Logitech International S.A, more commonly known by its brand name Logitech, is a Swiss-American multinational and one of the top producers of input and interface devices for personal computers.
Logitech wanted to reclaim control of the proposal creation process. By providing a tool to help their salespeople create better proposals, they wanted to ensure they were correctly structured and curated from approved and up-to-date content, with improved deck generation speeds and more personalization in order to impress the customers.
“What we were trying to create was some kind of interface the customer could use to view proposals, have them in an editable format, so that when specifications, or hardware change, it would be an easy process to make sure that the content was still relevant”
says Toby Lewis, Senior Manager for Collaboration Strategy at Logitech,
“We came to The Virtual Forge to see how we might be able to achieve that.”
The Virtual Forge took on the challenge by holding a Design Sprint with key stakeholders of the Logitech team. The team included experts of customer experience, sales and marketing, as well as product development.
A Design Sprint is a time-constrained process that uses design thinking distributed into five critical stages with the aim of reducing the risk when bringing a new product or service to the market. Developed in 2010 by a Google Ventures team, it has been a strategy gradually implemented across a large number of companies.
Due to lockdown, this session was hosted virtually by using a Miro board, an online collaborative whiteboard platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together.
Logitech chose the design sprint as the initial step to get their intended solution so that “everybody was brought into the concept, while testing out if the solution could actually work.
To ensure the designed prototype had the required functionality, a diverse team was assembled
The Logitech team included representation from different crucial business areas, including the sales team, global heads, customer success team, behavioural scientists and C-Level executives.
Toby Lewis was the Decider, while The Virtual Forge’s Facilitator and Product Designer ensured the sessions were focused and inspiring, stretching the team's imagination to create an incredible solution.
The process was distributed in five critical phases, in a highly collaborative and cross-functional environment, structured to unleash creativity.
To tackle the challenges presented by Logitech, it was crucial for the whole team to fully understand the issues at hand.
The challenge was analysed and understood through a combination of design-thinking exercises, explained by the Decider, and followed through by The Virtual Forge Facilitator. The Virtual Forge team devised a series of imaginative challenges to clearly understand how a user would navigate and experience the final product. This clarity allowed the team to come up with focused objectives and a fully developed mind map.
At the end of Day 1, all stakeholders were clear on what they were working towards and what next steps looked like. With the help of The Virtual Forge’s skilled sprint facilitators, all of this was accomplished within the allotted 4 hours and the day ended with all insight being processed and mapped for next steps.
The second day of the Design Sprint enabled the team to get inspiration and look back at the decisions made during Day 1, ending with several possible solutions to tackle the proposed challenge.
By examining several sources of inspiration chosen by every participant, the second day gets spent exploring potential solutions by ideation.
The initial creative concepts were identified using some creative challenges such as Crazy 8, an exercise in which each participant designs eight different ideas in only 8 minutes. The sprint facilitators guide this process to help participants stretch their imagination and explore creative solutions to the challenge presented.
Day 3 of the Design Sprint is where it gets really exciting. Building upon the ideas generated on the previous day, the team is able to produce an initial prototype of the product solution.
After the concept sketches were scrutinized and refined by all participants, the sprint facilitator presented several activities to help all participants identify the concept most suitable for solving the challenge initially presented. The initial work of clearly identifying the problem, helped ensure that the concepts presented were best aligned with the intended outcomes.
Each participant was able to create a simple user test flow with 6 steps. The steps, starting at the the entry point and finishing with the ideal ending, were closely inline with the mind map and sprint goals previously devised. At the end of Day 3, participants voted on the flow that best represented the chosen prototype.
With a lot of the heavy lifting completed, Day 4 of the Design Sprint generates the building blocks for the UI/UX team to create a prototype. In a time constrained process of just 2 hours, the team designed a logical flow for the entire solution, creating a storyboard with 8 screens/elements based on the team’s initial sketches.
The design sprint success needs to be measured by the test prototype created at the end of the fourth day. The outputs were delivered to the UI/UX team of The Virtual Forge, tasked with shaping the wireframes from the design sprint into a fully functional and working prototype.
The Virtual Forge used Adobe XD to create a test prototype that could be used in the validation phase. The Virtual Forge has been an Adobe partner for 10 years, choosing to use their suite of design tools for their fast and powerful UI/UX design solutions, including ease of use, their simple UI, impressive component libraries and the ability to share designs easily with other team members.
The Virtual Forge used all Adobe XD prototyping features to create an appealing and fully functional design, ensuring that the prototype resembled as closely as possible the final solution. This was crucial to the success of the project as having a visual dynamic prototype for the validation phase simplified the user’s task, as they could see the proposed solution and interact with it.
Logitech supplied The Virtual Forge with a group of users from their sales and management teams. They would be everyday users of the system and therefore the most qualified personnel to validate if the proposed solution was successful.
They were tasked with the completion of several predefined steps on the prototype to create and send a proposal.
The results were excellent. All users agreed that the solution would unquestionably allow them to optimise their tasks and improve their performance. The set tasks were completed with no issues and they found the product to be very intuitive.
Suggestions for improvement were gathered and studied to understand their viability. The ones that undoubtedly contributed to the end-solution effectiveness were added to the prototype.
“Going through the Design Sprint meant that we could break the walls down and not run inside the fences that we usually have”
Toby Lewis, Senior Manager for Collaboration Strategy at Logitech
The Design Sprint outputs generated a positive response from the executive management team, lending credibility to an idea and facilitating the agreement to start a project development around the created solution.
The fully clickable prototypes designed by The Virtual Forge with Adobe XD created the correct level of visualisation needed to ensure that everyone outside the initial design sprint could understand the level of improvement that the solution could bring to the sales process, certificated by the user testing process.
.webp)
Once the prototypes were completed, tested and signed off by executive management, The Virtual Forge’s Front End Development teams started to scope out the build. They needed to understand how the required functionality could be reproduced from the dynamic prototypes created during the Design Sprint.
The technical teams adjusted the primary designs to get a more easy-to-build solution, and therefore more cost effective, but on the whole, the design remained as intended throughout the more creative process.
As Logitech wanted to get a solution up and running as soon as possible, the decision was made to begin with an Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with future enhancements after initial development.
The Salesview application was built using the following technologies:
The development team set out the build and development following the completed prototype. Two week sprints were set up to complete the Product Backlog Items (PBI) as required.
Due to an optimised SCRUM methodology, the building phase was much faster than it usually is, meaning that the product became a reality in just a few short weeks.
Have a project in mind? No need to be shy, drop us a note and tell us how we can help realise your vision.
