Summary

In an explosive 10 day sprint we brought this founder’s vision to life in the form of a hifi click dummy. We identified the most important user journey, the magic moment, and hotwired everything together for her to tell the story

Project Spotlight

Click dummies are a fast effective PoC — they communicate the concept for stakeholders, raise money or hire.

A linear attack

For such a short sprint (10 days) the focus was on execution rather than exploration. The founder had a clear idea in her mind what she desired. The challenge was to bring that to life, in a beautiful clear way within the tight deadline. To achieve this, all efforts must focus on the right areas. Lean precision.

Low res. exploration

We immediately jumped into low resolution exploration. The first iteration was a patchwork of screenshots from the founders kickoff notes, merged with our own thoughts and suggestions. This quickly provided the platform for ongoing critique and collaboration.

Right from the first iteration we were aiming to define a single ‘happy path’ and isolate the magic moment within it. We laid our work out as a user journey to ensure user-centric thinking.

Magic moment

Crafting a ‘magic moment’ isn’t just for mature products. It is the fundamental compositional element of any successful product. For a persuasive PoC, the magic moment is the point of the demo. Getting this right was critical.

In larger projects, we’d craft a keystone. This would elegantly link multiple features and user journeys together. Here, with a single user journey, crafting a magic moment refers to identifying the product’s strategic x-factor and accenting that as the focal point of the experience.

App architecture

Even though this was just a click dummy, crafting realistic app architecture was important. This means an elegant arrangement of central navigation and selection of primary views.

Mid res. wireframes

This stage is always without branding (i.e. in greyscale with sketch fonts) not just to save time, but to focus stakeholders on the decisions at hand. This allows us to have detailed discussions on performance, without being distracted by style.

Sample sets

With the navigation and interactions for the product formed, it was time to apply style. As part of our briefing, the founder shared a beautifully styled pitch deck.

Although there were no UI elements involved, it laid the foundations for tone and style. We skinned a small sample set of views, presenting a couple of top level options for feedback.

High res.

After approval, we skinned all views and all components

Click Dummy

The final step was of course hot-wiring together the click dummy itself to bring the founders vision to life. We went the extra mile, faking keyboard interactions for onboarding and purchase flows, to create a fully immersive user journey.

The outcome was a beautiful hifi click dummy that enabled the founder to easily communicate her concept, and it’s USP to potential investors and hires.

Further reading