A design sprint from a developer's point of view

As a developer, I do not have the chance to attend many design sprints, so when I was invited to participate in one I knew it would be a great learning opportunity to understand how to use design thinking to solve complex problems.

A design sprint is a five-day process for answering or solving critical business questions through prototyping and testing the ideas with customers.

This particular design sprint was unique since we partnered with Contentful to look at how we could improve the user experience of their product and share our business needs particular to Telus. With this approach, we were able to apply real-world problems we were facing and brainstorm directly with the Contentful team to come up with creative solutions.

We decided to focus our efforts on the concept of composed content.

Composed content is content that comes from multiple sources(either other spaces in Contentful or even other systems) to foster reusability and discoverability. Why this concept was important to us was because at Telus we find ourselves duplicating content many times and updating one piece of content in multiple places.

Shorty after aligning on a problem to solve we started to sketch out possible interfaces to allow our users to select and re-use content from multiple places.

Finally, the last day after several iterations and many wireframes after we had to opportunity to show our designs to real-life customers of Contentful outside of Telus.

The whole experience was invaluable to me. It allowed me to understand the role of design and usability when solving a problem. As well, how important it is to showcase your sketches to customers quickly to receive feedback.