A “Designful Launch”
Design Log . Entry #1 . 29 January 2021
Today is “launch day”! The first three DT Dojo Courses are now live and generally available: “Design Thinking Intro”, “Design Project #1”, and "Skills Bootcamp #1”. And along with it, an entirely new site is live too. To mark the occasion, I wanted to write up an inaugural “Design Log” entry to share a few highlights as well as my reflections on the design-thinking-style launch process I’ve run over the last three weeks.
Below, you’ll find an update on recent DT Dojo design & development progress, a summary of my observations & insights from the launch experience, and a list of my favorite design tools & techniques that I used for the work.
Design & development highlights from the last 3 weeks:
Ran 3 “Launch Design Sprints” (each a week long) to get from prototyped video sessions to launched courses
Set up new site features for the courses including: customer accounts, member areas, and a commerce flow
Created over 30 new site pages from scratch (including new home & about pages, course pages, sales & support pages, contact/questions/feedback pages, etc.)
Conducted 7 think-aloud user tests to preview, validate, and test everything
Shared the new courses with over 125 people who helped test earlier versions of the video sessions last year
In addition to all the design & development work for the launch, I also ran a legal & operations design sprint in parallel (new entity, docs, accounts, qbo setup, etc.).
Key observations & insights from the launch experience:
I’ve noticed that it’s been particularly energizing for me to be back in startup mode (albeit, this time around my aim is to run this as a “micropreneur” and bootstrap the effort to keep it life-centered rather than new-company-focussed!).
I realize that one of things that I particularly enjoy about starting something from scratch is the eclectic and energizing mix doing very different styles of work in a tightly integrated and iterative fashion: rapid & hands-on visual and experience design, slow & thoughtful writing and communication design, and methodical & detailed operations and business design.
And, what stands out to me most about this phase of making-something-real is how big of a gap there is between what Design Thinking call a “prototype” and what the Lean Startup community calls a “minimum viable product”. And neither details out how to go through a “launch process” in a human-centered and experimental way. So I developed my own design-thinking-style launch process (and I look forward to creating a toolkit for that!).
Favorite design tools & techniques that I used for the work:
Trello - for managing the details & tracking the progress of my Launch Design Sprints
Keynote - for rapidly creating visuals for the new site & courses
Noteshelf (iPad app) - for all of the new sketches sprinkled throughout the site
Google Docs - for my daily design journal to think through each day’s work and to keep notes on research & decisions