Enhancing the digital charitable experience of Handicap International with a (Remote) Design Sprint
Hi, my name is Mehdi, I’m a UX Designer and I’m managing a design team within Capgemini Belgium. Today, I am glad to share with you the Handicap International (HI) Design story that changed my perspective on how to run a design project.
The Context
The Belgian HI website saw a traffic drop of 70% over one year, the bounce rate was huge, and overall digital engagement was poor. On top of that HI was looking for new ways to engage with their users and to gain loyalty of their younger supporters.
The Challenge
Boost the donation rate & improve digital ways of working within HI in just 4 weeks.
Additional restriction
We had to run the entire Design Sprint remotely because of COVID-19. But that was not our only restriction, some key team members are based in France & Switzerland. (Can we handle such a demanding process remotely? Yes, we can!)
How did we start this journey
With a brainstorming session like any good design team would?!
Our Design team was wondering how to put their skills to a greater good.We took inspiration from pro bono lawyers’ cases and decided we’d help a couple of NGOs (non-governmental organization) in their digital transformation.
It appeared to be the perfect moment for one of these organizations: Handicap International. They were in the middle of defining their new digital strategy. With Covid striking, NGOs were facing a big challenge: adapt themselves to this new reality. Indeed, the main source for many of them to collect money is through physical activities like going door-to-door, being on the field, or organizing big fundraising events.
We agreed with our client’s team to help them with two simple things:
- Improve the website.
- Create the charitable experience of tomorrow.
(Easy, right?)
Handicap International empowers people with a disability to be included in the society, by providing access to rehab services and by getting their lives back on tracks, included in their community.
The Classical Design approach, my dear old Friend!
First things first, we set up a meeting with the client’s team to better understand their needs. After listening to them, for me it was pretty straightforward, our design team has run dozen of projects like that so we would use our classical design process that we customized.
We planned a UX audit, mainly focusing on research by conducting stakeholder interviews, crushing data (Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc.), performing a usability report, proposing some recommendations illustrated by wireframes. We defined the design team that would work on this project and we got started!
Meanwhile, given the growth of our design activities, we decided to hire a new Lead Creative, Pierre Hayon, to update our Design strategy and develop further our design thinking methodologies.
At that time, we just finalized the analytics and usability report that we were planning to present to the client.
But Pierre asked us to wait …
Someone said Design Sprint?! 😍
He came back to me and said:
“Mehdi … the client will listen to us during the audit presentation, but they will never open this 75 pages report again… They need something more tangible that will help them move forward. Have you heard of Design Sprint already? “
My answer was:
Hmmm, I think I do. Is this the Fancy Google process? Only 5 days, impossible in Europe, too many workshops, Designer only, no way we finish any project in a week ….. process?
Pierre then replied:
In 15 years of custom Design program, I’ve never seen a process this efficient, furthermore I’ve spent time twisting and adapting the original recipe of Jake Knapp to make it more suitable for corporates projects. (“evil laugh”)
After hearing so much enthusiasm about the Design Sprint, I decided to buy the book in order to get ready for the first sprint we will run with the studio.
Explain to the client we will be doing things differently from now on
We planned a meeting with the client who was expecting to see the report. So of course, we presented it to them (a less boring version though!).
Then came the time when you need to explain to your client why you want to change everything, why there won’t be any audits and wireframes anymore, and why we need 8 extra hours of their time.
As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t imagine someone saying no to:
“We will do more, it will take less time and the icing on the cake is that we will have fun doing it”.
In addition to that, we took the necessary time to onboard them on the sprint, and explain why this series of exercises put together would give a way better result than any audits and wireframes would. (Small tip: If they still don’t want to try out the sprint, play the following card : “it’s one of the main methodologies used at Google” 👍)
Week 1
Prepare the Design Sprint 🔬
We didn’t put all the work we had prepared in the garbage, we actually leveraged it to prepare the sprint. (Who said there is no research in the Design Sprint?) Actually, it’s not in the book but the author confirmed that they always do research before the start of any sprint. (information here 👆)
Based on the information we gathered from google analytics, we understood that the two main target audience are:
- 24–35 years old 👩🏼🦰 (most representative age for consultation)
- the 65+ years old 👵🏽 (most representative age for donation)
In order to make the persona as real as possible, we organized 10 user interviews, 5 of each target audience. (5 users represent 85% of the problems)
The goal of the interviews was to dig deeper into the understanding of our audience, find THE real problem, and help our design team fall in love with HI problems rather than their solutions.
The interviews were organized in two parts:
- First part of the interview was mainly focused on the user’s relationship with the charity association.
- The second part was a usability test (scenario: collect information, donate, engage, and general experience feedback).
Also, a big discovery for me (not in the book!): Pierre and I prefilled all the exercises to make it less overwhelming for the client’s team. You should not start with a blank page, and this actually helps the exercises go smoother and faster.
Activities summary of the preparation week:
- User experience map
- Persona
- Challenges and issues turned into How Might We
- Long term expectation
- Benchmark
Week 2
The Design Sprint 🎯
Finally, we were ready to start the design sprint. We changed the order of the exercises to make the process easier and more pleasant.
Order of the Design Sprint exercises
Some of our hacks of the original Sprint:
- Prefill the exercises of the sprint with all the information collected in the research phase (avoid the blank page syndrome).
- Order of exercises: Pierre noticed that with this order, it goes smoother.
- 2 years goals instead of long term goals: By doing this, we avoid people interpreting “ long term “ and losing time on this.
- Ask the experts: The design team took the notes with the HMW technique, it’s not an easy exercise so it can be even trickier for clients who never used this technique.
- User test Flow
The Design Sprint Challenge 🤔
Boost the donation rate & improve digital ways of working within HI
The Design Sprint Team 👥
The Client Team
- Digital Communication & Marketing Officer (Belgium)
- Copywriter (Belgium)
- Volunteer Network Coordinator (SME — Belgium)
- Senior Digital Officer (Switzerland)
- Head of IT Delivery (France)
The Facilitation Team
- Pierre Hayon — Sprint Facilator
- Mehdi En-Naizi — Co-facilitator / Ux Designer
- Vincent Vilas Boas — Ux Designer
We started the sprint with the map.
The goal of this exercise is to understand the journey that exists between the actors’ starting points and their expected destinations. It allows the team to get into the mindset of the user, understand how they interact with what we’re designing during the rest of the sprint, highlight pain points, and identify opportunities to create a new experience or improve the existing one.
This exercise went pretty smooth with the team, we also learned from the decider that the sprint should focus on the 24–35+ population.
That was funny since we had already planned interviews with the 65+ for the last day of the sprint (less funny at that time 😊).
What I’ve learned from my first time:
- Don’t try to have the perfect map, a high-level one will do the job
- Agree on 3 important elements before starting the mapping process:
- Who is the Target Client / User? (cfr. Persona)
- Beginning of the story: when does the target customer experience begin?
- End of the story: what is the goal we are trying to reach?
After finishing the map we carried on with the next exercise :
Ask the experts
We interviewed key stakeholders within HI organization (Chief Digital Group officer, Belgian Digital officer and a group marketeer). We took notes with the How Might We technique (HMW), which is a good way to frame problems into opportunities by having open-ended and optimistic questions. It helps to trigger creative thinking and to find the right answers during the rest of the Sprint.
We then asked everyone to vote silently for the HMWs questions they think were most helpful. Once we had our selection of prioritized HMWs, we added them to the map next to the appropriate step (if it would make sense of course).
What was really interesting in this exercise was to see how aligned we were with the digital ambition of the organization. It strengthened the feeling we had that we were tackling the right challenge. At this point of the project, this exercise gave us a lot of confidence to move forward.
We ended up the first morning with the sprint questions and the 2-year goals exercises (long-term goals in the book). The objectives were pretty straightforward, we wanted to align the team on which questions we wanted to answer at the end of the sprint and agree on the long-term goals to have a clear vision on where we want to go with the sprint and beyond.
At first, I thought it was a trivial question but I have witnessed how powerful it was to set the goals for everybody from the start. We always assume that we are on the same page, which is not always the case, and this really simple exercise makes sure the team is aligned.
After a good healthy lunch, we started the afternoon with the Lightning Demos before getting into one of my favorite exercises of the sprint. The goal of the Lightning Demos is to look for inspirations, and the best way to do it is not necessarily to check what the competitors are doing (other NGOs in this case), it can definitely help but it is also super rewarding to explore unknown grounds by investigating actors from other industries.
For example, a good inspiration for us, was the way Kickstarter is collecting money for their projects.
We finished the first day with the 4-step sketch. (My favorite exercise 😍)
Pierre told me that it would be a complicated exercise because people are afraid to draw… . But we were impressed by the quality of the ideas. Actually, one of the best drawings was the one of the tech guy (Head of IT Delivery )!
It’s the perfect exercise to bring all things we learned to life. Before starting to sketch, it’s important to take the time you need to go through all of the different exercises you did in the morning, take notes so that you have all the necessary inputs to start imagining concrete solutions.
Day 2
We started the second day with the art museum. The goal is to discuss these ideas in a very effective way, using a technique called “speed critique”. Basically, no one is pitching their own idea, the facilitator will do it for you. So, it should be as self-explanatory as possible. It is a great concept that solves the regular issues we can face in that kind of situation (a bad idea with a good pitch, it’s trickier to give critical feedback, etc.) Besides, this avoids long, unfruitful team conversations and debates.
“Loved to discover everybody’s creativity in designing a solution” — Katrien, Digital Communication & Marketing Officer
It’s only after the presentation has been given that the creators of the solution sketch can reveal themselves and quickly answer questions if needed.
After all the explanations, the different sprint members start to vote for their preferred solution. It will help the decider to vote on the best idea.
Before getting to the storyboard, we did a User Test Flow exercise. It’s a little hack from the book, a very efficient exercise that helps you win some time for the prototype. Basically, we are defining the different high-level steps of the flow you want to test (TMI, the explanation was in the name of the exercise Mehdi … 🤦♂️)
The storyboard
For me, the Storyboard was one of the most challenging yet rewarding exercises in the entire Sprint process. This is the moment you understand the value of each exercise conducted before. It helps to align the sprint team on what exactly will be tested.
It is a demanding exercise because it is one of the less structured ones. You then fully get, why the principles of the sprint are so key.
- Work alone together • No (or little) democracy • High risk, high return
At the end of the sprint workshop, we came up with a storyboard of the website which was highlighting the following 4 main pages:
- More engaging homepage
- New way to present charity projects
- HI Champion profile
- Innovative contribution page (donation process)
It was also important to focus on the visual elements and the copy because we learned during the user interviews (Week 1 : Sprint preparation) that people didn’t really understand what HI was doing and what they expected from them (except the donation part obviously).
After 2 days of workshops, we were ready to start designing the solution and finalize the recruitment of the users.
What I’ve learned:
- The storyboard is the perfect moment to collect all the content you need in order to make the prototype as real as possible
- Try to do the User recruitment before the beginning of the sprint (we didn’t because we learned in the map that the focus would be on the 24–35 target audience)
Day 3
Time to prototype 🤖
We designed a high-fidelity website prototype highlighting the 4 main pages defined in the storyboard on Adobe XD. We decided to test two variants of the homepage (a standard one and the innovative one coming from the 4 Steps sketch).
Before getting to the user testing, we took the necessary time to prepare the test script. It was important to make sure all our questions covered the improvement points identified in the first round of interviews and that we had the answers to our sprint questions.
Day 4
Test with 5 users in one day
The moment of truth had come, it was the time to test our simple, clear, and attractive design.
What I’ve learned from this day is that no matter how hard you try to polish your prototype, real people focus on real content. It was so rewarding to have honest feedback from people that were discovering our work while not trying to please us. At this stage, our client was very excited considering the gap between the last Design sprint exercise and the prototype. However, only real users will confirm that the project is a success, and that’s why you should never skip this part of the Design Sprint. This is the moment I knew we had a tangible proof that we did a great job. 😎
We received amazing feedback from the users and interesting insights on how to improve the solution. Below interesting quotes from the users that confirmed our prototype solved some of the sprint questions and the issues identified in the research phase:
✅ Just the website itself makes me want to engage (Sprint question: Can we propose clear actions to create engagement)
✅ Good information structure, the content is not too loaded and it makes me want to read (Sprint question: Can we optimize our products and content for our target audiences?)
✅ The progression bar is a brilliant idea and it’s the main asset of the website, it triggers the user to support HI on a specific project (Sprint question: Can we propose clear actions to create engagement)
✅ Hypermodern, super easy navigation, interesting content, it makes you want to read, it’s not a website with too much info, super visuals (Problem: We don’t want to go through the content, too much information …)
✅ We understand what HI does (Problem: we don’t understand what HI is doing )
It was funny to learn that the engaging homepage (the best solution voted) got less attraction from the users than the regular one but that is alright.
In many design projects, we do a lot of research. We spend time considering all our options and we are doing this because we are afraid of being wrong. This is why the design sprint is so powerful in my eyes, it encourages us to take risks, we don’t spend time trying to prevent mistakes, actually, we hope they will happen! The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your near-finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments. In this case, we didn’t need to develop this homepage to know it will be less efficient than another one.
The Outcome
A clear vision on how to improve the digital experience of the Belgian HI Website 💡
Before getting to the conclusion, I want to remind you the two objectives of the sprint:
Boost donation rate
The user testing confirmed that the solution we imagined is going in the right direction. So, we are pretty confident that if HI implements our ideas, the donation rate will improve considerably.
Improve ways of working
I firmly believe the team is on the right path. What really works well with the sprint, is the sequence of the exercises that creates momentum. And this momentum generates enthusiasm and it was definitely the case with HI. The team was more than happy about the results and definitely in love with the process to get to those results.
This project created so much positive enthusiasm that the video of our prototype was watched by the head of HI Belgium that same day in the afternoon. A week later, HI decided to take it even further and make it the pilot project for the entire group. The idea is to show that this kind of website can have a positive impact on the donation. Our prototype will be used to create the foundations of the new Belgian website and help the HI group to reach its digital ambition.
We reached the sprint objectives. What about the sprint questions? As you can see in the user testing conclusion, we answered two of the three sprint questions but we didn’t answer this one:
Can we make our website really inclusive?
Obviously, we thought about it during the sprint and we have some ideas to make it happen. But today, let’s be honest it’s not the case and that is ok.
The mistakes we can make in a design sprint is to be too ambitious and try to solve every problem at once. The beauty of the sprint is to answer a big question in 5 days, and I think it’s already good enough.
A Clear Path
The sprint process helped HI Belgium clarify their vision and highlighted what needed to be done in order to create the charitable experience of tomorrow. Furthermore, it led to the crystallization of the digital ambition of the group. (the Design Sprint results could be used to back up this ambition with tangible facts : Lawyered!)
Obviously, this won’t happen in a day but the sprint was the most efficient and productive way to kick off this new website. Now, the team should stick to this journey and avoid getting back to the tempting old way of doing things.
My first time … Sprinting
I really fell in love with the Design Sprint process.
Alignment
Compared to the other project we did with our dear old friend (classical design approach), we never reached such a high level of alignment. To be honest, I’ve never been in a project where the client and us, designers, felt this much like a united team.
Time-efficiency
I’ve witnessed how we often misconceived discussions and brainstorming sessions. We think that it’s the best way to go, but we always finish with long monologues with no clear next steps.
I loved how this principle of working as a group but alone, allows you to skip soooo many hours of meetings, one-way conversations, endless design sessions and cut straight to the results. In my opinion, the Design Sprint is more time-efficient than any thing else I’ve ever tried.
And for those who would say:
“But why don’t we just take our time?”
I want to tell you :
If you take your time you will overthink the problem, you will come up with hundreds of solutions and you will be more afraid to take decisions. By focusing on a big challenge during a limited amount of time, it will give you a sense of urgency that will help you to keep moving forward. Getting started is more important than being right. So, don’t worry about making mistakes. It’s the art of the process and it will help you build a powerful product.
To conclude this long case study (finally Mehdi ), this experience changed my perspective on how to run design projects. Now, I’m just looking forward to our next design sprint.This time the topic will be about a new strategy (interesting, right? The prototype part will be fun!). Stay tuned !
Special thanks to Pierre who helped me put this case study together, for making me discover the design sprint, and for coaching me on a daily basis.
Big thanks also to HI for giving us this opportunity and trusting us on this strategic project.
If you’re interested to try out this methodology or to know more, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn.
Written by:
Mehdi En-Naizi
Ux Designer & Design Studio Manager — Capgemini Engineering
