the mountain,
he had this approach which was basically
to stick your head down and to run as fast as you could
and try and reach spiritual enlightenment the fast way.
And I think it's similar with a Google design sprint,
is you just kind of go for it.
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