Month: March 2017

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Zeit flies when you’re having fun

Five people looking at and working with paper mounted on a glass wall

Last Hallowe’en we launched Zeitspace. In the five months since then we’ve had some great people join the company, and we’ve engaged in wonderful projects with clients who are as passionate about creating great software products as we are. It’s been an exciting time.

Zeitspace inherited a healthy amount of Boltmade DNA, where I had previously worked with another group of great people on a variety of projects. And we’ve been building on that inheritance as we shape Zeitspace.

Over the last few months we’ve used design sprints, user story mapping, prototypes in varying degrees of fidelity, and other design tools to get clarity and alignment on what to build. And we’ve built mobile and web apps that enable our clients to release their products out in the world.

We’ll share stories about some of our project work in the near future. In the meantime we’ll continue to focus on the thing that has kept us so busy: designing and building great software products for our clients.

And if you have a project that you’d like to talk about, get in touch! I’m always happy to chat about how Zeitspace might help make it a reality.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

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Running a design sprint to increase project clarity and organizational capacity

Five people looking at and working with paper mounted on a glass wall

I recently ran a design sprint for Capacity Canada, an organization based here in Waterloo Region that helps charities and other not-for-profit organizations get better at governing and otherwise running themseves. In other words, they increase the capacity of these organizations to do good work. The design sprint that I ran was aimed at a new initiative that they are exploring, which is still in its early stages. My friend Matthew Reynolds introduced me to the initiative and to Cathy Brothers of Capacity Canada, and I was delighted to be able to help them move it forward.

As a designer, I’m pretty familiar with both the constituent parts of a design sprint, as well as the overall shape and framework that Google Ventures has refined and promoted with such success. And I had taken a workshop at Google last fall that teaches their own take on the GV design sprint. (The big difference is that they take a more flexible approach in terms of scheduling and duration of sprints.) And, of course, design for user experience is pretty core to what we do at Zeitspace.

We ran the five stages of this particular sprint in three days, and the sprint team’s efforts were pretty effective at generating results. Having said that, you have to have faith in the process to know that the uncertainty and confusion that appear early on will be resolved by the end of the sprint, with answers and insights that help move the project forward! Do check out Matthew’s take on the sprint, as I’ll forego going into too many details here.

It felt good to help clarify some options and otherwise help Capacity Canada via this design sprint. We’ll see where the project goes now.

Speaking of design sprints, I’ll be running a day-long design sprint workshop for the folks at Communitech as a part of their 2017 Tech Leadership Conference. If you’re at all interested in learning more, do check it out.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.