by JAN BLOM & XUEMING LANG,  Google Mountain View In May 2014, 180 Google employees participated in a UX sprint week in the Bay Area focused on innovating game­changing advertising and commerce solutions. Those participating in the sprint were designers, researchers, product managers and engineers. By the end of the three day sprint, the participating challenge teams had generated more than 1000 sketches and mocks, distributed across 23 teams, with the ideas ranging from ubicomp scenarios to novel service concepts. From a corporate ethnography point of view, the event was a success. A conscious decision was made to use research across various stages of the design process in order to ensure an empirically grounded direction for each group. The user researchers were split evenly across the groups, and plenty of interesting methods were used across the challenges to make sure that users’ perspective was properly taken into account. Our team’s challenge focused on design for the shopping experience. Therefore,...