My Apprenticeship and Sprint Experience with Funsize
My Path to Funsize
I recently graduated from Texas State University with a BFA in Communication Design. In my time there, I was taught everything from design basics to UI UX design for mobile and desktop. Before I graduated, I reached out to the co-owner of Funsize, Anthony, who I met four years ago through my dad. During the summer between high school and college, he allowed me to do Guest Desk at Funsize which was a great experience to see what being a product designer was really like.
My senior year of college, I sent Anthony my portfolio asking him if I could be a good fit with the company. He actually declined and explained that because Funsize does mostly product design, he didn’t think it would work out. At the time, I didn’t have any mobile experience. My last semester of school I took Interactive 3, a class on running design sprints to create mobile app prototypes.
Thankfully, around that time, Anthony reached back out to me and told me he had seen my recent portfolio updates and thought we would be a good match after all! I got an interview and a few weeks later, they hired me as an Apprentice Product Designer! In the past few weeks here, I’ve learned why Funsize is such a great place to work. The creatives, clients and culture are incredible.
Sprint Opportunities
My second week as an apprentice, I was thrilled because they asked me to join a week-long sprint with a company called TRADiiES. All of the sprints I have done in school were for individual projects, so I did them without a team. This design sprint opened my eyes to all the things that I was missing, and that make a world of a difference in the process. The first major difference was having other experienced designers, and the second was having the client themselves. Having the client be a part of the design sprint was vital because we were able to quickly get a solid understanding of the industry and the goals we needed to set.
TRADiiES
TRADiiES is a networking platform for beauty professionals. Their app aims to be the first all-inclusive space for beauty professionals to apply to jobs, book classes, build their portfolio, find education, and more. The first day of the sprint, after introductions and setting expectations, we did an exercise called lightning talks. We asked TRADiiES to give a brief recap of their business goals, current product details, and explain what they wanted to get out of the sprint. They have large goals as a company, and are really hitting on some of the biggest problems in their industry. I think they could become very successful!
Originally their goal was to consolidate the platforms beauty professionals currently use (such as Craigslist and Instagram). They want to get all beauty professionals, educators, and brands on this platform to help individuals navigate the industry, and they’d like companies to have a space to hire and promote their brands. To start, we needed to narrow down the goal’s focus to figure out who their current target user and the most important part of their product that could be addressed in a sprint.
The Sprint Experience
As the sprint went on, we decided on our target users (recent beauty school graduates) and decided on the direction we wanted to go in to meet our new company goal (which was to add educational value to their platform). Every day, the team came in focused and excited. This helped keep the momentum going and added a level of eagerness we all had to produce the best results we could.
The TRADiiES team gave some really good design input and were open to hearing our suggestions as well. It really helped that they had a good understanding of their industry when they came in and had a deep experience in the field themselves. We got through a lot of content quickly and ended up with a testable, high-fidelity prototype in just one week. If I was doing this sprint in school, it would have taken me at least three weeks of research and sprint process to produce what we did in one.
We ran into very few problems while going through the sprint. One of them was not fully understanding the needs of one of the types of users, but we quickly overcame that challenge by bringing in a real-life target user for testing and focusing on the other side of the use case — fitting in well with the user flow we had created.
Outcomes and Learnings
Overall, I feel like it was a really successful design sprint that produced a very solid prototype. I am excited to hear the user feedback from the company as they continue to get investors and influencers to join them. I think that TRADiiES now has a better understanding of themselves, who their target market is, and what their next steps are as a company.
This sprint helped me understand what it is really like to work with real clients and a real product. The process can change depending on the goal, time constraints, and client you’re working with, but the way each sprint is set up and handled should stay the same. Getting the client and the designers to do the exercises together was really helpful in the long run. Even if they don’t have design experience, they provide essential pieces and input that can push the final design further.
Funsize is digital service and product design agency that works with inspiring design and engineering teams to uncover opportunities, evolve popular products, bring new businesses to market, and prepare for the future. Worked at by friends. Got a project for us, Let’s Chat!
Funsize.co, Hustle Podcast, Blog, Twitter, Dribbble , Instagram, YouTube
