Well, as you already know, most startups fail — nothing new here. But why not start the new year setting yours up for success?
Working with startups for quite some time, I noticed that most of the time, there are no clear definitions or understandings of what they do, what they sell, who they sell to, or how they actually do all this. In many cases, some of this information was “stored” in the founder’s mind without the team knowing too much about this. …
Here is the story of how an EdTech company used Design Sprints in their quest to revolutionize the Traditional Public school system. Ultimately, it will be known as the story of how we ran a Durran Design Sprint to help a local company that serves 650+ schools and over 100.000 users rethink their platform and redefine their target audience.
TL;DR
- Project duration: 3 weeks (from concept until it was turned over to the development team)
- Goal: Redesigning the current platform and improving the user experience; however, we ended up rethinking the target customer and the platform from the ground up while testing new ideas.
- Interesting information: The entire Sprint was run remotely, using platforms such as Miro and Zoom.
Outcome highlights:
- 6 concepts and 1 interactive prototype were generated;
- We gathered feedback from 3 user tests;
- We managed to define the new target customer;
- Most importantly, the team is now aligned and knows what to focus on next.
How Everything Started
In Romania, where our…
Here is the story of how an EdTech company that serves 650+ schools and has over 100.000 users ran a Design Sprint to rethink their platform and redefine their target audience in their quest to revolutionize the Traditional Public school system.
Hi. My name is Daniel, and I’m a Founder & Lead Product Designer at Durran. Before starting my own agency, I worked as a Product designer for 9 years, either in-house or as a freelancer, helping companies ranging from early-stage startups to enterprise businesses, across domains such as Technology, Healthcare, Publishing, Education, and Professional Services, create better digital products and grow their business.
In 2020 I launched Durran because I wanted to help startups build great digital products confidently and in less time, using a proven process, the Design Sprint.
Here at Durran, we focus on startups trying to solve…
Though sometimes the next step is not very clear, you know that you have to take it.
As you already might have figured it out, this is one of those posts where I’ll tell you that I created my own agency — which is true, by the way — but let’s just go back a little and see how and why this happened.
Very brief intro
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Daniel and I worked as a Product Designer (or UX / UI Designer back then) for more than 9 years.
I started out at a local startup where I had the chance to learn a lot about how digital products are “born”, with…
Short guide on what and how to measure for your startup, so you can keep track of what’s important.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC measures the cost of acquiring a new customer.
CAC = (Marketing + Sales Costs) / # of Customers acquired
Customer Life Time Value (LTV)
LTV is how much you expect to earn from a customer during the time they are with your company.
LTV = (Average Purchase Value x Average Purchase Frequency) x Average Customer Lifespan
For a viable SaaS or other form of recurring revenue model LTV should be about 3 x CAC
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
MRR is simply how much money your product brings in per month.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors. A conversion can refer to any desired action that you want the user to take.
Retention Rate
Retention is the percentage of customers that stay with you over a given…
Workflow best practices for clients and designers
Quick process overview
As a starting point, is good to have an overview of how the workflow will look like:
- Introduction call (discuss about the problem that needs to be solved)
- Research
- Sketching / Wireframing
- Feedback session
- Design based on wireframes
- Feedback session
- Iteration / Updates
Define the problem and context
Before you dwell yourself in reviewing UI designs, it’s a good idea to have a definition of what needs to be built/what’s the problem you are trying to solve in the end. So, in order to streamline the design process, start by talking with your designer about things like:
- What…
It’s already March, so the first two and a half months of 2019 are already behind us. Honestly, my plan was to get back to monthly retrospectives, but somehow I find myself merging January and February together, in a single post.
Work & freelancing
Once returned to work after the Christmas holidays, January started with a new collaboration. I had the chance to work with my first client from Romania since I started freelancing — MEDIjobs. The project itself is really interesting — is trying to solve a real problem here in Romania, where we are in need of good medical professionals; they…
It’s (still) that time of the year
After Christmas, New Year’s Eve and lots of cake we already found ourselves in 2019. I think that it’s a good idea to take some time during those days and reflect on how was the year that just passed by; to see what went well and what didn’t, what can be improved and what we should learn. As I’ve done in 2016 and 2017, I put those thoughts on paper so I can share them with you.
Writing a monthly article — almost
2018 was the first year I tried to write somewhat regularly here on Medium. The whole idea was to put together a short…
After 2 years working from home, I finally decided to move to an office
It already passed 2+ years since I left my job at FlipSnack and, in this time, I mostly worked from home. Now, for those of you who didn’t worked from home yet, this might look like a dream come true, but, trust me, it’s not. In order to somehow separate work from my personal life, me and my wife transformed one of our rooms into a home-office. For a long time, it was quite a good option, with some very strong positive sides: I wasn’t wasting time commuting between home and office, I could start to work whenever I want…
After skipping one month of retrospective, I’m back
As some of you might have noticed, I really skipped the design retrospective for July. This “incident” is partially due to some projects I worked on, but now that I’ve finished them, I’ll try to cover both July & August in this retrospective. So buckle up; this one might be a little longer than usual.
About work & mentoring
In the last few weeks, I worked on a quite interesting project — a tool to manage and create processes and documents — in collaboration with MVP Factory from Berlin. At the beginning of the project, I traveled to Berlin where I had the pleasure…
