Running design sprints with the Institute of Physics

  • Sam Holyhead
  • Elif Gurbuz
The IOP are a scientific charity that promote the advancement of physics. Their overall aim was to become a more digitally focussed organisation.
We decided to start by running several Google Venture-esq design sprints to get to know the organisation, teach design thinking processes to its staff and start to identify areas where we could make the biggest difference.
Together, we ran several design sprints to teach the staff design thinking, and highlight areas where new services would be most effective.
We interviewed current IOP members to find out how we could maximise their engagement with physics — one of our main goals. From this, we discovered a need for more relevant events and engaging content.
Following some productive idea generation, we settled on combining an events system with a remodelled homepage. The key ideas being discovery of upcoming events and content tailored to the user.
The screens were initially created within keynote. A component template team members of all skill levels to collaborate with the designs. We then built the prototype using proto.io, which enabled us to observe users naturally inputting data.
After user testing, it was clear that an events discovery system would be the most effective product to improve member engagement.
We carried out further design sprints, focussing on how members organise & discover events before moving onto development.
Whilst not publicly available, please get in touch to view any of the prototypes we built during the design sprints.