Peace One Day: How CAF helped the renowned NGO go from an app idea to a prototype and a business model
This is a story about a GV style design sprint. If you’ve never heard of it, you can learn more here or read the book.
Chelsea Apps Factory (CAF) is a leading mobile and web development agency based in London and Edinburgh. Since 2010 we help our clients, from start-ups to blue-chips, reach their true potential in today’s mobile world.
Intro
Thanks to the work of the Peace One Day NGO every 21st of September is an annual day of global unity and intercultural cooperation on a scale that humanity has never known before. Since 2008, millions of people have been active on Peace Day in every country of the world, and hundreds of organisations have carried out life-saving activities in areas of conflict.
Peace One Day (POD) approached us as they wanted to build an app that could inspire and enable people to contribute to a more peaceful and sustainable world. CAF offered to support POD’s initiative with a pro-bono 5-day project to build and user-test a prototype of the app.
POD also needed help with shaping up their business model and go-to-market strategy so we said we could support that as well… Sounds like a lot to cover in 5 days, doesn’t it?
Here is how we did it 😊
A Hybrid Team
The hybrid team for this Design Sprint was composed of 4 POD members, including Jeremy Gilley (Founder of POD), Jim Rai (Lawyer and partner of POD) and Alex & Nick (2 film-makers) — alongside 6 CAF members, ranging from Engagement Leads (Paul and Gerard), Designers (Bartek and Jordi), a Product Owner (Josh), a Solutions Architect (Damian) and a Strategist (Guillaume).
The Decider was Jeremy and the CAF Facilitator was Guillaume.
This hybrid team brought complementary skills and expertise to the project:
- The POD team has years of experience in peace making and sustainability initiatives but limited experience in digital product development
- The CAF team had limited previous engagement with the world of NGOs but was confident in their digital expertise and their ability to use the Design Sprint to bring value to the project
Can we inspire people to contribute to a more peaceful and sustainable world with an app?
On Day 1 we defined the long-term goal for the app that POD wanted to build: “the POD app should inspire and enable users to contribute to a more peaceful and sustainable world”.
This goal was translated into our Sprint Question: “can we design a mobile app that inspires people to act towards peace and sustainability?”
Additional sprint questions were also defined and we aimed to get elements of answers to as many of these questions as possible within the dedicated 5 days.
POD came to the Sprint with the view that the app should be built around 3 user experience pillars:
- educate and inspire users
- empower users to act
- offer a support network
We produced a high level map of the intended user experience and concluded that the focus of the prototyping and testing should be on “empowering users to act”:
How did we make the clickable prototype?
Multiple product demos were completed to stimulate ideas and ensure the team would leverage best-in class design practices. Some of the products we looked at included: Be My Eyes, Hyper, Plant, Insight Timer, Fitocracy, BodySpace, 7 mins workout, ShareTheMeal, Peace Unify, and Strava.
Each Sprint participant then produced a Solution Sketch — you can see below a couple of examples:
As you can tell from the multiple sticky dots on the above photos, we completed a round of voting to identify the group’s favourite ideas. We ended up shortlisting about 10 key features that we thought we could stitch together into a coherent Experience Architecture that would compel users to act towards a more peaceful and sustainable world.
The overarching idea was to let users build a rich and meaningful peace profile, listing their peace and sustainability achievements.
With this high-level experience architecture well defined and agreed we produced a detailed storyboard of the user journeys we wanted to prototype and test.
We used Marvel to produce the clickable prototype, which in the end included a total of 9 mock-up screens.
What we learned from user testing
By Day 5 it was time to put our prototype in front of target users and complete one-to-one user testing interviews.
The main thing we wanted to test was whether people would find that the app motivates them to complete peace missions.
We found that:
- people loved the idea of having a personal peace profile
- people understood the concept of “peace mission”: how to find missions, how to get more info about a mission, etc…
- people were not necessarily that keen on completing too many “generic” peace missions — they wanted to know more about how the app could let them create custom peace missions
- people were keen to understand how their “real world” peace actions would be captured on their “digital” peace profile
Overall, the main assumption was validated: users were keen to get started with building their peace profile by completing peace missions.
What happened next?
On the back of all the work completed within these 5 days, the combined CAF and Peace One Day team talked confidently about next steps, including how to raise funding for this app, how much funding would be a good target, and how quickly the app could be built and launched.
How CAF modified the Design Sprint process
At CAF we regularly run for our clients what we call “5-day challenges”. Usually we run these at the start of a new digital project to de-risk the project, test key assumptions and build consensus. Contrary to GV’s Design Sprint, our 5-day challenges do not solely focus on Design outputs — they often include Technical, Product Management and Strategy outputs.
How does that work? We broadly follow the steps of the GV Design Sprint to deliver the Design outputs (i.e. the clickable prototype and user testing). The big difference is that we usually complete the Day 1–4 activities in half-day workshops (usually in the morning) instead of full days!
This frees up time for us to deliver additional value to our clients beyond Design, such as Technical support (e.g. technical architecture and risk log), Product Management support (e.g. product roadmap and product backlog) and Business Strategy support (e.g. business case and expected return on investment).
On this particular project, the POD team did not have a fully fleshed out business model nor a go to market strategy so we used afternoon sessions to help them with this, including defining two distinct fundraising strategies and two revenue model options.
What worked / didn’t work about the sprint process?
At CAF we’ve run several Design Sprints over the last 12 months and we find the process both reliable and flexible. We think the key factors for a successful Design Sprint are:
- having the right people in the room, with a good cross-section of skills and with the right level of responsibility
- the sense of urgency and focus that it creates: 5 days is a short period of time but with focus we can meet the objectives of the Design Sprint
- a collaborative and risk-free environment
Things that sometimes do not work well with the Design Sprint process:
- without timekeeping the schedule can quickly go out the window! We have found that with big Sprint teams the product demos (Day 2) and the review of solution sketches (Day 3) can be very time consuming
- during the Sketching phase there is usually a dip in confidence for first-time Sprint members. We have found that it is important to position the Sketching as a “Visual Product Management” exercise as opposed to purely a “Design” exercise — emphasising that it’s not about how pretty the final solution sketch is!
Will CAF continue to use the Design Sprint?
Yes! We regularly use the Design Sprint as part of our 5-day challenges — people love the energy that they create, the speed of the process, and the immediate user feedback. They are a great way to kick-off new digital projects.
Many thanks to Google Ventures for publishing that awesome process!
