Holland & Barrett — Christian Buncher

Remote design sprints to reimagine a vitamin subscription service.

Holland & Barrett had launched a vitamin subscription service in 2019 that had failed to gain traction.

I was asked to work with the Holland & Barrett innovation team in London to help them re-imagine what the digital journey could be, with a real focus on the customer experience. The caveat… it was lockdown in the UK and the sprints, design, testing and MVP development all needed doing 6 weeks with the whole team and agency being remote.

Approach.

The coronavirus pandemic has fundamental changed the way we work. This project for Holland & Barrett allowed me to develop, test and run my first remote design sprint. A process that I have always conducted face to face with a group of 6 to 12 people.

Working with a Senior Digital Design from McCann I adapted our normal 5-day process and included the client at critical stages during the week. This included a 3 hour online sketching workshop with 6 people. The sketches were uploaded onto Concept board and we used the same dot voting process that I would use in person via the shared virtual whiteboard.

Myself and the designer created the storyboard and prototype, with the designer polishing it all off in a clickable prototype in Adobe XD.

User testing was done remotely by myself, I briefed a 3rd party market research company to hire the appropriate users for the test and conducted 8 interviews / prototype tests via Lookback that allowed the client to view the sessions live and make comments as we progressed.

The feedback from the testing was fed into two iteration sprints. This is a 3-day style sprint that I have developed that focuses on adaptation of an existing idea rather than ideation. This allows for the idea to be pivoted and adjusted according to the use feedback.

Two more rounds of user testing were conducted until we got to an MVP that we would be happy to launch with. Once we had agreed on the MVP, I created a set of jobs stories and handed over to the Product Owner and development teams to begin work. As part of the process we also tested different commercial scenarios and tested these with the business to ensure profitability.