This video is all about taking your idea for an app and the actual process behind building it and delivering it to the appstore.

If you’ve ever worked on an app, you can only dream of that feeling of pure joy when you open the App Store and see your app featured on the homepage.

Then you open Product Hunt and it’s #3! The app was v2 of Kevin Rose’s meditation app ‘Oak’, which myself and my colleagues at AJ&Smart were lucky enough to completely redesign. I was personally a little worried about the redesign being taken badly (people often don’t like change) but the response was overwhelmingly positive.

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I rarely get a chance to show you exactly how we design products at AJ&Smart because many of the products we work on are under heavy NDA, but Kevin kindly agreed to let me show everything!

The main process we used to rethink the app and collaborate with Kevin (and his developer) was the Design Sprint by Jake Knapp. As we were on separate continents, we did this completely remotely.

Since I’m assuming a lot of you already know the stepbystep of a Design Sprint (or if you don’t you can check out our other stuff here) I’ll not bore you by going into allll the tiny details and exercises, and will focus on the points that made this sprint different.

Here's a little bit of background:

A few of us at AJ&Smart were actually using the original version of Oak as a meditation app, and we took a longshot and reached out to Kevin Rose because we had a few suggestions about how it could be improved.

I then met Kevin in San Francisco, and was telling him about our ideas for product improvements, and together we decided that AJ&Smart would help him redesign the Meditation Select screen of the app, buuut little did he know that when I returned to Berlin and spoke to the team about it, we were so excited about the project that we decided to surprise Kevin and do a total redesign from scratch, ripping the app apart and building it back together again.

With an excited Sprint team pulled together, we gathered our zenlike focus and dived in, and life at AJ&Smart became allthings Oak for a few weeks…

My Remote Design Sprint top tips:
Be extraspecific when making notes and writing the likes of the How Might We postits — these may need to be read by someone on the other side of the world when you’re not there to explain what you meant.

Doubledown on alignment checkins: there’s a lot more scope for misunderstandings and confusion in a remote Design Sprint, so it’s important to make time for extra checkins to make sure everyone is on the same page

Extra focus on the Lightning Demos: again because there’s scope for confusion, it’s important to realllllly understand the client’s mindset and what they[re envisioning. It’s harder to do this while not in the same room so we’ll always put a lot of emphasis on them showing us what inspires them, and we’ll also do a bit of extra work on this too (like the Pinterest board)

Have the right toolbox: tools become very important when running a remote Sprint. Don’t let technology ruin your Sprint or let important stuff get lost in emails. See below for what we use when running a remote Sprint
Remote Sprint toolbox:
RealtimeBoard — a collaboration tool where you can basically set up a workspace that has everything you need for a Sprint (digital postits, voting dots, storyboarding, etc)

Basecamp — for project management. It’s important to always track clear and transparent notes that all team members can access.

Figma + Marvel — UI Design and Prototyping

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My friend Sarah's insta:   / sarahkilcoyneart  
This video covers:
AJ&Smart's complete design process
How to design an app for the appstore
How to run a remote design sprint
UX/UI design process
A real product design case study
Remote workflows for product design

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IDEA TO APPSTORE Design Process UX/UI Remote Design Sprints:
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