Digital Accelerator

A Digital Accelerator phase helps reduce the risk and longer term costs when investing in the development of new products and services where time is of the essence.

Why a Digital Accelerator?

It strategically combines research and rapid prototyping to deliver the following outcomes:

Customer satisfaction - assurance that the proposed product or service features will deliver value to users
Understanding constraints - confidence that the solution can be delivered in the current context
Shared vision - agreement across the core team and broader organisation on how the solution will serve the business

What you learn during the Digital Accelerator will inform your decisions on how to proceed: whether to invest in creating a working product or service, or whether to shift your focus to a different problem/solution.

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Digital Accelerator activities

Stakeholder alignment

Workshops and one-to-one meetings to align the team and key stakeholders around a shared vision for the project and:

map out broader stakeholders and other ‘actors’
agree desirable outcomes and how to measure success
establish any assumptions and hypotheses
declare risks and discuss mitigation
understand security, privacy, and policy constraints
identify key users to engage in research

Primary and secondary research

Review existing data, documents and insights and fill any gaps in understanding of user needs through:

Observation of user behaviours in context
Segmenting users with personas and typologies
Semi-structured interviews with target users
Auditing insights from past research into user needs
Analysing existing data to understand current performance and user satisfaction
Learning from case studies and best practice

Analysis and ideation

Working with the core team and relevant stakeholders to:

map out future service touchpoints
create storyboards to inform prototype development
enrich personas based on user research insights
identify mindsets that exist across persona groups
map existing user journeys to capture pain points and barriers to access
run collaborative sketching sessions to generate creative ideas that address opportunities

Technical exploration

Research, technical prototyping and consultation with other teams to explore and understand:

technical roadmap across the organisation
current and emerging technologies and how they might add value
security, privacy and data storage requirements - what needs to be recorded, and what is not recorded
technical requirements of proposed solutions
dependencies and integrations with other systems

Prototyping and testing

An iterative process to test concepts and technologies involving:

creating paper prototypes and other artefacts to gain early feedback on concepts
high-resolution, interactive prototypes to test user journeys and specific features
user-testing with actual users to iterative development
iterating based on feedback and retesting revised prototypes with additional users gathering evidence to support future decisions

Playback and reporting

Sharing progress, insights and decisions with stakeholders throughout the process:

Regular show & tells to share learnings, state intentions and gather feedback
Sharing updates in group chat, blog posts and week notes
A final report/presentation containing:
- A prioritised list of user stories describing features against user needs
- A set of principles to guide future work
- Relevant data and metrics to track performance and measure success

What you get

The physical outputs of a Digital Accelerator phase provide evidence to support future decisions. They may vary depending on context but will generally include:

Stakeholder map
Risk logs
Personas/typologies
As-is/to-be user journeys and service maps
System map
Validated prototypes
Guiding principles
Recommendations report

Who we’ve done it for

Fulfilling-ongoing-application-support-for-new products

Char.gy

On-street lamppost electric vehicle charging solution for residents

SH:24

Transforming sexual health services in the UK

national-cancer-institute-BxXgTQEw1M4-unsplash

NHS Trust

Helping patients to report their symptoms online

What people say about us

Chris Howroyd | CEO | SH:24

Unboxed brought the right people together quickly to help us test our proposition and rapidly turn our vision into a live service, designed around our users' needs.

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A typical Unboxed team

Unboxed provides design and technology expertise to augment your internal team, expanding knowledge and building capability and confidence within your organisation.

Working together

Augmenting internal teams and respectfully introducing new thinking:

a single team with a shared vision and a trusting no-blame culture
learning sessions to introduce concepts and techniques
on-the-job coaching and mentoring
accessible cloud-based tools to support collaboration and knowledge sharing
virtual, in-person, and hybrid workshops and meetings to ensure all are included
open communication to encourage engagement and feedback, and ensure visibility
regular checkpoints to ensure internal and external accountability

Looking for something else?

Not sure a Digital Accelerator is what you need right now but still looking to align your teams and make an impact this year? Not a problem, Unboxed offers a variety of services that can cater to your goals and innovation projects.

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Reducing the risks and costs in digital product development