As we look to 2017, we would like to share InRhythm’s most memorable, interesting and fun facts from 2016. Wishing you success in the new year!
Your partners in accelerated digital transformation
This year, have had the privilege of working with truly amazing clients, serving as their trusted partner in implementing modern digital transformations. We have made inroads into new markets, expanded our geographic influence, and were fortunate enough to collaborate on many incredibly exciting projects. Our continued growth and success have laid the foundation to make this new year even better.
As we look to 2017, we would like to share InRhythm’s most memorable, interesting and fun facts from 2016. Wishing you success in the new year!
A Design Sprint is a structured but flexible five day product design framework that elevates the possibilities of product creation. Simple as that? Well, not exactly. Traditionally, when you have a product idea and have completed research and designs that means you are ready to start the development process. At InRhythm, we believe there is a need for a step in between. With our Design Sprint, you take a week to really dive into the experience of the product and create a fully testable prototype. This will allow you (and your users) to get an in-depth sense of the entire look and feel of the product. You will also be able to test the prototype out on real users and gain insight into the value of the product. All this before a single line of code has been written. Now, when it’s time to head into development stages, your engineers will have a better resource to build off of, creating a smoother work-flow throughout the entire process.
At InRhythm we are excited to be starting this new initiative: Design Sprint Studios in which we embed onsite with clients to assist them through their Design Sprint week. The idea of Design Sprint originated at Google and has been adapted and built out to conform to our needs. Here’s how we structure the week:
Monday: Understand
Define and Unpack the Problem to Solve
Together we will develop a common understanding of the working context, including the problem, business, customer, value proposition, and how successes will be determined. By the end of this day, we will have identified some of our biggest risks and start to make plans for reducing them.
Tuesday: Sketch
Generate Ideas in Order to Solve the Problem
Together we will explore the range of possibilities and come up with possible solutions. This day is about individuals sketching out their ideas, sharing them with the group and then collectively voting on the ideas to move forward with.
Wednesday: Decide
Select the Ideas to Pursue for Testing
The team gathers all ideas exposed during the first two days of the Design Sprint, eliminating any of the wild or currently unfeasible ideas and begins to hone in on the ideas which everyone feels are strongest. These ideas will guide the prototype implementation which occurs on day four and will continue on to be tested with existing or potential customers.
Thursday: Prototype
Build a Prototype that can be User Tested
On this day, a prototype is built which is designed to reveal learning around specific unknowns and assumptions. Its medium should be determined by time constraints and discovery goals. Paper, Keynote, and clickable prototypes are some of the most popular prototyping methods. The prototype storyboard and work completed during the first three days of the sprint should make prototype building fairly straightforward.
Friday: Test
Validate the Hypothesis by Observing Prototype Use
Together, we test the prototype with any existing or potential customers. We recommend using existing or potential customers because they are ultimately who will be interacting with this product. The context of their experiences have influence on your product that is not present with non-customers.
At the end of this day, all feedback and learning are collected, leaving the team with a valuable understanding of their product and its next steps.
We would love to get an initial conversation started with you on how our Design Sprint Studio can benefit your product.Reach out to us!
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Written by Ricki Steiner
Last month we held our second Meetup covering the popular UX tool – Sketch. Our in-house UX Designer, Prerak Patel, led us through more of the amazing things that Sketch allows you to do, including a heavy focus on how the app has combined web standards and simplifies design process. Prerak ended with an incredible live demo where he prototyped an Instagram clone real-time. I was completely amazed when I saw how fast he was able to create the look-a-like. We are excited as a team to continue learning more about UX Design and hope to see you at next month’s event!
Sad you missed out on the Meetup? We’re taking a break this month for the holidays but our January 20th Meetup is shaping up to be incredible. Join us as Nathan Stilwell leads a discussion on PostCSS.
Written by Ricki Steiner
One of InRhythm’s core values is to “Build Positive & Trusting Relationships”. What better way to build strong connections between our employees than by bringing everyone together for a Meetup? On a warm Wednesday night we gathered our operations, UX, and development teams for a night of prototyping. The highlight had to have been watching the developers sit down with markers and paper to try to sketch out layouts. Each team came away with a new level of appreciation for the other and maybe next time we will get our designers writing some code.
Our awesome UX team taught the fundamentals of design and why prototypes are important on the job. Instead of starting a huge build on day one and stumbling through design pain points and changes, creating a workable mockup helps us understand our product at an earlier stage and get meaningful feedback from clients. We are no longer putting all of our energy into building something before we completely understand how it is going to behave.
We began the Meetup with marker and paper sketches and moved on to basic Sketch mockups. In many cases, like mine, we simply click and dragged basic shapes across the screen and pretended that it looked just like the demo version. We then had a quick demo of the incredible powers of creating interactive, clickable design through InVision. Watching a live demo of a prototype through the InVision mobile app was pretty mind-blowing as I had only ever experienced working with static designs previously.
Having the chance bring everyone together at InRhythm was fantastic and our Design team really knocked it out of the park. Come and see for yourself, our Meetups are now open to the public – looking forward to seeing you at the next one!
Written by Ricki Steiner
Before any final product goes live, there are countless sketches, whiteboard scribbles, test plans, and prototypes to guide us forward. We, as end users, don’t always see them, but those rough squiggles and drafts are invaluable even though they never see the light of day. Prototypes are an early version of a product, and as a drafting tool they are an increasingly essential part of any multidisciplinary team’s methodology. They’ve had a long history outside of the digital world, but for any digital product team their benefits are rich and varied. Teams can gain approval earlier in the process of building, determine and solidify design direction, understand and evaluate technical approaches and solidify content from one tool before any code is written. Agile promotes getting out of the office and in front of the customers – in order to validate that what we are building is valuable to them. Prototypes are one of the best tools in a team’s toolbox to help build enjoyable, functional and delightful products quickly, without confusion and with lower costs and time.
The UX team at InRhythm have been veterans of the various Prototyping Wars over the years. We’ve seen prototyping go through intense debate – what fidelity and software, when to build them, what to make interactive, what code we can leverage afterwards, and how to encourage them in the first place. Like many in current UX and Product Design circles, we’re enthusiastic, passionate cheerleaders not only for the value of prototyping, but in particular for the killer Tag Team of modern prototyping software, Sketch and Invision. To say they are game changers and life savers is not hubris – they are a revelation. We’re excited to be able to share what we’ve learned about the world of prototyping in more depth in our upcoming Meetup, and walk through how these tools make everyone’s lives easier no matter if you’re a product owner, designer, developer, stakeholder, other team member or end user.
There is a role in modern software development for moving towards code based prototypes using Bootstrap, Angular and other frameworks – perhaps we’ll all be prototyping in Framer one day. There should always be room in the family for the high fidelity, interactive ‘click through’ prototypes that Sketch and Invision create. When it comes to mobile, Invision and other tools like Pixate can create experiences so close to native code that you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. No matter what fidelity or tool, getting a prototype in front of stakeholders allows for approval and testing with real users without needing the final, polished, finished, and tested product code, which can be expensive to retroactively go back and fix. Our UX team has worked with developers to build out the prototypes we’ve designed and developed, and can share how a mature approach to prototyping benefits everyone on the team.
When prototyping a flow of screens, the time to develop multiple screens or multiple design options can be easily done by a designer rather than a development team. Prototyping the right thing means giving more time back to the development team to focus on solving the important technical challenges rather than prototyping the obvious things that don’t need validation, or building out multiple screens and multiple flows. By using Sketch’s branding related features like ‘Copy CSS’ and Invisions ‘Dev Notes’ commenting tool, developers will get the instructions they need to pick up the pace after a prototype is validated. There is a source of coolness for our devs – by hiding notations layers or multiple pages via a simple ‘-‘ to a file name in Sketch. We can quickly go from ‘rough concept’ to ‘selected design’ to ‘prototype’ to ‘final design with notes to help devs’ all within the same document, rather than sending a never-ending stream of PDFs. With Invision Sync, working with these two tools becomes seamless and automated. Like a great product, you don’t have to think about it – it just works. Development has become a beautiful craft because we build upon the work of previous products – with modern UX prototyping software, building continues easily, scalably and without pain and heartache. The days of slicing .gifs, version control panic and PSDs with sad titles like ‘final_approved_last_change_USETHISONE.psd’ are dead – and it’s about time.
Since this is an InRhythmU Meetup, you can expect a little theory but also practice – we’ve created a number of exercises so you can get hands-on with the tools. We hope to provide you with a chance to ask practical questions on how prototyping works, how to make it as useful as possible for both you and your team, and how our experiences with clients has helped evolve prototyping to meet their needs. We’ll walk you through both Sketch and Invision, and spend time on how they work together. We look forward to an action packed session, so bring your open mind, laptop, thirst for learning and curiosity to create. It will be a ‘pull up your sleeves and have a good time learning’ kind of night.
Written by InRhythm UX Team