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"Officially announced last year, the Google Ventures design team consists of four designers and a single UX researcher. The team's mission is to share its expertise and work directly with Google Ventures's\u00A0portfolio companies, many of which are unsurprisingly engineer-centric and have limited design staff.\r\n\r\nIn the past, the team has shared its insights externally. This time, however, TNW was invited to go behind the doors and participate directly with the Google Ventures design team during one of its multi-day hands on sessions.\r\n\r\nThe Sprint\r\nThe Google Ventures design team isn't necessarily radical \u2014 there are a handful of other VC firms that pride themselves as being very hands-on, Lightbank included. What is surprising, however, is the depth to which the team goes to perform what design partner Jake Knapp calls a design sprint.\r\n\r\nWhat it sounds like: &amp;quot;We have designers to fix your stuff.&amp;quot;\r\nI was thrown in as a fellow designer...\r\nWhat it actually means: &amp;quot;Let's set aside a week for an intensive program where we can figure out what you want and need, conceptualize solutions, prove nearly all of your ideas wrong and then prove a handful of them right. In the end, we'll have the best concept and potential implemetations possible.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nTo be clear: I was thrown in as a fellow designer for the exhaustive process, tackling two upcoming products with Ordr.in, a Google Ventures\u00A0portfolio company since October 2011.\r\n\r\nBut first, we all needed to learn exactly what Ordr.in is. The design team purposefully keeps from diving too deeply into each company beforehand, so it can address the problems at hand with a fresh mindset.\r\nThe Company\r\nOrdr.in is a NY-based startup which offers &amp;quot;restaurant ecommerce-as-a-service,&amp;quot; operating firmly in the b2b space. In non-marketing speak, Ordr.in\u00A0is essentially developing a massive web of restaurants that companies and developers can tap into for online food orders.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nOrdr.in can be used by individual restuarants to handle their own orders online, but it can also be used by third-parties to offer specialized ordering services (like hotels and local publications). In this scenario, even a Seamless or Grubhub-like service could tap into Ordr.in's network to expand its proprietary database of restaurants.\r\n\r\nDay one of what turned out to be the &amp;quot;understand&amp;quot;\u00A0phase, as\u00A0Knapp called it,\u00A0largely focused on introductions and planning. Ordr.in CEO David Bloom\u00A0and CTO Felix Sheng\u00A0guided us through the opportunities at hand, the company's existing products, its current stats and goals.\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, the rest of us were instructed to take notes in the\u00A0\u201Chow might we\u201D\u00A0format, to help identify specific and often less-than-tangible goals like building trust and catering to a wide set of demographics.\u00A0We grew comfortable in our\u00A0stark white conference room, located in Google's Zagat branch of its massive Chelsea, NY headquarters.\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=&amp;quot;584214,584215,584211,584213&amp;quot;]\r\n\r\nThe design team came to understand the basics, and quickly dove into the company's core mission and plans for the future, some of which had to be kept off the record.\r\n\r\nFor the most part, however, the environment was unusually open, as we discussed Ordr.in's next products: a white-labeled app for individual restaurants on mobile devices and a method for integrating directly with publications to serve a Seamless-like role in smaller cities and towns.\r\n\r\nThe Process\r\nDay two kicked off with the task of making sense of our\u00A0notes. Marking our favorites with red dots like a heat map, we reorganized them and entered the &amp;quot;diverge&amp;quot; process.\r\n\r\nWith everyone taking different angles on how Ordr.in's upcoming products must be implemented, we moved quickly: from notes and mind-mapping to thumbnail sketches and elaborate storyboards \u2014 all on paper. No more than 40 minutes in, we took to\u00A0critiquing\u00A0our results, first silently observing and then with timed, three-minute assessments of what looked promising and what should be avoided.\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=&amp;quot;584266,584268,584265,584274&amp;quot;]\r\n\r\nAs this sprint was scheduled to last just three days, finalizing potential layouts and developing user flows had to be done briskly. We entered the prototyping stage.\r\n\r\nBuilding &amp;amp; Testing\r\n\r\nDesign partner John Zeratsky, UX research partner\u00A0Michael Margolis,\u00A0Knapp\u00A0and I took to creating the mockups for user testing. We were instructed to use Keynote, which (completely to\u00A0my surprise) proved to be an extremely useful tool for building functional mockups. Often during user testing, subjects didn't even realize they weren't using completed apps. Our second day ended with the final validation stage on the horizon.\r\n\r\nOn day three, Margolis' researching skills went to work; he had gone ahead and lined up subjects to test our prototypes days in advance.\r\n\r\nMargolis\u00A0led the research study sessions \u2014 he's led 35 over the past year \u2014 while we took notes in a separate room and\u00A0Zeratsky made sense of the feedback on the conference room white board. These results helped confirm which ideas would likely fall short, but also flagged successful concepts and revealed what needed refinement.\r\n\r\n[gallery ids=&amp;quot;584403,584427,584422&amp;quot;]\r\n\r\nWith detailed, and now proven\u00A0concepts in place, Ordr.in had to face its next steps.\r\nWhat's Next?\r\nFollowing this sprint, the design team will gradually decrease its interactions with Ordr.in, a startup without a single full-time designer. This is done intentionally, and largely out of practicality; the design team is successful because it works in bursts of energy, and not due to latching onto startups as free, full-time staff.\r\n\r\n How Ordr.in fares will certainly reflect on the Google Ventures design team.There's a reason why the team doesn't just show up and churn out pretty designs like hired freelancers. The success of a sprint lies in how well Google Ventures can teach true design thinking.\u00A0For example, the answer to the question &amp;quot;where does the button go&amp;quot; is precursor to &amp;quot;how can we make this button look attractive.&amp;quot; The latter is easier to solve once key usability challenges are addressed.\r\n\r\nParticipants are intentionally left not as trained designers but as team members now capable of making key design decisions. Those decisions can then be perfected by hiring design staff or working with freelancers.\r\n\r\nAs for the results, how Ordr.in fares with the launch of its upcoming products will certainly reflect heavily on the Google Ventures design team. We will, of course, keep our eyes on its upcoming releases.\r\n\r\nWhile this approach may not sound appealing to every startup out there, the design team is clearly a selling point for Google's VC arm, making it more attractive to promising early-stage startups. Google's search brand can only cary it so far in a world with top-tier VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz.\r\n\r\nDesign is about making order out of chaos, encompassing everything from how a project looks to how it functions and feels. Google Ventures understands this, and is hell-bent on making sure that the companies that it invests in do as well."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/15/how-google-ventures-instills-design-into-the-heart-of-its-portfolio-companies/>