Crush your design challenges with a Unicorn Invasion.
Need design help to take your project to the next level?
A VR experience-design prototype produced by one of our student teams during their design sprint. Right‽ (Photo by the author)
Well, you’re in luck.
When I was teaching at General Assembly, our full-time UX students capped their program with a three-week project for a real client. I was always impressed by how much work these small teams of three-to-four design students could accomplish in such a short time with real users, stakeholders, and objectives. Impressed enough, in fact, that as my co-instructor and I helped mentor a particularly sharp cohort through their sprints, we realized:
If a team of students can accomplish all this in three weeks, imagine what we could do in ONE.
Never shy about testing our ideas, we put our notion to the test. Working with J+E Creative client Block+Tackle, my former co-instructor and I leaned into an accelerated design sprint, collapsing our product design processes into a single ambitious week.
And we kicked ass.
The Unicorn Invasion was born.
Get ready for a Unicorn Invasion.
This is my unicorn. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. (Photo by the author)
Sharpen’s Unicorn Invasion isn't staff augmentation or a run-of-the-mill contract assignment. It’s a design-thinking A-team dedicated to you and your specific challenge. Our team of veteran creatives join your squad for a one-week design sprint, leveling-up both your project and your team with a mixture of business analysis and user research all the way to information architecture and high-fidelity visual design.
This unique take on a design sprint was the signature offering of Sharpen’s predecessor agency, J+E Creative. We successfully applied it to startups, enterprise BI systems, marketing sites, product proofs of concept … even digital transformation challenges. For each engagement, the timeline and budget were the same—two veteran designers, one crazy-productive week—but the scope of work and the deliverables we produced were unique to every challenge.
Unicorn Invasions are a blast and I’ve never seen one fail to deliver. In fact, these engagements often spawned other exciting opportunities for our clients and for us, too! So, you can probably see why the team at Sharpen is thrilled to bring the Unicorn Invasion back as our first package offering.
Let me show you how we do it.
Let our design unicorns invade!
A Unicorn Invasion is a flexible, affordable, and rapid design sprint created to serve a wide variety of clients and projects.
We've designed our Unicorn Invasion design sprintS to target the needs of:
Start-ups and entrepreneurs with few or no design resources looking to upgrade their product.
Internal teams and intrepreneurs at product companies needing to rapidly-prototype an MVP for a pitch, investment, or user testing.
Digital and marketing agencies wanting to leverage user-centered design to create a pitch.
Anyone with a project in trouble that needs creative leadership to turn it around.
Over the course of one week, our unicorns will:
Work embedded with your team—colocated or remote.
Carry out user-centered design processes to quickly discover, create, and validate ideas.
Deliver tested design recommendations based on user needs and opportunities.
Create a roadmap and help you identify resources to execute these recommendations (even if that’s not us).
And when we're done, your team will benefit from:
Your project getting the focused attention it needs to be well-designed and successful.
All the deliverables you need to keep the ball moving forward when our engagement is complete.
A strengthened base in user-centered design.
A foundation in design thinking that creates efficiency, empowerment, and empathy.
But how much can you really do in a week?
A lot! In a typical one-week Unicorn Invasion engagement, our designers, consultants, and seasoned instructors work with your stakeholders and team on a single key project, either at your office, in your user's environment, or in a creative and convenient off-site location. And whether your team is made up of designers or members from other disciplines, we'll tailor our approach to demonstrate effective user-centered design principles and processes and we’ll deliver artifacts you can start using right away and keep using once we're gone.
This schedule is an example describing the process used in the Post-Office Cowork case study, below. The exact services and deliverables will vary by client and project. (Illustration by the author)
A Unicorn Invasion case study:
Post-Office Cowork.
This is not the first app we’ve built. But it’s the first app we built intelligently.
— Post-Office Cowork co-founder
The team at Block+Tackle have launched their fair share of big projects over the years and are no strangers to process. With Post-Office, their roving pop-up coworking space concept, they wanted to build it as intelligently as possible. So, they did what they tell their own clients to do all the time: They called in the experts. 😉
Getting to start from scratch with a new consumer product is just about every designer's dream. And helping to create Post-Office's user experience, to flesh out its business model, and even to craft its voice delivered on every point—for us and for our client.
With Post-Office, we spent each day, from morning to evening, camped out in the co-founder's Atlanta home, scribbling ideas in dry-erase on living room windows, subsisting on delivery sandwiches, and analyzing every facet of the project. By Friday, we emerged from a living room papered in Post-It notes feeling inspired, armed with a deeper understanding of our users, and equipped with a business model that’s pretty damn close to bulletproof.
User research was planned, conducted, and synthesized in under two days. (Photo by the author)
Invasion: Down to work.
As a business owner, you don’t often get the opportunity to sit next to the designer.
— Post-Office Cowork co-founder
We've all used coworking spaces from time to time and we thought that gave us a head-start on knowing what our users might want. But ultimately, our users’ wants and needs outweigh our own. So, we spent the first two days of the Unicorn Invasion doing competitive and user research. We came out with a comprehensive understanding of the people we’d be reaching. And that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from having some of your own guesses and hunches validated by data.
And while those first 48 hours were research-intensive, on Wednesday, the magic started to happen. We started taking what we learned and putting it toward real-life features.
Raw user research was synthesized using affinity mapping to find themes among qualitative data. (Photo by the author)
Pseudo-persona were derived from the mapped user data, painting a clear and surprising picture of our user. (Photo by the author)
Sketched flows and wireframes quickly put the experience in scope and highlighted opportunities. (Photo by the author)
From zero to testing in five days.
You think you’re working on an app prototype, but you’re working on so much more. We worked on every facet of our business that week. Logistics, Operations, Business model, and it all happened organically that week as we worked through this app.
— Post-Office Cowork co-founder
One of the coolest parts about locking a bunch of brilliant creative people in a room together for a week? You’re practically guaranteed at least one momentous a-ha moment. One of our favorites came after hearing from users that one of the trickiest parts of coworking is finding a place that matches your vibe: some people are there to mingle and chat, others prefer to plug in and work uninterrupted with minimal distraction. And the two don’t really mesh that well.
Cue the Vibe Meter: our solution for feeling out the social vibe and noise level of a coworking venue before you even set foot inside the door, provided by in-app check-ins. It’s a way for users to scope out the feel beforehand—and it’s an idea we never would’ve developed without doing this kind of intense user research.
So with this kind of information in hand, we committed the second half of that first week to designing a robust—and, shockingly high-fidelity—prototype and testing it. This allowed us to quickly test pricing, language, flows, and more complex ideas like our daily pass concept and sharing mechanics—all before committing the development-ready design assets or a single line of code.
The vibe meter—the data visualization used to communicate the atmosphere of the location—went through several redesigns and rounds of testing before landing on this solution. (Illustration by the author)
Wireframes. (From left) The vibe meter—shown here as a newly checked-in user would interact with it—elicited a lot of excitement from usability testers. Initial testing focused on users understanding the checki-n process. Testing included their understanding of location details and the vibe concept. We also assessed the flows for booking and e-commerce. Testing also confirmed the business model and sharing mechanics. (Illustrations by the author)
After the invasion: Down to Mingle.
As an entrepreneur we are taking enormous amounts of risk to be able to start a project. I’ll never take on another piece of business without going through this process. We’ve pretty much nailed an opening business model. We’re going into a whole new level of business with a level of confidence I’ve never had before. We’ve vetted a lot of things that I thought were going to be gotchas. Where else are you gonna get that?
— Post-Office Cowork co-founder
The output of a Unicorn Invasion often becomes the first step toward something larger. The rapid turnaround allows for quick validation and decision making. And the focus on delivering actionable artifacts means the next phase of work gets started with a significant leg up.
With our initial week complete—and many lessons learned—we entered a second phase of our project and spent the next few weeks iterating on the original prototype with an eye toward creating a complete design solution that would work on a variety of devices and for an even wider variety of users.
The Unicorn Invasion scope focused on a handful of priority flows for mobile users. And many of those priorities received additional development. The vibe meter, for instance, went through several more rounds of design and technical validation. Additionally, many processes which had been designed for the mobile user underwent design for the tablet or desktop user. And, as with many other projects, the mobile-first process delivered a simpler and more elegant desktop solution than otherwise might’ve been conceived.
The mobile-first approach radically improved what might’ve otherwise been form-heavy or text-heavy desktop interactions. (Prototypes by the author)
The finished Post-Office app let account-holders and guests easily find locations, buy and share passes, and get to work quickly and with a clear picture of what the co-working space has to offer. (Photo by the author)
Launch your invasion!
As you might gather, we’re really into this stuff. And why not‽ Our Unicorn Invasions combine all the things Sharpen design teams are best at: speed, smarts, and dedication. And I’ve seen the process overdeliver enough times to know how well it works for everyone involved.
Contact us for a free remote consultation with our innovation leaders to see if a Unicorn Invasion can help with your design challenges. Your one-week Unicorn Invasion engagement includes your own dedicated, veteran design team on a full-time engagement as well as any deliverables and related licenses produced during the course of the week. And if you need a longer engagement, we’ve got killer design packages for those, too. 😁
We love bringing your ideas to life and being more innovative than ever. And if we can deliver for you quickly, all’s the better.
