Domino's Design Sprint: Case Study

Vision Statement

The Design Sprint’s results would allow for a group of people who have difficulty deciding what to order on a pizza to decide a fast and fun way. Specifically, we are working on a Design Sprint for consumers who would order from Domino’s. The vision of our designed application for Domino’s will create a fun and easy process for a user to decide what to have on their pizza for a group of people. Everyone will have their opinions visualized by all who participate in the application. Everyone gets to pick their top eight toppings they would consider to have on the pizza. Then, collectively, everyone gets to pick 6 toppings. Whoever wins the domino spin game gets to pick the final 4 ingredients to be on the final pizza. This allows for all of the consumers to have a say in what is going to be on the final pizza so that everyone is happy. This prevents awkward moments of decision making or putting all the decisions on one person. Our application will make it a collective decision between the consumers. It can be frustrating and difficult for some consumers to decide on what they would like to have on their pizza. Therefore, our application’s process will create a stable, fun, and unique way of deciding what the customers will have. Struggling to decide what to have on their pizza should not be on the agenda of a customer. Our Domino’s application will prevent this stressful decision to become a fun moment between friends or family.

The Challenge

Getting together with friends or family to have breakfast, lunch, or dinner is always a great way to connect and enjoy each others company. Eating meals together allows for the building of relationships, healthier eating habits, explore new food options, laughter, stress-relieving, and saving money. Although this is a great bonding moment, things could become heated at the moment. Sometimes in this kind of group setting, people could begin to become hangry if a food decision has not been made ahead of time and may lead to some conversations that could have been avoided with a full stomach. It can be difficult to decide on something to eat that everyone will enjoy and be satisfied with. Deciding what to eat can be quite an issue and frustrating because not everyone can agree on what to have on their pizza specifically. My group and I will come up with a solution for our hangry consumers who wish to order a pizza from Domino’s. Our solution must make it easier and enjoyable deciding what will be for dinner when ordering from Domino’s. Our application provides a solution to the question, “What’s for dinner?” before the hangry monster becomes a problem. The Design Sprint requirements were to design for Domino’s, make a digital application or website, end result leading to a customer being able to make a purchase, work in an assigned group, and end with submitting a case study.

The Team

Evie Weeden

https://evieweeden.wixsite.com/evieweeden

Kate Fox

https://katelynnfox.wixsite.com/portfolio

Hannah Lee

https://hliaerok.wixsite.com/leedesign

Joah Campbell

The Sprint

Day 1: Understand (Monday, August 26th, 2019)

Day 1 of this Design Sprint was the first phase out of five. We started the day by getting together with the group members that we had picked from the class before. We made a decision on the group leader based on who has either worked for dominos, worked at a pizzeria, worked in the food industry, worked retail, and/or spent the most money ordering pizza. This decision was finalized leading to me becoming the group leader due to working at Pizza Pedlar, little Caesars, Piadas, Arbys, Athletic club café, and Forever21. Due to my experience working in the food and retail industry most compared to my other group members, I was the best fit for the leading role.

After figuring out our groups and team leaders,

we began with a Design Sprint kickoff. The kickoff transferred into asking, “How Might We? (HMW)” questions. These questions were accumulated by thinking about Project vision, business goals, the voice of the user, existing product audit/design evolution, competitor audit, and technology: considerations & opportunities. We were provided with post-it notes and spent about 5-10 minutes thinking about HMW questions related to these subjects

which we wrote onto the post-it notes and stuck them up so everyone could see them. As a group, we started with fourteen HMW questions. Based on these questions, We narrowed down our questions to four and then 2 ideas. Our two final HMW questions were “HMW.. bring recipes from other countries to the USA for a limited time?”, and “HMW… make a pizza flavor contest?”.

After coming up with our HMW questions, me and one of my group members, Hannah, moved

groups to conduct an empathy-building exercise. For this exercise, we observed each other on

how we decide and order food.

Previous week:

On Monday, 8/19, we picked our group members. For homework within the groups, we had to read

some Domino’s articles and daily/weekly eating out/in statistics provided to us. We split up the

reading between the four of use to where everyone read one Domino’s article and one statistics

page which we provide notes about.

Observations & thoughts:

One day one of deciding our group's team leader, HMW questions, and empathy-building exercise,

I have concluded some thoughts. After being a team leader for a group for the past 5 weeks, I

have built confidence and great team leader skills I did not know I had. Looking back at all the

experience I have had within the food and retail industries, I have learned a lot about human behaviors. Based on my recent experiences, I believe it did help me with formulating my HMW questions. I

suggested the majority of the HMW questions between my group. I knew from day one that my

group and I would be reliable and trusting based on current relationships and new forming

relationships which were reassuring and prominent.

Next class assignment:

As a group, we formulated a simple creative brief, summary over our market research notes,

and 3 design sketches for our potential prototype.

Day 2: Sketch (Monday, September 2nd, 2019)

Day 2 was the beginning of putting together our possible prototype for our Domino’s application. Once class started, we got into our groups and found a spot away from other groups to look at everyone's sketches. All four of us had to create 3 sketches that we believe would be needed within the application prototype. My group and I found a dry erase board and taped up our sketches side by side. Under each sketch, we had to provide a brief statement as to what the sketch is representing. This process was called solution sharing. After taking a minute to look and read each other's sketches, asked additional questions to reassure we knew what someone’s sketch was representing. Without saying much after this, we took our colored star stickers and placed them over sketch idea features we believed will be prominent to our design process. This process was called heat mapping. After everyone has placed their stickers, we discussed how to take the top features we selected individually and came up with more solution ideas. As a result, we decided to incorporate a home/login page from my sketch, pop-up ad from Joah’s or Hannah’s sketch, and Evie’s layout for the pizza topping selection sketch.

After seeing everyone's ideas, doing our heat mapping, and discussing our ideas for the prototype, we decided on what our final application will slowly become. We all meet back together with our whole class afterward. As the team leader, I had to create five sketches of what our prototype might look like will steps to explain to the whole class. As a group, we decided to go with our idea of creating a pop-up ad which would appear on the Domino’s application during ordering. The pop-up ad would be for a pizza flavor contest which could become Domino’s new signature pizza flavor. The ad would either appear before or after the customer is ordering their pizza.

The steps were:

1. Start on the login page

2. Create order Pop-up ad appears.

3. Click on a pop-up ad that leads you to a page so you can apply for the

Contest

4. Click on the create button

5. The page takes you to fill out by selecting your toppings or type.

a. Toppings will appear on physical looking pizza

6. Once done adding your submission, click on the submit button

7. Thank you end page

8. After the "thank you" page, everyone's creations pop up for you to vote on

Winning pizza pops up after everyone hits submit.

After creating the sketches, we presented our ideas to the whole class. As groups presented their ideas, we realized our decision mistakes. We realized that our idea was off track from the assignment. We realized we had to create an application which the consumer could make a purchase in the end.

Observations & thoughts:

Day two was getting into the meat of this Design Sprint. Based on our mistake and realizing what we needed to do next, we knew what was in store for us next. We decided to start over our thinking process and come up with better ideas as different as possible compared to everyone else's idea which I will get more into for day three.

Day 3: Decide (Monday, September 9th, 2019)

For day three, my group and I met up for an hour very early in the day before our classes we had throughout the day to come up with a new idea. We wanted to be different from the other groups with our

solutions. We came up with some great ideas but knew our ideas were a bit far fetched for the assignment. For example, creating a smash bros game to decide what they will eat for dinner. The problem with this idea was it wouldn’t be directed to dominos. Also, the result of our application idea would not lead to making a purchase. Wheel of chance formed into an idea we furthered into our actual prototype. We finally concluded to create an application based on the 4-3-1 method. This method between groups is were four people decide a place that would like to eat. They then narrow it down to three ideas and then one person becomes the final decider and picks one place to eat at. We took this idea and decided to call ours the

8-6-4 method.

The conclusion to this idea helped me start a new sketch prototype for our new idea. We still incorporated our original sketches from before by using Evie’s sketch of how picking the toppings would look like, Joah’s pizza sketch, and Joan’s and my sketch of a login page.

The new steps for our prototype:

1. Log in or sign up page.

2. Information about pizza size, number of people in the group, and group name.

a. Once everyone in the group is ready, everyone clicks on the ready button.

3. Next page takes you to where you can select your first 8 toppings they would

not mind being on the final pizza.

a. Once everyone has selected their 8 toppings, they hit ready.

4. Based on everyone's topping selections, only those toppings appear on the next page where

everyone then picks 6 toppings.

a. Once everyone has selected their 6 toppings, they hit ready.

5. The next page allows everyone to spin a domino which will decide who gets to pick the final 4

toppings for the pizza. Whoever gets snack eyes gets to make the final decision.

6. The winner of the Domino spin picks their 4 toppings while everyone else waits.

7. The final pizza decision appears for everyone. The winner goes to check out to purchase the pizza.

a. Who pays for the pizza or how they decide to split the purchase is on the customer.

Observations & thoughts:

I thought day three was going to be a problem with conflicts for my group. I was so proud of my group

with coming up with such a great idea so fast. I believe our idea was still different enough compared

to the other groups. My group worked so efficiently together to come up with a new idea as fast as

we did prove to me that this decision was effective.

Day 4: Prototype (Monday, September 9th-16th, 2019)

Day four consisted more into a week of working with my group and formulation final decisions on how our prototype would look like. This included color palette, menu bar, ingredient images, tabs, Domino’s

logo placement, etc. This part of the process was where things become a little disorganized and

frustrating. My group and I communicated by text messages mostly and met together on

September 16th to finalize the layout.

I, fortunately, had a much more open schedule compared to my other teammates due to work and

class schedules. Therefore, I had time to illustrate our prototype in Illustrator. The set of illustration

you see was my first attempt at designing the layout for the prototype.

Evie stood forward by helping put together the prototype together in Marvelapp.com.

My group and I was okay with how it looked but still was not satisfied with the layout which I agreed. The first prototype was not the best and we knew we had a lot of work cut out for us. As a group, we were very unsatisfied with the turnout and everything did not flow well. https://marvelapp.com/453c5g6

Hannah and I Came up this idea of a layout. We agreed on the new placement for the menu bar and domino. We could not decide if this new layout was too cluttered or to empty if only cheese items appeared and so on for the meats and veggies. We scratched this idea and decided we needed some fresh eyes.

We found some illustrators on the floor and asked them what they thought of our first layout idea. We got some great feedback which helped reassure our idea and what to do with the new layout for our prototype. Other groups who were working on the same project as we made it clear to us that the prototype does not have to work as a final application which eased a lot of stress from us on the project. My group and I finalized our layout design with the images shown below. We added additional tabs for the group info page. We included pizza crust and pizza sauce tabs. Based on doing this, we decided to change our 8-6-4 process to 6-5-4 process. So now the steps were still the same but the number of toppings to pick had changed.

We were finally satisfied with how the layout and color

palette looked and decided to further our prototype by putting it together in Marvelapp.com. Our second version was coming together nicely but still had some improvements needed to it. We decided to keep it as it was until conducting our user testing for the prototype.

Observations & thoughts:

After my team and I realized our mistake and come up with a new idea as fast as we did was a great example of great teamwork and I was so proud of us with everything we came up with. It would have been nice to have a little more help of the illustration process but in the end, made things smoother when putting together.

Day 5: Validate (Monday September 16th - 23rd+, 2019 )

Day five conducted of us discussing our user testing findings and results to further our prototype. Unfortunately, finding those who would be willing to be our user testers and let us record them was not easy. Issues faced during this part of the process was time and for those willing to be recorded. Not everyone was comfortable being recorded which was the main issue for me. I finally found my user to test who had a time, date, and comfortable for me to record them while I ask them questions.

The questions I asked my user were:

(Before showing them the prototype)

What are your expectations for this application?

What do you expect it to look like?

(After showing them the prototype)

Did your expectations from before looking at the prototype match or was it better or worse?

Would you say the prototype does what it is supposed to do?

Would you say the application design matches the purpose?

What would you like to see come first when you open the application?

Was anything distracting?

Did something not fit or seem odd?

Did the navigation make sense?

What features are missing?

What would you change about this application if you could?

How likely or unlikely would you want to use this product once finished?

Unfortunately, due to limited time with everyone's schedule to get user testing and Stephan not being in class when we were supposed to discuss our user testing, we did not get together to discuss what we observed and what changes we would make. However, based on my user tester, I felt like I could make the final changes for our prototype. I continued to make additional features and Illustration pages which would be added to the final prototype. I continued to communicate with Evie about our prototype process and decided I would put together the final prototype so we could have a before and after prototype. We wanted to avoid Evie paying Marvelapp.com to create two prototypes.

Observations & thoughts:

This part of the process was a lot more disorganized and confusing. Our challenges for this part of the process wasn’t too much of an issue for me as it was for others on my team. I was fortunate to have received as much help as I did from Evie. I realized as I began to use Marvelapp.com that I did not enjoy the way it worked and realized how important naming my pages were.

The Outcome

Creating a Design Sprint was a great experience. It was very eye-opening and filled with many challenges. I learned a lot about working with a team. I also realized many challenges and struggles that occurred along the way of this assignment. The beginning part of the process seemed to be a lot easier and then progressively became more difficult and frustrating as new tasks were needed throughout the process. As a group, I believe we struggled the most out of the rest of the groups due to our first solution being completely wrong for what the assignment was meant to be.

However, once we realized our mistake we quickly were on top of it and trying to come up with lots of ideas that would be related to the solution for this project. When we realized our pop-up ad for a pizza contest was heading south from the assignment and saw what idea solutions other groups had, we knew to avoid what they were doing so we could be as unique as possible with our solution. We quickly formulated our ideas and were feeling pretty confident with our new solution idea. Once we had this figured out, the prototype took off and helped us understand what the premises of the Design Sprint were. When I had gotten together with my user tester and got their feedback, I knew what needed to be done. Communicating with other designers from our class also really helped us see what we needed to do for the layout and things became very smooth sailing from them. The biggest challenge was for others on my team to find their user testers in time for this Case Study. I was able to find my user tester and use the feedback to finalize our improved prototypes. The final prototype conducted of thirty-five illustration pages but it is smooth and makes sense. Hannah realized a way to make the transitions smoother by including a page that lets the user know what the next make will be, “Select 6 toppings, “Select 5 toppings”, “Select the final toppings”. This helped the flow of the prototype which we all agreed tied the prototype together. It allowed it to seem like a completed application if a user wanted to use it as an actual way to decide what is for dinner. Our prototype solution was one to be proud of which I am and hope the rest of my group is as well. The outcome of our application solution make me wish it existed and maybe after the semester when I have more time, I could get ahold of Domino’s and make this application a reality for consumers who love Domino’s pizza but struggle to decide what the have on the pizza within a group setting. I do not expect it to be easy but maybe with the help of my teammates, we could continue to communicate to make this assignment a real application. https://marvelapp.com/9b9iaa1

A project retrospective answering the following questions:

What did I find most challenging about this project?

As team leader of my group, I found a challenge in dividing the workup and to where I wasn’t doing all of the work which I feel did end up happening. Not saying that my team did not help because they all had great ideas but I was the one who illustrated 35+ pages for the prototypes. Also, trying to do my best to make sure everyone knew the objective of the project and what our final solution was. I felt like I was the only one understanding of what the final application would end up doing and looking like. The other part of this project that I found difficult was user testing. Conducting the user testing was not difficult but finding my user testers were. Due to these challenges, my whole group was facing this problem which caused our user testing to happen way later than what was intended based on the due dates. Furthermore, it is not easy working with a team when you do not know their daily lives and how to instruct each member with tasks. I was fortunate to have the time to work on the project as much as I did compare to my teammates but it would have been nice to have a little more help from my team.

What was the most valuable lesson I learned?

This Design Spring project was a great start into what it would be like to be in a team and what it is like to become a team leader of a group. I learned the challenges of working with people who do not have the same open schedule as I do which lead to some conflict. It was interesting seeing our process. We learned about a mistake we made and turned it around instantly to something greater. I learned it is okay to receive feedback from other teams and designers even if my group as a collective decision to ignore those insights based on our knowledge and wanting to stand out. To not seem basic but still on-trend. This was my first time creating prototypes for a fun application but a lot of hard work and time. I learned how fast a Design Sprint can be. It seemed slow in the beginning because we had a whole week to do something that took one day or even just a couple hours but then things began to speed up based on less time from schedules and the amount of work being put into this project.