GVDS Best of the Best: Ahmad Yahya
Last month, over 300+ practitioners across the globe came together for the first ever Global Virtual Design Sprint. The event brought together design sprint facilitators, designers, developers, researchers, subject matter experts, advisors, strategists and thought leaders from San Francisco, California to Auckland, New Zealand. Together, they explored various challenges and ideas to throughout the month of April, using the design sprint process in a virtual environment to explore possible solutions and products.
Recently, we featured a number of these practitioners with Spotlight Awards. These awards were peer-based, with various sprint team members nominating each other for their facilitation, collaboration, design, development and advising contributions.
In this series of articles, I’ll be featuring a group of professionals who received the most Spotlight Award nominations from their peers. I’ll outline their notable contributions to their virtual design sprint teams, as well as their thoughts on how the event went.
Enjoy!
Ahmad M. Yahya: UX Design Lead at A Job Thing (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
Ahmed Yahya is the UX Design Lead for Maukerja.my and AJobThing.com, leading a 4-person team with ideation, process, prototyping and interaction design.
He’s involved with his local UX and IxD community via UXiD Jogja and frequents coffee shops around the city in his spare time.
In the Global Virtual Design Sprint, Yahya was recognized for his outstanding ethnographic and applied research towards the Internet of Things (IoT) Second Sight Initiative.
When I first read about the Global Virtual Design Sprint online, I thought it was a good exercise for me to test the idea of doing an online sprint. Since our team was spread out over multiple locations, doing an online design sprint seemed to be a logical solution.
I wasn’t expecting anything at first. I figured I’d have the opportunity to meet new people online, observe how they worked and learn about the process while going through the mechanics of each design sprint exercise. I also assumed I’d get consumed by the week’s activities, and I needed to set the stage for my work.
While I had originally joined the team in the ‘Designer’ role, I decided to prepare for the virtual design sprint 2 weeks in advance by finding the right research participants and recruiting them early on. I figured we’d have a hard time getting blind people as research participants, but I was fortunate enough to get a lot of support from the team and the local UX community I was affiliated with. Together, we found the right research participants for our design sprint.
“The nature of our challenge made it relatively difficult to recruit people for interviews and testing. We wanted to hear from recently vision impaired people. Yahya went the extra mile to find and talk to people that fit our intended demographic. Ultimately his efforts helped everyone relate and understand the people we were hoping to design for.”
Our schedule had me juggling my time between different activities to keep up. Eventually, everything worked itself out due to the great online collaboration we did.
I was also hoping for more some more music during our online ideation sessions. It was a little quiet, and maybe injecting some background music would have worked.
Ultimately, I ended up spending a great deal of time and energy to find the right participants for our prototype, but it was time well spent. I wanted to contribute to make sure the event could be as meaningful as possible for our sprint team.
In the end, we got some candid insight from our end users, and it made all the difference. It was a great experience.
“Watching the user videos that Yahya did really touched my heart… knowing what we’re doing at GVDS is for people, and not just a paper exercise.”
If you’d like to experience the next Global Virtual Design Sprint later this year, feel free to join our Facebook group anytime you’d like:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualdesignsprints/
You can also sign up for the GVDS Newsletter (via Tinyletter) for updates every 2–3 weeks on what’s going on with the Global Virtual Design Sprint:
https://tinyletter.com/virtualsprint
