Portfolio of Christina Fowler

When I joined BCA, user experience and design was well established in some areas of the business but were lacking in others. There were projects being kicked off that did not involve UX or research from the beginning, there was also a perception that our team could only handle a certain type of design challenge. The head of UX provided the following challenge to the team: "Inspire the business that we, as a team, are capable of delivering a consumer brand that can exceed the best out there".

I took the lead in this challenge to do an intensive week of remote challenges in a Google Design Sprint style. I broke the challenge into five days and gathered together a group of seven UX, UI and creative designers who had not worked in this way before.

Day 1: Define & Understand

On the first day we used a Miro board to look at the challenge set to us by the Head of UX and agreed a strategy for the week. We decided that the output would be a stylescape and discussed who would be available for each day of the sprint. We defined an objective for the week, I facilitated the plotting of a basic journey map and I captured "How might we..." questions from the team.

I asked one member of the team to speak who had recently been conducting research into customer facing brands within the car industry. I then ensured that everyone took some time to understand this research in relation to our objective. Finally, I set homework for everyone to gather inspiration for customer facing brands.

Day 2: Inspire & Generate Ideas

On the second day of the sprint I facilitated presentations from each participant to show the inspiration they had found. I asked one of the team to speak who had previous experience in tone of voice and brand personality for consumer brands.

At this point I set a challenge for all the participants to work for the rest of the day generating ideas based on the research and inspiration we had gathered so far. I broke down the challenge into eight areas for generating ideas...

• Brand name & tagline
• Logo
• Photography style
• Brand colours
• Typography
• Graphics, illustrations & icons
• Transitions & animations
• UI

At the end of this day we came back to look at all the ideas that were generated and I facilitated a vote on each area to see which ideas resonated the most with the group.

Day 3: Brand Foundations

Before we met again in the morning, I collated all of the most popular ideas into a moodboard which would guide us for the rest of the sprint. This moodboard contained colour palletes, photography styles, logos and brand name choices. Two key themes came out of this moodboard: Neon and Sunset.

I challenged the team again to create ideas for the brand foundations based on the moodboard. This time I limited the challenge to just logo, brand colours, typography and photography. At the end of the day we came together again and I facilitated another vote to decide on the direction of the brand going forward. We also made a decision between three brand names through another vote.

Day 4: Brand application

Again, I gathered all of the most popular ideas from the previous day onto a moodboard to set the scene for the day. Now that we had a clear direction for the brand foundations I tasked the team with applying the brand to an app login screen, website hero, email template, animations, advertising and merchandise. Our final vote on this day was to choose a celebrity persona for the brand.

Day 5: Presentation

Now that the team had created all the brand assets and applied the branding in a variety of ways, I tasked the team with creating the final stylescape. We used Figma to bring together all the elements and present them in a continuous scape. While the team was doing this I created the slide deck for our final presentation to the Head of UX and Design Director. I captured all of the most exciting steps from the sprint and prepared to showcase all of the work we had achieved that week.

The result was very well recieved by our design leaders, they were particularly inspired by the electric vehicle theme that had emerged. They were also able to see the potential use as a non-controversial brand for any demos of BCA's white label products.

The whole team, who had not done a design sprint previously, were very energised by the approach and found the process to be a refreshing break from their usual day to day tasks. The speed and result of the sprint paved the way for many more Google Design Sprints for me to conduct.

Aftermath

To follow up this sprint I facilitated another design sprint focusing on our white label products. I used the official Design Sprint Miro board but compacted it to a three day sprint. We generated a list of principles for white label at BCA and a number of actions to make the process of designing a white label product easier in the future.