HB Reavis is an innovative and data driven company. Before building the app, they were already running some of the services as pilot. For example, the concierge service allowed people to delegate almost any task to the secretary in the lobby of the building. They already had a concrete idea about what digital product wanted to build.
However, a good product is always built on solid research. After checking the existing data, we planned to find out why people hired the services (Jobs-to-be-done), which would then allow us to discover underserved user needs – opportunities.
We only had one month for the discovery phase. We needed to find a fast and efficient method to collect that much data. We decided to conduct guerilla research. In three weeks, we ran 54 interviews in order to cover the 4 services. It allowed us to build 8 personas. We also prioritized 320 solutions to define the MVPs, with 150 generated from the research. It was an intense but rewarding process. It was good to show the client that research that delivers actionable insights is not always a long process.
We initially tried to digest this huge amount of data on Jira in a flat backlog, but it was hard to have a high-level overview of what the product was. We quickly adopted a very simple visualization: the Story Map. This concept made the scope of releases much clearer and we loved it so much that we have applied it to other projects since then.
In 8 two-weeks sprints, we delivered the desktop and mobile apps for the 4 different services as well as 5 admin interfaces. Each sprint felt like a new design challenge.
We were wireframing really quickly for two or three days. Then we tested with 5 users, then iterated more. The week after, visual design took over the screens, while we started to design another set of wireframes.
