Day 1 Understand
Take the idea, dig into it, and understand the problem. In this case, my problem isn’t anything unique; it’s a blog.
Enjoy this article Product Design Sprint day 1. There is no team this time, except for when I talk to my wife and friends about my ideas.
Why?
I am creating this website so I can share ideas and display my projects. The audience would be other web developers.
Existing Solutions?
There are existing blog platforms like wordpress I could use, but I want something that allows me more control such as Jekyll or even something custom using Node. For the design sprint, I’m not worried about the technology, but more the general look and feel.
Lightning Demos aka Inspiration
Jake Knapp describes this as: >Look at competitors’ products. It can also be helpful to look at non-competitive products that solve a similar kind of problem in a different market.
I wouldn’t call other blogs competitors simply because the web thrives when people are able to share their ideas. If my ideas help another developer on a problem or to understand a concept, the whole industry can benefit. If software development is an ocean and the developers are ships, a rising tide raises the whole industry not just one individual.
Over the past six months, I’ve gathered about 100+ links of inspiration, best practice, and stuff that made me say, “I really like that.” I captured some screen shots and created a mood board:
How will I know this is successful?
Jake Knapp wrote an article about the HEART framework which breaks success into metrics: happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. Each one of the these are assigned goals, signals, and metrics. For a detailed breakdown, take a look at the article.
For this sprint, I am aiming for happiness and engagement metrics. After the redesign launches, I will come back to adoption, retention, and task success. Going through this process will be a success for me in itself.
Thoughts
The first day works better with groups. However, it has been useful to look at inspiration and to think about the design of the website.
