As a product manager passionate about mobility technology, I had the opportunity to spend three months traveling across Europe this summer. I encountered a blend of innovation, local adaptation, and unexpected surprises that are shaping the future of transportation in the old continent. Here are 10 key takeaways that caught me by surprise and broadened my understanding of mobility tech.

1. Electric Car Chargers Are More Like Giant Plugs — Bring Your Own Cable!

One of the first things I noticed when driving through Europe was that electric car chargers, especially in public places, often require drivers to bring their own charging cable. Unlike in the U.S., where many chargers come with a built-in cable, most European chargers are just large outlets waiting for your plug.

This means drivers must have their cables with them, and while it may seem inconvenient, it has some benefits. Drivers can use their preferred cable and reduce the chances of malfunctioning due to wear and tear on public chargers (EV owners know the struggle of a broken charger…). This highlights the importance of user responsibility and customization in European EV infrastructure. As a product manager, it made me think about how we can design for flexibility without sacrificing convenience.

Note: Even car manufacturers are embracing this design and offering “built-in” cable like the Fiat Grande Panda.

2. Car Rental in Iceland: You Choose Between ICE and EVs

In Iceland, it was common to see car rental companies offering both electric vehicles (EVs) and internal combustion engine (ICE) cars as standard options. This level of choice reflects Iceland’s progressive stance on sustainability, but it also underscores how far ahead parts of Europe are in EV adoption compared to the U.S., where ICE vehicles still dominate most rental fleets.

Unfortunately for us, we had booked our rental car through Booking.com and we had not seen the EV options at that time. So our family of four traveled in a small but mighty Suzuki Swift (hybrid nonetheless)!

Offering choices at the point of service is crucial to accelerating the adoption of greener technologies, especially if they are financially advantageous. As a product manager, this reminded me of how Amazon is offering different delivery options, offering flexibility while encouraging sustainable options to effectively drive user behavior.

3. Most Highway Gas Stations Have Added EV Charging

We traveled across 8 countries, and one major surprise was how many European highway rest stops now offer EV charging options alongside traditional gas pumps. In countries like Germany and France, it’s become the norm for highway gas stations to feature fast chargers for EVs, with some stations even having multiple chargers available.

In contrast, the U.S. is still catching up in terms of nationwide EV charging infrastructure, especially along highways. While we’re seeing progress with companies like Tesla building out networks, Europe has already integrated EV charging into its existing fuel station ecosystem. This transition underlines the speed at which infrastructure is catching up to the needs of EV drivers.

For product managers, the lesson is the importance of infrastructure when introducing new technologies. No matter how good the product, without a solid support system, adoption can be slow, especially with capital intensive investments. So re-using existing infrastructure (like a gas station) is a blessing for incumbents!

4. Portugal’s EZPass Equivalent called Via Verde offers “Shaded Spots” and quick payment for EV Owners

In Portugal, I came across a clever setup at EV charging stations: “shaded spots” for EV owners. These charging spots provide shade which is very welcome under the scorching Portuguese sun. To make the charging experience even more seamless, EV owners can use Portugal’s equivalent of EZPass called “Via Verde” for a quick, automated payment process.

This combination of convenience through simple amenities and integration reflects the importance of user experience in mobility solutions. It’s not enough to simply offer infrastructure; enhancing comfort and usability is crucial.

Product managers can learn from this by focusing on small but impactful details that can improve the overall experience and focus on service instead of staying a utility. Those often have a great ROI.

5. Sevilla’s Public Transport: Just Tap Your Visa Card

One of the most frictionless public transport experiences I had was in Sevilla, Spain. There, you don’t need to buy a ticket or worry about local transport cards. Instead, you can simply tap your Visa or other contactless credit card to board public buses and trams.

In the U.S., many cities require specific transit cards or apps, which can be inconvenient for tourists or occasional riders. Sevilla’s system is an excellent example of how simplifying payment methods can enhance the user experience and increase public transport adoption.

It’s a reminder that removing friction points can be one of the most effective ways to improve user engagement.

6. High-Speed Trains in Spain Require Airport-Like Security

One of the more unexpected discoveries was that Spain’s high-speed trains, like the AVE from Renfe (equivalent of Amtrak), require passengers to go through a security screening similar to that of airports. This is something you don’t often see in train systems, but it speaks to the value Spain places on security for these faster, long-distance journeys.

The introduction of this security checkpoint reflects how new transportation methods can blur the lines between different types of mobility.

It’s important to consider how evolving regulations and customer expectations might impact user experience. Whether it’s high-speed trains or future autonomous vehicles, designing around safety and security is often non-negotiable.

7. Bike Lanes Extend Beyond Downtown — Even in Suburbs

In cities like Amsterdam and Munich, I was amazed by how bike lanes didn’t just dominate the downtown areas but extended far into the suburbs. These dedicated lanes create a comprehensive network that makes cycling a viable transportation option not just for short trips but for longer suburban commutes as well.

In the U.S., bike lanes are often concentrated in urban areas, leaving suburban commuters with fewer options. Europe’s approach to building out a full cycling infrastructure is something the U.S. can learn from, especially as micro-mobility solutions like e-bikes continue to grow.

This highlights the importance of creating solutions that work for a variety of environments, not just dense urban cores.

8. Local Ride-Hailing Apps Beat Uber

Another surprise was the dominance of local ride-hailing platforms like Bolt and Cabify in many European cities, especially in places like Barcelona and Lisbon. In many cases, these local apps have overtaken Uber, largely due to regulations that favor local players and limit the operations of global giants.

In the U.S., Uber and Lyft dominate the ride-hailing market, but Europe’s approach shows that local alternatives can thrive when regulations create a more level playing field.

This emphasizes the importance of localizing strategies to meet regulatory requirements and consumer preferences. Simply applying a global template may not work in every market.

9. eBikes Are Taking Over, and They Come in All Shapes and Sizes

I was amazed by the sheer variety of electric bikes I saw across Europe. From foldable city models to powerful, cargo versions, eBikes seem to be everywhere, offering different options for different types of riders.

While eBikes are growing in popularity in the U.S., they haven’t yet reached the same level of ubiquity or diversity in design. In Europe, eBikes have truly become a mainstream mobility option. This trend highlights the importance of offering specialized products for various use cases.

This is a reminder that segmentation is key — creating different models for different lifestyles and needs can drive wider adoption.

10. Owning a Car Is Still Synonymous with Freedom

Despite the rise of shared mobility options, one thing remained consistent throughout my travels: for many people, owning a car still equates to personal freedom. Even in places with advanced public transport or bike infrastructure, car ownership is deeply embedded in the notion of independence.

This underscores the fact that while new technologies are emerging, traditional mobility modes still hold immense value for users.

It’s critical to balance innovation with existing user expectations. Not every region will fully embrace shared or autonomous mobility, and catering to a diverse set of needs remains important.

Conclusion: Europe’s Mobility Landscape Holds Valuable Lessons for the U.S.

My three-month journey through Europe revealed a dynamic and rapidly evolving mobility tech ecosystem, one that offers valuable insights for the U.S. From the way EV infrastructure is integrated into everyday life to how public transport is simplified for users, Europe’s approach to mobility is often ahead of the curve.

For mobility players in the U.S., the key takeaway is that while we have much to learn from Europe, adapting these innovations to our local needs and regulatory environment will be crucial. Whether it’s seamless payment systems for public transport or building out a comprehensive cycling infrastructure, the future of mobility depends on creating solutions that are user-friendly, sustainable, and adaptable to the diverse needs of all communities.

Are you a product leader in the mobility tech industry? Want to chat about my travels or how I can help you?
Reach out to me on Linkedin

As teams and individuals, we share a deep belief in the missions that we are here to serve. We do our best work to impact our goals. That means an extreme focus on delivering stellar solutions to whom we serve.

Because we focus so much on bringing the best to others, we sometimes forget to bring the best to ourselves: too many meetings to attend, too many slides to read, too many fires to fight. We all agree that too much complexity is… too much. This is why I’m writing to you today — I want to share 3 simple tactics that my team uses to help us focus and operate better.

1 — Run meetings as an investment

Situation: We have calendars that are triple-booked. We show up to meetings, and we don’t know why we are here. We schedule meetings to organize more meetings!

Complication: Too many meetings reduces our productivity and often prevents us from doing meaningful work.

Resolution: Treat our time as a scarce resource by running meetings as investments.

Learn about meetings that don’t suck from Ken Norton, Product Management Partner at Google Venture:

Meetings that don’t suck: Break free from the tyranny of the conference room (6min read)

2 — Deliver simple and concise presentations

Situation: We use slides to put our thoughts down and communicate them with others. Business plans, data reports, strategies, technology architectures, roadmaps, etc.

Complication: We lack consideration for our audience which prevents us from delivering a clear message. We cram as much information as we can into a presentation and create a lack of focus and confusion.

Resolution: Let’s understand our audience and deliver simple and concise messages.

Learn more about the 10-20-30 rule from Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist at Apple:

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint (3min video)

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint (3min read)

3 — Break free from distractions

Situation: We excel at firefighting and get laser focused when a crisis comes up.

Complication: We lack this level of focus for the longer term problems we are solving for.

Resolution: Put what doesn’t matter on the back burner.

Learn about the DOC framework to say NO to your colleagues:

“Focus is about saying no” — Steve Jobs (1min video)

The DOC Framework For Just Saying No on the Trello Blog (5min read)

The Story behind the Story

I have been personally using those tactics on a daily basis. I’ve met with a C-level exec that was sharing how hard it was for his teams to focus and actually make the best of their time. We did a little research and bingo! The challenges were the usual suspects: purposeless meetings, never-ending decks, and bombardments of requests.

With deep empathy, we crafted a framework coined “simpler is harder than complex” that is easy for teammates to digest and apply (know your audience…). We also measured a baseline and defined what success would be like within 3 months.

We used Return On Time Invested (ROTI) as a way to measure our progress:

When I think about the time I invested in my last meetings, I would say that:

0 — The meeting was a complete waste of time — no value was received.

1 — More time was wasted than value was derived. For instance, while 30% of the meeting time was useful, 70% was not.

2 — An even split (50/50) of value and time spent. I spent half the time on things that aren’t directly useful — but overall, the meeting was a wash.

3 — More value derived than time spent. If I spent the same amount of time on my own trying to seek out the information and decisions I gained in the meeting, I couldn’t have done it.

4 — Very strong value for time spent. The meeting was crucial to moving forward, so the investment of time was clearly worth it.

As you start experimenting with some of those tactics in your team, think about how you will measure success. What is your baseline today? What do you expect it to be in a few months?

About me: I’ve been operating as an internal consultant to help people align and achieve a common goal without being their boss in a Fortune 5 company for the last 2 years. Before that, I experienced different roles in Product Management where soft skills are about the ability to lead teams, communicate with diverse groups and influence change throughout an organization.

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We know that simpler is harder than complex: team tactics to up your game was originally published in Fusion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unlock your inner leader today: motivate and influence like Amazon’s CEO by reading your audience, sharing facts and earning trust

Are you a freshly promoted manager or a more seasoned executive who wants to grow as a leader? I’m writing this piece for you (#sharingiscaring) to share a framework that will shift your thinking around the language of leadership.

When it comes to motivating and influencing others, why do we do what we do? Why do we share personal stories? Why do we ask how we can help? Why do we share data and facts?

Today’s leaders

Leaders influence up, down, sideways, inside and outside. They achieve performance through people by influencing their thinking. It drives behavior, ultimately getting results. It takes a diverse set of tactics to motivate and influence a diverse crowd. The first task is often to read the situations and people.

Leaders are always searching for relevant information as an asset to be shared in an organized way. Information needs to be reliable, accurate and precise, and communicated in a digestible and timely fashion.

People appreciate leaders who say what they mean, follow through and share relevant information. Well-functioning teams share vision, trust, roles, and include the right talent to do the job.

In my research, I’ve seen a concept coming back a lot: the modes of persuasions coined as Pathos, Logos and Ethos by our friend Aristotle. What was missing was how this concept relates to leaders’ actions. Let’s deconstruct the 3 pillars of Pathos, Logos, Ethos and learn how you could leverage them.

Pathos — You care for your team and understand their emotions

Pathos is the persuasion by means of emotional appeal. You find the same Greek root in words like empathy, sympathy or patient.

Understand what moves people to change. Leaders ask themselves what emotions they could trigger to create that change of behavior. They manage themselves and their filters to avoid potential bias. Think about the research that consumer goods companies conduct before launching a commercial for the Super Bowl.

Seek to inspire and motivate by appealing to values, ideals and needs. Leaders research their audience by looking at what people need and believe in. They understand their environment, goals and current challenges.

Deal with people individually and teams one at a time. Because they understand who they talk to, leaders also understand that they need to segment their audience to have a stronger impact. Think about how politics will change the way they speak or the content of their speech based on where they campaign.

Grow your Pathos through: Audience Prep Questions

· Who are they?

· Why are they here?

· How do they feel about the subject?

· What do they know about it?

· How do they feel about you?

· What do they know about you?

· What would make them resist?

· How can you help them?

Logos — You read situations and support your argument by facts or data that are hard to argue against

Logos is the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. You find the same Greek root in words like logical, technology or dialogue.

Collect essential and relevant information. Leaders look at different sources of information inside and outside their organization. They dig in macro trends and tie challenges to the right context.

Assess value and connectedness of information. Leaders select information from sources their audience trust. They identify patterns that create insights.

Synthesize and communicate information. Leaders use frameworks to help people understand complex constructs. They create a concise message and keep what is essential. They talk in terms of outcomes and they think about impact — and impact not for themselves, but for the people that they serve

Grow your Logos through:

1. Looking outside your industry

2. Bringing in your customers/users: What they say, what they do, what they feel

3. Using the SCR framework from McKinsey to set the stage: Situation > Complication > Resolution

Ethos — You earned trust from your team

Ethos is the persuasion through convincing listeners of one’s “moral character”. You find the same Greek root in words like ethnography or ethics.

Be values-guided in your actions and decisions. Followers need to know that leaders have deep values and dreams, and they need to hear leaders speak about hope. They also want to know that those who lead are animated by some big beliefs.

Be clear about your message. Leaders use simple language that anyone can understand. They focus on a limited amount of information and have specific asks. They are also aware of how they carry themselves and understand the impact of their leadership shadow.

Do what you say you will do. Leaders instill trust by a strong sense of ownership and bias towards action. They humbly recognize their failures and share credit for their successes.

Grow your Ethos through:

1. Sharing your vision with the Golden Circle: Why? How? What?

2. Sharing personal stories and anecdotes

3. Making your writing bold and clear with Hemingway App

4. Measuring yourself and getting feedback with a survey

About me: I’ve been operating as an internal consultant to help people align and achieve a common goal without being their boss in a Fortune 5 company for the last 2 years. Before that, I experienced different roles in Product Management where soft skills are about the ability to lead teams, communicate with diverse groups and influence change throughout an organization.

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Thanks to Cailtin and Jeremy for their feedback and help.

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A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.

Unlock your inner leader today: motivate and influence like Amazon’s CEO was originally published in Fusion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Fusion, the enterprise accelerator of Optum, we shift thinking paradigms. We created a new way of thinking about strategic planning called Lean Annual Planning. It is a mix of fun, creative exercises and craft building. We realize we can’t predict the future. What we know though are the necessary crafts to create opportunities.

In this article, I’ll share with you some of the activities we went through to develop the crafts of our team as part of our yearly team event.

As far as my role, I worked with my colleagues Haya and Ryan to design and lead the 2 days events that we created for our team of 15.

Stagecraft — poetry of mantras and stories

1- We always seek to raise the bar on our storytelling chops. This skill helps us deliver precise communication. That means a clear and concise message based on the audience, that will be acted upon and reinforces conversations instead of shutting them down.

We were lucky enough to get an improv class delivered by a comedian at the Improv Asylum in Boston. We re-learned to leverage the power of YES AND. We built stories off each-others ideas. We got out of our comfort zones and we had tons of fun!

2 — We believe in the power of stories to raise empathy. This skill helps us understand the deepest pains that are under the surface of people’s skin. We also know that complexity is everywhere in our organizations. Communicating that complexity is challenging.

Greg lead us through a Lego Serious Play to do a full retrospective on the way we use OKRs. This was all done through building Lego models and telling stories about it.

Statecraft — pursuit of purpose and value for others

3 — We are helpers and don’t expect something in return. We always start with the question “How can we help you?” because we know it’s a snowball effect. Our team had the mindset, but how do we make it more actionable?

My colleague Jake introduced us to the Reciprocity Ring. It’s a framework built around asking for and giving help. It taps the collective knowledge, networks and energy of a group to meet each person’s request. You’re able to access a much wider knowledge base: Who you know? becomes Who (and what) do we all know?”. Everyone was then able to help each other in the team and setup actions. Haas — Help-as-a-service.

4 — We are self-improvers and coaches at the same time. We welcome feedback from our peers, mentors and leaders to improve the way we work, live and play. We hate opinions and non-actionable or untimely feedback. We needed to build our feedback muscle to make it a habit, not an exception.

Haya brought back to the team what she learned from Joseph Weintraub. He is the founder of the Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Program at Babson College. We had open discussions around the concept of evaluation, feedback and coaching. We’ve setup team habits to enable the team to deliver more structured feedback.

5 — We share the same values making our team flexible yet aligned. Affirmations are guiding principles that are true in the context of the team. They help teammates understand expectations and live the unspoken culture of a tribe. What happens when a new member joins us?

Sarah and Ed had the team describe their personal affirmations. The team then narrowed it down to a shorter list applicable to our team. The output will be an experimental deck of cards with our affirmations. New colleagues can review when they join. Others can review, reflect or share with others.

Tradecraft — mastery of focus and execution

6 — We focus and prioritize our work to achieve our vision. OKR is a management tool that allows our team to bring a high level of focus and ownership. Direction coming from objectives is firm and lead us toward that vision. Key results are flexible stretch goals and evolve as the work progresses. They keep us accountable to see if we meet our objectives.

We defined our 2019 OKRs as a team because we believe it is a collaborative process. With contribution comes engagement and ownership. This year, we created 3 categories of OKR to bring even more focus as they evolve through time: Experiment are objectives where we want to investigate and test. Grow are objectives where we want to improve and gain maturity in. Scale are objectives that are working and needs to be spread across the organization.

7 — We create momentum for easy execution by identifying actions, timelines and owners. We call it the massive action plan. Massive stands for the amount of value it will create, not the number of actions in the plan.

We had the team review the full 2 days. They listed all the actions that will create massive value for our team and our organization. We like to give ourselves short timelines of 7/14/21 days and do a check-in after 21days.

Food for thought

Reflecting on our time mastering our crafts, it was a success because:

• We leveraged face to face time to do things that we could not do remotely.
• We reviewed our past through storytelling to extract insights and empathy.
• We planned for focus and worked on specific aspects of our team DNA.

We also increased opportunities for individuals to contribute and engage. We had external and internal leaders. We gained empathy. We gained alignment and ownership.

Do you want your team to be a “WE”? Reach out to us so we can craft your next team event.

Special thanks to Ed Boudrot for adding his point of view and to Jeremy Smith for his help reviewing this story.

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Perfect your team’s crafts by Lean Annual Planning! was originally published in Fusion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This article is a recap of the 3 days event organized by Design at Business in which the main topic was around innovation as a practice.

Last week, I got a chance to take part for my first time in Design at Business. DatB is an intimate group of Design Thinking practitioners in the context of large organizations. Individuals and teams share their stories and solutions to overcome their most pressing challenges. Stronger together.

1 — Rapid prototyping

In our group, most of the organizations represented are using rapid prototyping. The levels of maturity are different. From basic wireframes to full on usability testing, there are different practices of rapid prototyping. The places where rapid prototypes fit within the design process are also different. The recurring challenge is about explaining the value of rapid prototyping to product teams and business leaders. While a majority uses rapid prototypes to show a vision (roadshow/funding pitch), only a minority communicates the value of de-risking innovations and iterating towards a refined product and value proposition.

2 — Innovation process

The overarching theme of the meetup was about sharing stories around the 8 practices of innovations based on the book “the innovators way”. It was a substrate for our conversations. By hearing war stories, we were able to extract tactical nuggets and best practices to take home to our own teams. Sharing is caring!

Sensing

Leaders greatest ideas, gut feelings and opinions can be good hunches or intuitions. But, they never replace validation from the market and your users. The group consensus was around documenting your sources and flagging the ones that are gut feelings. For the gut feelings, do not speculate and commit to no action until you confirm your problem or solution.

Envisioning

The lack of stories that show value or highlight the promise of solving a problem are legion. They prevent thinkers and doers to align and commit to that change. The group consensus was around telling simple stories that show the value in a very tangible context. Thinking about your audience is often the first step to get people onboard. This is true whereas you need support of your leadership or the best engineers to join your product team.

Offering

Coming up with a solution that is not feasible, delivering it too late or over budget are some of the reasons why new offers never meet the people they are designed to help. Group consensus formed around accepting failure in your organization. Then iterate upon initial ideas using customer feedback to move forward.

Adopting

Forcing adoption using the stick instead of the carrot or completely avoiding the barriers to change are reasons why your innovation might not succeed. The group agreed around understanding the challenges and barriers to adoption in the network of people you are trying to get adoption from. That also means leveraging influencers in that network to spread adoption. Last, measuring your adoption is key to iterating and assessing your success (or lack of).

Sustaining

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Becoming irrelevant through time can sink the smallest products or the biggest companies. The group consensus was around creating a mindset of ownership and measurements. It allows to assess the level of trust between your users and your innovation. Trust is something intangible that is measurable through time (think cohorts / churn).

Executing

Executing is all about fulfilling that promise that you made to your customers. Lack of alignment on the problem at hand or lack or clear metrics can prevent an innovation from launching to market. The group unanimity was around having conversations to align on context and possibilities. It meant having conversations focused on action with a plan geared towards execution.

Leading

Leaders regard power as a capacity to persuade and influence people to commit to a new practice. Not listening to your customers/team or losing your focus can cause a breakdown for your innovation. The group consensus focused on a clear distinction between a senior manager and a leader. Leaders give directions, influence and ask questions. While managers remind you of your P&L, offer minimum support and give you the answers / tasks.

Embodying

Embodying is to create a strong emotional connection between your innovation and your end user. The ultimate goal for your user community is to absorb the new practice, product, or idea. When embodying, the innovation is adopted and blends into the community. We achieve rapport and mitigate resistance. Our group focused on achieving a deep level of empathy and agreed toward the use of conventional (i.e. contextual interview) and non-conventional techniques to do so (i.e. meditation).

3 — Acquiring & Retaining Design Talent:

In wrapping up on Day 3, our conversation focused in on how we retain design talents. Highlights from that conversation are below:

💼 Loan talent from the business and transform them as advocates

🎯 Hire for fit, not skills

😍 Allow for the freedom to bring employee’s passion into their work, not checking things off the backlog

🔍 Provide transparency around an employee’s career path and potential with the organization

🛠 Bring the right tools and enablers to avoid frustration

🔦 Be transparent about the day to day work at recruiting, not after to avoid wasted investment in training

Finally I would like to thank all the individuals who attended the meetup and my colleague Sarah Konstantino who helped me polish this article.

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For corporate America, innovation is a buzzword. For the un-corporate thinkers, it is a craft. was originally published in Fusion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Like,” “Um,” and “Ah”: discover simple tactics to identify and avoid the (not so) silent killers of your career

Everlasting Webex, PowerPoint abuse and acronym filled reports are work hassles that you and I see everyday. But there is something that no one sees yet everyone knows about: Speech disfluencies (aka filler words).

In fact, up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like “um”, “uh” and “er”. We all suffer from it.

Today, I want you to increase your self-awareness about how you use filler words so you can reduce their presence. It will improve your credibility as a public speaker and help you deliver stronger messages.

Whether you are a salesperson and have to speak in front of customers every day or a manager that needs to motivates and grow his team, we all feel the same. We are self-improvers and want to raise the bar when it comes to public speaking. We are also unaware of the problem even though we hear it often.

How do we empower ourselves with simple tactics to say Adieu to the speedbumps of our communication highway? Read on!

Filler words are like vulgarity…

The occasional use is acceptable but when too frequent, it loses its meaning and signals to listeners that the person speaking is lazy about language.

It seems that on a subconscious level, we are judged by listeners for our use of fillers. A study from 1995 found that people who avoided using filler words (or “disfluencies”) are rated as significantly more favorable speakers by study volunteers than speakers who used words like “um”.

The average person incurs one disfluency for every 4.4 seconds of spontaneous speech. It’s like we’ve accepted this cultural norm that everybody condemns, yet still adheres to. And if you think about it, it’s pretty intuitive — a conversation partner who consistently uses filler words is assumed to be either nervous, out of place, or clueless as to what they’re talking about.

In fact, people around the world fill pauses in their own way. In Britain they say “uh,” Hebrew speakers say “ehhh,” the Turks say “mmmmm.” The Japanese say “eto” and “ano”, Spanish speakers “esto”, and Mandarin speakers “neige” and “jiege”. In Dutch and German it’s “uh, um, mmm.” In Swedish it’s “eh, ah, aah, m, mm, hmm, ooh, a and oh”. You get the idea…

3 easy tactics to see where you stand

“The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist” — Zig Ziglar

1 — Put a sticky on your screen or your notebook and write “uh” or “like”. Every time you’ll be in a meeting or on a webex call, you’ll have a visual reminder that filler words are everywhere. Listen to others. Listen to yourself.

2 — Record yourself while you speak and listen. After doing that for a week, make it a game and count how many times you’ve used filler word. Warning -You will be surprised by your numbers!

Tips: Most smartphones have a Dictaphone app. If you have an iPhone, it’s called Voice Memos. If you are a Samsung owner, look for Voice Recorder.

3 — Ask a colleague to pinch you. If it’s not a pinch, ask them to give you a little sign while you are speaking. It could be a little flag they raise in the room or an emoji they text you. If you find it too disruptive, just ask them to count the number of filler words and give you the results at the end of your speech.

Tips: If you are coaching someone, you can use a tally counter to count their filler words.

Augment your credibility with PTA: Pause. Think. Answer.

Confident leaders and seasoned public speakers utilize silence effectively to dramatize their messages.

Pause — Silence in speech is powerful. A well-placed pause allows words to ring louder, linger longer, and emphasize your point. It gives time for your listener to digest what’s being said.

Think — When you use a filler word such as “um,” you are thinking verbally. In other words, you are verbalizing your thought process. Armed with this information, it is easy to realize that the best way to avoid using filler words is to pause. If you are not speaking, you can’t say “um”!

Answer — It’s now the moment to make an impact. Continue your train of thoughts and don’t be afraid to come strong.

Politicians, salesmen and public figureheads are all taught this important technique. Next time you listen to a strong conversationalist, notice how they establish a linguistic rhythm. Notice how each spoken word is calculated and purposeful. And most of all, notice how they empower themselves with silence, rather than shy away from it.

What do I do now?

1 — Record yourself for 5 days during all your meetings and presentations. On the last day, listen and count how many filler words you’ve used. What’s your TOP 3?

2 — Write 2 stickies to put on your screen / notebook: one with your top 3 filler words and one with Pause. Think. Act.

3 — Use the PTA technique in your upcoming presentations and meetings. Record and measure for another 5 days.

Check your progress. Rinse. Repeat.

Interesting reads and inspirations about the subject:

Tips on Public Speaking: Eliminating the Dreaded “Um” from Harvard Extension

Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers on NYT

“I have a dream” speech by MLK with no filler words

Like, Um, You Can Totally Stop Worrying About Filler Words, Science Says on INC

Like, Eliminate Ums and Ahs, Right? From Coach Lisa Marshall

Learn more about Fusion

A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.

“Like,” “Um,” and “Ah”: discover simple tactics to identify and avoid the (not so) silent killers… was originally published in Fusion on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shopping online for smart devices can be a real hassle for non tech-savvy people. Information overload, tech lingo and never ending product lists make it hard to make an informed purchase decision. How do we allow shoppers to find and buy smart home devices compatible with Alexa?

I used Amazon as my reference point. I compared the usability of the shopping experiences for smart devices. I mapped out the conceptual models of the different categories of information. I then sketched and prototyped a revamped product page.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Amazon and this is a pure design exercise for a problem I found relevant.

Why did I design this?

“Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year, and we’re thrilled that millions of new customers will be introduced to Alexa as a result.” Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon

Alexa was one of the most popular gift for christmas and is not only used by a tech-elite anymore. This means that your parents also have an Alexa and they want to say “Alexa, turn the living room on”. But the reality is a little different.

I came across this problem when my friends tried to buy me a smart thermostat for my birthday. My friends asked my wife if we owned an Alexa. She said yes and they ordered me an Ecobee. Of course it was not compatible with my old heating system and I had to return it.

I went online to see what other devices were compatible with Alexa. The amount of devices and technical details shoked me. As a proud geek, I must say even I was even confused and I decided to look into this problem.

I stepped in the shoes of the Amazon product team and came up with the following goals for the project:

Who did I design for?

I decided to design for all the people who have an Amazon Alexa device but are not tech savvy. The democratization of smart devices and assistants will happen when everyone can make the most of it. It might still be a niche today but the growing competition in the space makes it a promising challenge.

Understanding what a user wants is easy. But delivering a compelling action requires devices, setups and integrations. I’m hoping that making those devices more accessible will change their routines in the long term.

What was my role?

I focused on the interaction design part of this project (usability competitive analysis, IA and user flows). I also sketched and prototyped a solution. Ling helped and provided guidance and feedback throughout this project.

The design process

Validating the problem

The problem was the overflow of information preventing shoppers to find a smart home device compatible with Alexa.

It was a hunch at the beginning. I decided to conduct a competitive analysis to answer those questions:

• What are Amazon competitors doing in the space?
• Where should I focus my efforts in the current journey?

I first started to look at 4 places where shoppers look for info about a smart device. I compared Amazon, Best Buy, CNET (the first blog post that show up in Google when I typed “Amazon Alexa Smart Devices”) and Ecobee (a device manufacturer).

I looked at their websites and came up with this:

I now had an understanding of the disparities and weaknesses of the competing experiences. I decided to dive deeper at the usability level to compare the most similar experiences: Amazon and Best Buy.

I went through each steps of the shopping journey and applied basic usability heuristics points.

I summarized my results in the customer journeys of Amazon and Best Buy:

Organizing information

To better understand what were the shoppers dealing with , I did 2 card sorting exercises to answer those questions:

• How might we categorize the smart devices?
• How might we order the the product sections on the product page?

For the categories, I asked 5 shoppers to group 20 popular smart devices. I used Optimal Workshop to do the card sorting and gather the results.

For the product sections, I asked 6 shoppers to rank 9 product sections including Amazon existing sections and an Interactive Demo section that I wanted to test.

I found that the existing categories on Amazon were pretty close to my findings. Product categories would be Smart Sockets/Plug/Outlets, Smart Appliances/home, Smart lighting and Entertainment.

For the products sections, the results were more interesting:

On average, most of those 6 users were not interested in seeing the ease of setup at first. This was going against my initial hunch. On the other hand, the Interactive Demo section was before the Questions & Answers. Note also that the business driving sections from Amazon are at the bottom of the page.

Iterating toward a solution

At this point, I knew I wanted to focus on the product page and try a solution that would not be disrupting the Amazon shopping experience. My two solutions for the design would involve a rather classic navigation bar for the product page and an animated demo of the smart device.

With that in mind I created the following sitemap to understand how the user would interact with the page:

As my understanding of the product evolved, I’ve put together a set of product requirements that I would use on my design. I moved on to some low-fi sketches:

The navbar was the most challenging part. What information do we show and when? Is it redundant with what the user already sees? How much space do we have for our categories/ What’s the call to action?

After a few iterations, I ended up with the following:

For the Interactive Demo, I considered using the microphone of the device or an actual Alexa device. It would allow the user to say the command himself and see the result happen right away. Instead, I went for something simpler and easier to interact with using a carousel and a button to trigger the action. We would have to test with user to see if it makes the job.

Prototyping

I created a prototype of the solutions using Origami to get a feel for the experience and see if the navigation bar was integrating properly in the current Amazon website. One of the constraint of the project was to keep the same visual design as the Amazon brand.

I also wanted to see how easy it was to interact with the demo on a touch device (sliding and tapping).

My focus for this project was on the interaction design and information architecture. I decided not to proceed with an in-depth user testing. Instead, I got feedback from 4 Amazon shoppers:

• Everyone understood the use of the navigation bar to go from one section to another one.
• The space where the Product Summary thumbnail is on the navigation bar feels “weird” when it’s blank.
• No one noticed that the product sections order changed.
• Everyone found the Interactive Demo helpful to understand what the product does.
• But the swiping and “try it” button combination seemed confusing.

The next iteration would have to deal with those two challenges:

• How might we best use the space on the navigation bar?
• How might we increase usability of the interactive demo?

What is Amazon doing?

As a conclusion, I wanted to highlight that throughout the project I’ve noticed that Amazon has implemented two navigations bars. They are on the product page of the desktop version.

The first bar is a fixed navigation bar that appears when the shopper scroll down to the bottom sections of the product page. It includes the product summary and the “buying option” button:

The second bar is a fixed right bar that appears when you have an item in your cart. It shows the content of your cart at anytime on the website:

What did I learn?

In depth usability analysis of your competitors will help you find the missing gaps.

When I started to look at what other companies were doing in the space, I noticed differences in the wording and the information’s presentation. It’s only when I looked at the usability at a granular level that I was able to see how the competitors were solving the problem. I created a report that follows heuristic guidelines and outlines both positive and negative aspects of the product interface and service offering. I was able to gather insights and identify where the problem was and why it was there. For this particular project, I focused and got inspiration at the same time on how to fill the usability gaps.

Elegant and simple UI patterns can be tweaked, but not too much.

Effective interaction design relies on standard patterns for the behavior of interface elements. Communicating their interactivity, providing actionable feedback and indicating progress help a user through a flow with little effort. By starting with a pattern for some of my UI elements, I tweaked them to solve the specific problem for Amazon shoppers. While it worked pretty well with the navigation bar, the carousel and button who represented and Amazon Echo confused the users. A simpler button might have been enough?

Basic product requirements will save you time

Before jumping too fast into wireframing, I fnd it useful to go back to my sitemap / user flow. I can list what I need to design and how specific UI elements of the design will help the user complete tasks. I spent 20 min writing down the requirements for this project. When I did my wireframes, I used them as a checklist to make sure I did not forget any UI elements. It was also easier to go collect the required assets and have them available.

Further readings: I recommend you the book by John Rossman called The Amazon Way on IoT. John shares great insights about Amazon’s strategy, customer obsession and some good stories about the echo and Alexa.

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Informing the users about how to use an application for the first time is hard. Doing so using a conversational interface is even harder. You can only prompt so much information.

How might we confirm our hunch about the on-boarding problem? How might we make sure our new users understand the value of the application and how to use it?

This case study is about Captain Feedback. It’s a Slack bot that facilitates quick structured micro-feedback in teams.

Why did I design this?

The initial problem was located just after a user installed Captain Feedback on their Slack team. I identified the problem first in our analytic platform. The 3 things I noticed were:

• Users did not engage with Captain Feedback.
• Users typed “help” for their first interaction.
• Users asked questions to the bot such as “what can you do?”

The main goal of the project was to improve the on-boarding. It needed to be warm / welcoming and to communicate the value of Captain Feedback : facilitating timely and structured feedback in teams.

Who did I design for?

The users of Captain Feedback are professionals who are using Slack as a way to communicate as a team. Majority of users install Captain Feedback in their teams to promote the culture of giving and receiving feedback. A small minority of the users are “bots enthusiasts” and just want to try out the bot.

While the size of the teams are small, both startups and large companies are installing Captain Feedback. Some of the teams work remotely.

As I worked through the project, I noticed that they were 2 types of users:

• The user who installs Captain Feedback.
• The user who talks to Captain Feedback for the first time.

What was my role?

I conducted the entire project with my co-founder Greg from research to prototyping and testing. Greg focused on the data analysis while I focused on the implementation and testing. We both worked on the user research and ideation.

The design process

Validating the problem

The product was pretty much at the MVP stage. From our website, a user would install Captain feedback on Slack:

He would then get a prompt inside Slack from Captain feedback. That was it.

At this point, I could feel that the on-boarding was a big friction point for the users to interact with Captain Feedback. And to be fair, we did not put too much effort in this part yet. To confirm the problem, we decided to update the copy to communicate the value proposition. Then we created a little “Trojan horse” to gather insights from the users who just installed the bot.

The user would install the bot and would get asked three questions:

We’ve waited to get more than 15 installs and we got the following result:

At this point we were pretty sure that the message was not simple enough. We also noticed that we were only treating one part of the problem. While user who install Captain Feedback got the prompt, all the other users were still not engaging. They were still asking questions likes “who are you?”, “what can I do?”, etc.

Iterating toward a solution

While text is a great way to convey a tone of voice, it’s not a warm welcome. As a GIF lover and power-user, I always use GIFs to convey emotions to my colleagues when I use Slack.

I created a GIF that would appear in the conversation not only for the users who installed Captain Feedback, but for all the users who interacted with him for the first time. This is a great medium because unlike a video, it auto-plays and catches attention right away.

The idea behind the GIF was to emulate the first time you meet someone: “Hi, I’m Antonin and I do Product Design. I can help you by doing XYZ and this is how you can reach out to me”.

“A good GIF, and anything is GIF-able these days, captures just enough of a specific moment to illustrate emotion yet leaves enough out to spark your curiosity. It’s a beautiful balance of amusement and wonder.” Gizmodo

I did a first version to see what it would look like in the context of the Slack Application. I sent it to a few colleagues to get their feeling about a GIF with text (speed, size of font, visual design):

My colleagues enjoyed the concept of the GIF. They wanted something more welcoming and impactful though. They liked the pace but thought it was too big in their screen. In fact it was so big on their small screen that they could not even see the text below it.

I took their feedback and I created a simple series of images. I put them together to create an animated GIF. The result was the following:

I then asked a few users about it to get some first reactions:

The value proposition was not communicated well enough. I did a final iteration before the testing:

I now had a GIF that emulates a first meeting with a person. It is warm and welcoming and it communicates the value of Captain Feedback.

Testing it live

I implemented the solution and tested the same question to see if it had any impact at least for users who installed Captain Feedback:

I was really happy with the results. Out of the 17 answers, all the users clearly understood who was Captain feedback, what it could do for them and how they could talk to him.

As for the users who talked to Captain Feedback, it is hard to say if it led to more engagement. In fact, we were changing other features of the product at the same time.

As a good proxy, I did notice a strong decrease in the number of “help” requests:

Since we did not have anymore friction at the on-boarding stage, we decided that the solution was successful.

What did I learn?

It’s easy and fast to iterate with a text-based only interface.

I feel like the copy of a visual design might appears as secondary for some designers. When it comes to conversational interfaces, it matters. It matters a lot. Because it’s “only” a text, it’s easy and fast to implement a change to see if it helps your design. To do a lot of the testing in Slack, I just had to copy and paste my text to get immediate genuine reaction. I did not have to write code or set up an interview. I would just send a message to a few users pretending to be Captain Feedback. I could see what they wrote back to me.

Conversational interface are great for user research.

I enjoyed this concept of “Trojan horse” for user research where I was able to gather insights without disrupting the flow for my users. Since it’s a conversation, it’s easy and time-efficient for them to provide an answer to a question I might have. They also feel more compelled to tell me certain things than if they were having a conversation with me face to face. I recommend you to read what the folks at IDEO are doing with chatbots and prototyping: Chatbots: Your Ultimate Prototyping Tool

When the interface is a constraint, think about all the possibilities of formats and contents.

When I face a “text-heavy” content, I always tend to shrink it as much I can. But sometimes, it’s just impossible to do so without removing too much information. For the on-boarding process and the info I wanted to share with our user, it was the same dilemma. The Slack messaging platform can let you post a long text (not like Twitter), but how likely is it that someone will read everything? Slack also lets you use basic text formatting and emoji. Those are great to put an emphasis on something, but it’s still more information. I found the GIF to be a great medium to communicate in this type of interface. It plays on it’s own and it grabs attention. This is why GIFs got so popular in messaging applications. Next time I’ll have a “text-heavy” content, I’ll make sure to consider a simple animation as an alternative.

If you are interested in promoting timely and structured feedback for your team, please visit and install Captain Feedback for free over here: http://getcaptainfeedback.com/

Want to read more about conversation interface: Chatbots: What’s the real impact behind the hype?

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Case Study: Build a warm user on-boarding for Captain Feedback using GIFs on Slack was originally published in Captain Feedback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spend about 8 hours per day at our office. Office spaces are often built to optimize how many employees we can fit in a hundred square feet. They are rarely designed as a way to help us focus and achieve more.

I applied Design Thinking method to transform a small and noisy Phone Booth Room. It became a quiet and warm place to keep focus.

Why did I design this?

The initial problem was that some employees in my office complained about meeting rooms used by a single person. This resulted in lack of meeting room for group work. Another fact was that the 4 phone booth rooms seemed underutilized.

As an employee myself, I was the one identifying the initial problem.

My main project goal was to increase the propensity to use the Phone Booth Rooms.

My goals for my research were to:

• Identify & understand the use cases for employees going in the Phone Booth Rooms.
• Identify & understand the use cases for employees using Small Meeting Rooms on their own.
• Learn how they feel when they are in those rooms and why they pick those rooms.

Who did I design for?

The users are the 50 employees of an innovation lab of a global telecom company. They are located in San Francisco.

Their routine activities is to connect with external partners. They also create content and present to executives about latest trends in technologies. They sit in an open-space.

Majority of those people go in small meeting rooms on their own. I did not know what they were doing and why they were doing it in those specific spaces.

What was my role?

I conducted the entire project myself from research to prototyping and testing. I was mentored by Ivana who is a seasoned designer. She gave me weekly guidance during this one month project.

What was the constraints?

The main constraint was to get the buy-in from 3 person in the office to secure budget for the prototype:

• The COO of the office (make sure we get some budget)
• The HR manager (make sure it fits with company culture and rules)
• The building manager (make sure of the technical feasibility)

For the timeline, I needed to get budget approval before the beginning of December 2016.

The design process

Understanding the users

The problem I was hoping to solve was the under utilization of the Phone Booth Rooms. I learned about this problem because of 3 things:

• Colleagues complaining about how they could not find a room for a meeting
• Seeing the rooms empty on a regular basis
• New signs on the meeting room saying “Reserved for 2+ people”

Those were hunches and not validated through testing. I started my research by creating a research plan. It included the goals, research questions, methodology, participants and schedule.

The methodology first included an online survey. I sent it to the 50 employees to gather the use cases, the frequency and the choice of one room versus another. Afterward, I conducted 5 user interviews to dig more on their motivations and feelings.

Defining the problem

From the 18 answered surveys, I regrouped the insights in two empathy maps. One was for employees using the Small Meeting Rooms. One was for employees using the Phone Booth Rooms. The goal was to regroup all the different insights.

I then created 2 storyboards to show the users in their current contexts. I highlighted 2 use cases (personal call and work session).

I also tried to compare different features from different type of rooms (privacy pod vs small meeting room vs personal office) but I did not get any insights from that.

At that point, I had a pretty good understanding of my users and their problem. I felt confident to reframe the design challenge.

I used POV statements to express user’s needs and motivations. I then wrote How Might We (HMW) statements to think with solutions and not with problems.

I came up with a pretty extensive list and I had to narrow it down to keep my focus. I was kind of overwhelmed with such a broad space.

I decided to filter out what I call “itches”. “itches” are something we can live with and if we scratch a little bit, we feel better and forget about it. I also regrouped similar HMW statements and focused only on the Phone Booth Rooms.

The final design challenge before moving to solutions and ideation was the following:

• How might we create a warm and welcoming environment to help focus in the Phone Booth Rooms?
• How might we create a quiet environment without noise or visual distraction in the Phone Booth Rooms?

Generating ideas

My first step was to go do some looking around on the web. I saw how other office spaces were tackling those challenges. I created two board with images of solutions used by others and pinned them on the wall for inspiration.

My second step was to do some fast brainstorming for each problem statement:

• 10min on gathering notes and jotting down rough ideas
• 2 iterations of 8min sketching 8 different solutions (Crazy 8)

My third step was to select a few solutions and integrate them into new storyboards. This allowed me to put the solutions in the context of the user’s journey. I showed the storyboards to 3 non-users to see if I was missing something big and if the story made sense.

I transformed the personal call use case into a work call because it came up more often in the initial survey and I decided not to go on the “doing personal stuff at work” theme. This might be seen as controversial by both employees and managers.

I picked 6 solutions to test. I was a little worried that each solution would compete with each other. But the starting point was so low that I felt like I needed a baseline. I also wanted to make sure to have one bold idea to test.

Prototyping

Prototyping on a non digital product is not easy. I decided to start with a 3D rendering of the room with the solutions. I got an overview of the design and how everything fitted together.

I then went to see what kind of budget I would need to run my test. I struggled quite a lot because I wanted to have a great perceived quality. It would generate more genuine reactions. I also wanted to stay crappy to keep the budget reasonable. A good example is how I used a yoga mat to create a soundproofing tile on the wall.

At this point I invited the 3 persons I needed buy-in to explain them what I needed to prototype. I walked them through the entire process and got positive feedback.

I purchased everything and implemented it in the room as per the 3D design. This was definitely the most fun part of the project.

Afterward, I created a learning canvas to define the criteria of success. I would be able to measure success or failure when I test my solutions.

Testing

To test my solutions, I created a second research plan with 2 goals in mind:

• Test assumptions from the learning canvas about integrated solutions.
• Test the propensity to use the room.

I conducted 5 usability interviews to gather reactions and feelings. I was really excited about getting feedback. As you can see below most of the assumptions were validated:

On the two assumptions that were inconclusive, I believe the quality of the prototype was not high enough to confirm the assumptions.

For the custom room name, the wording was not clear enough and users were confused about the purpose of it. For the soundproofing, I used a yoga mat to simulate a soundproofing material. I was surprised by the mixed feelings I received. The perception of the sounds level varies from one individual to another.

The last step of the project is to send a follow up survey. I want to gather insights about the frequency usage and perceived value of integrated solutions in the long term.

My goal is to have a final validation and redo the 3 other Phone Booth Rooms using the same design.

What did I learn?

Working on a physical space is the same as a digital product, it is just harder to track usage.

When I started my project and the user research around it, it was pretty easy to understand the needs and motivations from the users. When I did the prototype, it was challenging to keep the budget low but the quality high enough that I could get genuine reactions. When it came to measure the actual usage of the room or “features”, everything became way more complicated. One way to have good quantitative data would be to install a camera or put a sensor of everything. This was not doable.

It was more challenging that building an app, but it was not impossible at all: it was still about solving a problem where a human sits at the center of it (literally).

Prototyping with users around does not allow you to capture their feedback.

When I built the room prototype, a lot of employees walked by and said things like “oh cool, I like this” or “this is too green”. While it was always a good intention, it was impossible to focus on the current task and pay attention to them. On top of that they would often have feedback on different elements that were not part of my assumptions.

Next time, I’ll make sure to do it when there is less people around. Maybe surprise them in the morning?

Getting budget approval by showing the entire process is easier.

I invited 3 persons to review the process with me. I walked them through the entire design thinking exercise. They were not familiar with the process but at the end they did not question my choices and assumptions. They were all excited and gave me some budget for my prototype ( about $400).

Keeping design artifacts on a wall allows for short term memory.

During my entire process, I kept all the artifacts and placed them on a timeline on a wall so I could have a look at it at any time. Even though you need some space to do so, I found it much better than having it in a folder on my computer. I could have an overall view. It was acting as a short term memory and kept me focused. It was also a great substrate to explain what I was working on to my curious colleagues.

Thank you for reading. Please email me if you have any questions or feedback about this project: contact@antonin.work

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Let’s solve a challenge as a team!

Collaborating as a team to solve big problem is usually not an easy exercise. Even less a fun one. Let’s face it: most of us work in an environment that was not designed to function that way. This is why we are sharing this story of our experience running a Design Sprint: 5 days of intense collaborative work to solve a big problem using Design Thinking methods.

So, what are the benefits of a Design Sprint?

• Engage coworkers.
• Learn a new way of solving problems.
• Develop expertise in pragmatic Design Thinking.
• Talk to users in person.
• Feel accomplished.
• Move fast.
• Have fun!

Our objective

Let’s be clear: solving the core challenge of the sprint was NOT the only objective. It was definitely a nice-to-have. Our core objective was learning by doing while having fun as a team. It was an experimental exercise by essence with no intent to commercially use the output.

This Design Sprint was not about the destination. It was about the journey as a team. Nevertheless, we knew it was important to pick the right challenge for the team to be engaged for a full week.

The Challenge

We chose to pick a problem where no one had skin in the game or a personal attachment. We brainstormed potential problems based on observations from people in our close network or problems we personally faced recently.

We needed a challenge where:

• The underlying problem was intrinsically easy for the team to understand and gather insights.
• It was very likely that our team members had personally experienced.
• The prototype would be easy to build (i.e. digital product).
• We could easily and rapidly recruit local users to test our solution face-to-face.

We used these criteria to narrow down our list of potential problems.

iPhone users struggle to discover and understand how to use new features that come after a major iOS update.

Our goal for the sprint was straightforward :

As Apple’s Product Marketing team in charge of iOS 10, how can we help our users to discover and learn to use new features that come with each update of iOS.

This “role playing” trick, where we pretended to be the Apple team facing this problem, helped us to make the situation more real and concrete. It was also helpful when assessing the real life business and design constraints. We often went back to asking ourselves: “What would Apple do?”. And more importantly: “What would Apple NOT do?”.

It also came with some cons. We didn’t have deep past expertise around the problem. We also fell short in understanding the full extent of the problem, of existing solutions, and the current user behaviors.

The team

We recruited the team on a volunteer basis. We approached our coworkers on an individual basis. We explained them the Design Sprint concept. We also talked about our goals and expectations. We discussed the benefits and learnings they could gain in participating. A few were excited to join the experiment and could free their schedule for an entire week.

The individuals in our core team have a pretty diverse mix of skillsets. There was a Graphic Designer, a UX Designer, a Business Developer, and a Planner. We were two facilitators: a Product Manager and a Product Designer. We took turns in facilitating the sprint. When one of the facilitator was not moderating, he was participating with the rest of the team.

Understanding the problem

To gain an understanding of the problem, we interviewed a couple of experts.

We brought in Matt, an Apple Genius with 5 years of experience. He provided tons of insights on user behavior. He helped us understanding how the cycle of iOS updates fits with Apple’s business goals and strategy. We also interviewed Will, a coworker who is an industry expert and Apple fan.

Thanks to our experts, we gained a holistic and deeper understanding of the problem. This helped the team to narrow down two sprint questions:

• Will users prefer using our solution versus existing available 3rd party solutions?
• Will users be less disrupted by a personalized solution versus a generic one?

We divided our audience across three personas: “normal users”, “power users”, and “evangelists”. We decided to focus our sprint on “normal” iPhone users. Based on our research, the problem we were focusing on was impacting them the most.

Brainstorming new ideas

The team used every tool in the Design Sprint toolkit to ensure we were truly diverging. As a result, we came up with lots of new creative ideas.

The “lightning demos” exercise catalyzed the team’s inspiration. We looked at a large diversity of design concepts in existing products. We focused on picking concepts from products outside of the mobile app industry. Lots of ideas came from video games level design, education web services, and social media. We came back to it multiple times over the course of the day. These design concepts acted as a repository of raw ideas that helped us in our creative process. They became the building blocks of our solutions.

We then used the 4 steps iterative sketching creative process:

• Note gathering
• Rough ideas
• Crazy 8s
• Solution sketch

Because of the size of the scope of our solution, we divided the work into three independent sections. Two person worked on each of them.

• The trigger: what brings a user to want to know more about a feature.
• The content: what helps a user understand how the feature work.
• The exit: what does a user after he learned and interacted with the new feature.

This creative process led to 6 full solutions sketches. We closed the diverging part of the design thinking process on these 6 full solutions.

The next day will be all about converging.

Making fast decisions

Now that we had explored lots of innovative and creative ideas, it was time to select which idea to pursue. Our goal was to end the day with a thorough detailed plan about what prototype we are going to build.

To narrow down from what we had, to what we needed, we used a series of steps to help us make fast decisions. Making group decision is generally an exhausting process. It is also prone to a variety of individual cognitive biases and group thinking.

To overcome these issues, we started by using a silent voting system to highlight the best ideas. With this technique, each team member has the same amount of influence over the final decision. It also helps the decider to make fast informed decisions. The team has to constantly goes back to the sprint goal to make sure we keep a common direction. The best ideas and sections are selected and recombined into a new solution.

The storyboard

Next step was the creation of a storyboard. The storyboard is a critical step to discuss the details of implementation of these big ideas before diving in building the prototype itself. It is an intense collaborative exercise.

Multiple vignettes are composing the storyboard, like a comic book. It starts with an opening scene and walk the user over tasks. In our case, we had 12 vignettes. The opening scene was an iPhone notification. There were several tasks for the user to perform combining interactions and videos.

The big and small ideas

Our solution was revolving around a handful of big ideas: personalization, engaging content, and fun discovery.

These big ideas translated in combination of small ideas during the storyboarding process. Here is an overview.

The main trigger was all about push, videos, and fly-test. We designed:

• A push notification trigger about a popular new feature that the user has never used so far.
• A 5 seconds walkthrough video of the feature.
• An option for users to directly try out the new feature after viewing the video. We tested two versions of this fly-test option: a simulator within the “Tips” app, and, a deep link to the real app where the new feature lives)

We also revamped the UI and navigation of the “Tips” app itself:

• We created a navigation menu with two levels: 1) apps & 2) feature in that app.
• We picked menu layout made of floating bubbles rather than a scrolling listing.

Finally, we added personalization into the menu content and layout by:

• 1 correlating the app bubble size with the level of popularity of the new features living in that app.
• associating the app bubbles color tone to the user personalized frequency of usage.
• distinguishing visually whether a user has discovered (video watched) or already used particular feature.

Building the prototype

We started with a discussion about the tools we could use to build our prototype. Teams usually have a design toolkit they are familiar with and they use in their job. Since we put together our team specifically for this Design Sprint, we needed to add this step to the process.

After some discussions, we agreed to use Adobe Experience Design. It comes up with all the UI elements of the iPhone and iOS10. Our UX Designer knew the tool very well. This was enough to make XD a natural winner.

Now that we had built each vignette in XD, we needed to stitch everything together. We also wanted to add animations and user interactions. The team decided to use Keynote to do that. Keynote is a surprisingly powerful prototyping tool. It is extremely easy to use for people with no design background. It also has a theater feature to run the prototype full-screen on an iPhone, which became very useful when testing the prototype with users.

We also created and embedded tutorial demo videos that we created with QuickTime and After Effects. This was one of our key idea for users to quickly learn how to use iOS new features.

You can check a few screenshots of the result below:

Testing with users

The excitement to have real users coming to our office to test our prototype was palpable. The prototype was far from perfect and extensive. But it was functional and usable. And that’s all we needed for our user research to fuel a good discussion with users.

But before people show up at your doorstep, you have to recruit them. A couple of day prior, we posted an ad on Craigslist. Following the Design Sprint book advice, it was simple and straight to the point. “User interview. $60 for 60 minutes of your time.” We rewarded the participants with an Amazon Gift Card for their time and participation.

We made sure they were part of our core audience. We created a small screener to test a couple of points:

• iPhone users for over a year. We wanted to make sure they’ve been through an update cycle.
• Not too tech-savvy. They had to qualify for “normal users” and not”power users”.
• Not working in a product / engineering / design role in a tech company. We wanted to get genuine reactions, not professional advice.

The interviews was a mix of user research and usability testing. They were 60 minutes long. Our user researcher intentionally designed the script to be simple and flexible. It focused on “themes” and “hypotheses to test” rather than a clear sequence of questions to follow. Here are a couple of these themes and hypotheses:

• General context about the user as a person.
• The usual behavior and relationship with their iPhone.
• Reactions to certain steps in the prototype.
• Reactions and feedback around the comprehensive experience.

Our user researcher did all the 4 interviews to make sure we had consistency across users. We had two cameras in the room. One was streaming a view of the phone interactions. The other one was streaming the interviewee face so we could see her reactions.

The rest of the team was in a separate room. Everyone took notes during the day using the post-it method. We distilled the core takeaways by placing these post-it on an affinity map after each interview. At the end of the day, we all debriefed together to identify the common patterns about what worked and what did not.

Learning about the process

Our team deeply cares about continuous improvement. Heck, we even built a tool in Slack to facilitate quick constructive feedback among us. As facilitators, we wanted to conduct a retrospective of the entire sprint. We came up with a simple idea.

Everyday, at the end of the sprint, we asked every team member to record a short video / audio. The team had to answer the following 3 open-ended questions:

• How do you feel right now?
• What did you enjoy today?
• What was challenging?

The day after the end of the sprint, we reviewed all the videos. We used the post it note taking method (obviously) and consolidated the main insights. This gave us a great overview of the pulse of the team emotional and physical state over the course of the sprint. We also spotted some mishaps in the facilitating process itself. It helped us to reflect on it and point out areas where we succeeded, stumbled, and failed.

We will share those learning in a series of future posts. We also reflected on our experience as facilitators. We will share insights on what we did right, what we missed, and what we failed on. For those of you thinking about running a sprint in your company, we hope that it will help you taking the plunge.

What’s next?

We are definitely convinced by the Design Sprint concept. We aim to apply it again in our own company on real problems some teams are facing this time. But before, we need to educate our coworkers about it and the benefits it can provide them. We scheduled an internal brown bag session to walk our co-workers over this story.

Our office promotes collaboration and cross-pollination of domain expertise. We will search and find internal opportunities to support our co-workers in overcoming challenges they face. In a similar way than Google Ventures, we also want to offer startups that are part of our Corporate Accelerator the same opportunity. We want to support them in answering a major challenge they are currently facing. Startups needs to move fast and in the right direction. It’s a question of survival. They also have strong multi-disciplinary teams. The Design Sprint model is a tool perfectly adapted to their needs and goals.

From our perspective, we are curious to learn the differences between internal design sprints and external ones with startups. We aim to run 3 more sprints before the end of the year. If you have an interest in having us facilitating a Design Sprint for you please reach out to us at designsprint@osvproduct.com .

Our thanks go to (in no particular order):

• Our Design Sprint team: Carolyn, Ludo, Sara, and Gene.
• Our experts Matt and Will.
• Nadya who took the time to advise us on the process.
• The Sprint Book and its authors.

About the authors:

Gregory Veran. I am a Product guy with a balanced mix across Business, Technology and UX Design. I am currently honing my Product Design skills through multiple initiatives (running Design Sprints, building Captain Feedback and a marketplace for nanny share). You can read my latest posts on my Medium profile and follow me on Twitter @gregveran.

Antonin Lapiche. I‘m a Product Designer at Orange. I’m building expertise from the ground to infuse design (not pixelpushing) in the veins of the company. I care a lot about solving problems for people like you and me. I see technology being an enabler for solutions. I don’t see technology always being the solution itself. You can read my latest posts on my Medium profile and follow me on Twitter @airlikidh2.