The Brief
Update is a powerful tool that captures the most important parts of virtual meetings and hands it over to you once done. Determined to make an insanely great app, Update needed help in narrowing its features down to an MVP. So they tapped Purple Bunny to help them deliver on this.
The Challenge
Remote work is here to stay and with it the tools that make it all possible. But what if the tools that are supposed to make us more efficient are the same ones that are doing the opposite? Meetings take longer, collaborating much harder, and people more fatigued. The Update team thought of an innovative way to solve this problem and found a way around it, banking on a simple premise- an innovative tool that uses AI to take automatic meeting notes and keep track of important information.
They had already been testing the features on users but the main issue was that they had a really broad product, and there was a need to rightsize it without compromising their vision.
The challenge brought a broad range of participants. Update's CEO and Founder, Josh Schachter whom we had already worked with in the past, his brilliant team of designers, developers, and AI experts from LA, and Bill Gross of Idealab Studio. Having such a cross-functional team working together in one space gave a wider, more empathic perspective on the work ahead.
The Solution
What is Update, and who is it for? By clarifying all these and more through two collaborative branding workshops, we were able to define Update’s identity. The process helped clear the path, letting them innovate without struggling over its purpose.
The visual identity followed suit. The challenge was to bring this brand to life with all its attitude and personality. We wanted to put the fun in Update’s functionality without losing sight of its main purpose. We needed to create an identity system that would fuel Update’s growth in the coming years.
From here, we moved on to the core of the work. Figuring out the most important features Update should carry forward into the actual product build, required combining a Design Sprint with the Value Proposition and The Importance vs. Feasibility exercises. While they aren’t part of the Sprint process, we added them because we knew that we could get valuable insights from both.
Design Sprint - Week 2
Opening Design Sprint
Workshop #2: Solution
This stage tackles the big questions: what are some possible solutions to the challenges? We did a round of exercises that let us get inspired by what's out there and repurposed them according to our vision.
Workshop #3: Prototyping
By this time, we had a stack of solutions. But since we couldn’t prototype and test them all, we evaluated each one of them and chose the ones that had the best chance of achieving our goals. Having a clear sense of which solutions to implement, helped us move forward to the next phase of the Sprint, creating a storyboard for the prototype.
In a matter of 8 hours, the design team came up with a beautifully-designed prototype on Figma.
Round 1: User Testing
While it was looking great and we were raring to go, we had to validate our design decisions with our users first. We tested our prototype and recorded their feedback to see if our product meets their needs and expectations.
Design Sprint - Week 3
Workshop #4: Do it again, but better
We reviewed all our users' reactions from the first round of tests and used the data to define the challenges we had to tackle next. From there, we worked on several iterations to make sure we really had something good before doing another round of prototyping and user testing.
Design Sprint - Week 4
Design handoff and asset delivery
Workshop #5: Handover
What's moving us forward and what's holding us back? The second round of user tests helped us identify what stands between the team and our goal. Using an Effort vs. Impact Matrix, we made post-Sprint recommendations that were immediately feasible and impactful.
"I know how challenging Design Sprints are, and the fact that you guys were able to pull it off remotely blew my mind.... everyone was involved... kudos to all of you for pulling that off"
Josh Schachter
CEO & Founder, Update
The Results
Designed for teams, by teams.
A truthful and exciting brand identity that would set them up on a path toward growth.
A Design & Iteration Sprint Report.
Summaries of the Design Sprint and Iteration Sprint.
2 high-fidelity prototypes.
Data-backed recommendations for next steps.
As people who constantly use productivity tools, we knew that we were on to something very valuable. We saw ourselves as potential users and felt that there was indeed a need for this kind of tool. It was also a huge plus to work with the most remarkable minds out there who were also equally cool and humble. We can't wait to see the great things Update will do.
