What are the benefits of using UpTop’s eight to ten week UX strategy sprint?

Episode Transcript

Moderator: Hi welcome to One Question with UpTop Health. Today’s article we’re going to cover is “How to solve your healthcare organization’s most complex digital problems.” And after reading this the one question I had in my head is, you know, an eight to ten week program seems like a lot. What are the benefits of using UpTop’s 10 week strategy sprint? And Deborah, could you start us off please?

Deborah: Absolutely, thank you John. Well, I think that our UX Strategy Sprint is really geared towards solving complex problems. And so that eight to ten weeks really gives you the time that you need and it’s this balance of speed and structure to gain internal buy in, align around you know, the solutions and then to solve these more complex problems.

Often times there might not be research done so we start with an intake phase where we’re looking at what is the problem that needs to be solved or getting up to speed on the main pain points, looking at existing research, no user data, the competitive climate. This also can include stakeholder and user interviews. This really helps us to kind of get a sense of the heart of what really matters to users and then we move into phase two which is a client workshop. This is where we bring in stakeholders and users from different areas of the business. This might include an executive or decision maker. You know, an IT representative, product owner, voice of the customer and user.

What’s really key about this is it brings together all these people that have different experiences different viewpoints. And it brings them together to look at the problem space, to look at the research that we uncovered in intake and we lead them through this series of divergent and convergent activities. This is to help align everyone around the problem to solve and identify the highest impact opportunities for design.

Because you can go out and spend all this time solving a problem, but if it’s not the right problem to solve that’s wasted energy. So this helps you to really target in on what is really making the biggest going to make the biggest impact for your organization. As a part of this process, we also have everyone individually ideate on potential solutions and that is just so powerful because you’re getting alternate visions on how to solve this problem and we’ve seen that really great ideas emerge when everyone is allowed to experiment. When you’re thinking visually, it makes ideas more tangible and forces decisions.

It helps to really converge everyone around what is going to make the biggest impact for your business. And then from there, we take all of that learning and then our team comes up with a prototype, a design that we test with actual users. Just having the full 10 weeks gives us time to do all that so we’re not jumping onto the wrong problem to solve. We really take the time to research that first. Michael any thoughts?

Michael: Yeah, you know Deborah covered I think pretty much all of it. But the one thing that I could probably add is that what we found in healthcare is time is relative. Eight to ten weeks may sound like a lot but with healthcare, it’s a good amount of time for the type of organizations that we’ve worked with. Where, like Deborah said, a lot of times research doesn’t exist so we need to actually take the time to perform that kind of foundational work to actually come up with the appropriate strategy and execute within the design sprint.

As Deborah was talking about it’s all dependent on the specific problem. So it’s not whether you know, or whether or not you know, I like the Design Sprint because it’s shorter, it’s quicker. It really is about the type of problem. And with some of the clients we worked with and you see it a lot in the industry with all the legacy systems out there, with the really dated portals. They’re looking to do a lot of digital transformation. Re-imagination of the entire digital experience rather than just a slice of it. So it does require that much more work. And eight to ten weeks isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things. It actually happens pretty quickly. But both sprints are founded in design thinking; the framework is embedded in both approaches.

The one other thing that I was going to say is that with a Strategy Sprint, there is that output of a UX roadmap that with a Design Sprint, you just don’t get. You get to validate a feature and say whether it works or doesn’t work. And if you’re looking to transform your entire digital experience, it is pretty important to know, what is our next steps? How do we actually make this a reality? At UpTop Health, we lay down the groundwork for the subsequent phase for folks who want to begin implementation. And I think that’s a crucial part of the UX Strategy Sprint because it does set you up for that.

Moderator: Well great guys. Thank you very much.

Deborah: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you.