What the 🩆 is a Design Sprint?

Mentally Friendly
Aug 24, 2017 · 10 min read

Product Design Sprints — an invention of Google Ventures’ design team — are 5-phase exercises intended to improve the chances of making something people want. At the end, you’ll wind up with a validated prototype (a testable first-pass of a key product feature), a clearer direction, and a bunch of neat ideas for the future.

The sprint gives teams a shortcut to learning without building and launching. — gv.com/sprint

Why Design Sprints?

Uncertainty is the silent killer of productivity. So, we want to turn false confidence into validated confidence before beginning a potentially expensive build. That way we can move forward at speed and be sure we’re building the right thing.

Design Sprints are great for (but not limited to):

  • Unblocking an existing product design process.
  • Kicking off a new product design process by getting the right people in the room and building a testable first-pass of a key product feature.
  • Kicking off a new feature build by rapidly designing, prototyping, and validating the feature before spending weeks on traditional design and build.

What outcomes can a client expect from a Design Sprint?

By the end of a Product Design Sprint, the client will have a validated prototype of a new or improved idea, product or feature. We’ll also end with a clear set of learnings and a plan for next steps.

As a bonus byproduct of the Sprint, your client gets a rich set of new ideas, some of which are partially-validated and ready to move into another Sprint.


Introducing the client(s)

We technically had two clients, MedicalDirector and LifeLetters (now known as Florey, but I’ll refer to them as LifeLetters).

MedicalDirector’s hero product is practice management software. If you’ve visited a doctor recently you might have noticed them tapping away on their laptop — chances are they’re using MedicalDirector software.

You probably also noticed that your typical visit to a doctor’s surgery goes a little something like this:

  1. You show up for your 15-minute check-up.
  2. You wait 20 minutes or longer in the waiting room.
  3. Your consult with the GP winds up taking longer than expected.
  4. The GP might seem to be in a hurry (probably because they’re running behind).
  5. You might get a prescription.
  6. You go back to the reception, and wait a bit more while the service person takes care of your payment, paperwork or a phone call. Or all three.
  7. You leave (roughly an hour later).

This is where LifeLetters comes in. Their goal is to make the whole process of going to the doctor smoother through the use of service design and technology.

What was the big question?

How can MedicalDirector and LifeLetters share knowledge and expertise to re-imagine the GP consult?

MedicalDirector had a powerful new product called Helix, and Life Letters (now known as Florey) were re-imagining the typical GP consult through technology.

This situation was a little more ‘meta’ than your average Design Sprint. Rather than solving a very specific problem, we were to bring both businesses together and take them through a Design Sprint to form an initial working relationship.

What’s involved?

You’ll need people

We had these people:

  • 6 MedicalDirector Staff
  • 3 LifeLetters staff
  • 2 MF Facilitators (we actually had 3 at the beginning to kick things off) Typically you only need one facilitator, however this was a far larger group than is typical.

We also apppointed the CEOs of each organisation as Deciders. Deciders help maintain the Sprint’s momentum by being available to make a final call on any sticky decisions that are slowing us down, as well as make the final decision about which ideas make it into the prototype.

Process

Five days, with five key goals.

  • Monday — Map the flow, identify the week’s goal, capture hypotheses and assumptions
  • Tuesday — Sketch all the ideas in response to the above
  • Wednesday — Decide which ideas make it into the prototype, and storyboard the process
  • Thursday — Prototype the prototype
  • Friday — Test the prototype

Monday: Map

Create a map of the problem. This is usually in the form of a simple flowchart. We decided to map the doctor / patient consult, from the moment a patient walks in to reception to the moment they leave.

We had a large group (10 people). Rather than having one large group doing the map, which would be very difficult, we split into two groups to map out the experience. Both groups then presented their maps and we merged the two.

What’s the juice🍊?

  • The co-created map provides a framework for all the exercises to follow, and describes the context for the problem to be solved.
  • Common understanding empowers the team’s decision making and contributions to the project. People will be aligned around the goals and invested in the outcomes.
  • Understanding that risks exist and devising tests to measure their impact allows us to move forward with confidence. We also save time and money because we’re not creating things based entirely unknowns and assumptions.

Tuesday: Sketch

Sketch your heart out. Explore as many ways of solving the problems as possible, regardless of how realistic, feasible, or viable they may or may not be. Of course, make sure the ideas you’re creating are in response to the identified needs from Monday 😊

What’s the juice🍊?

  • You don’t need to be an artist. When we say ‘sketch’, it’s really just another way of saying ’tell a story’. If you’re more comfortable with drawing boxes and using words, that’s absolutely fine. If that’s what it takes for you to effectively describe your idea, no problemo.
  • Everyone is a creative problem solver in some way. Those that don’t feel they have permission to think big or broad are now given permission to go with their hearts and dream as big as they’d like, without feeling the pressure of their colleagues.
Everyone sketching away during Crazy Eights — a rapid sketching exercise designed to get the juices flowing
Everyone sketching away during Crazy Eights — a rapid sketching exercise designed to get the juices flowing
Solution Sketches in progress
Solution Sketches in progress

Wednesday: Decide & storyboard

Focus on ideas we were the most confident in and inevitably eliminate the ones we were least confident in.

Tuesday’s finished Solution Sketches arranged as an Art Gallery
Tuesday’s finished Solution Sketches arranged as an Art Gallery
The winning concepts!
The winning concepts!
Storyboarding. Here’s a quick role-play to test the storyboard scenario.
Storyboarding. Here’s a quick role-play to test the storyboard scenario.

What’s the juice🍊?

  • The group decides, and the Deciders super-decide. Everyone gets a chance to talk though their idea in front of the whole group, and the group votes. The Deciders (the CEOs) can see where the group’s thinking is headed and take that into account when they make their own decision.

Thursday: Prototype

Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers. If you want true insights about what you’ve made, it makes sense to test it with the people you’re making it for.

Breaking up the work to be done
Breaking up the work to be done
A test-run of the prototype consult
A test-run of the prototype consult

The medium you choose should be determined by time constraints and learning goals. Paper, Keynote, and simple HTML/CSS are all good prototyping media if you want to keep things simple. That said, if you want to code some amazing Artificial Intelligence thingy in Python, then go for it! Just make sure it can be done convincingly within four days 😉

  • The prototype should be designed to learn about specific unknowns and assumptions.
  • The prototype should be real enough to test. This means it just needs to be convincing enough to seem like a real thing.

What’s the juice🍊?

The Prototype Mindset

We used a Keynote presentation for the doctor’s ‘touchscreen’ interface, as well as a choreographed consultation. The screen we used was just a TV — the doctor ‘touching’ the screen was actually a cue for me to move to the next slide.

Just ask yourself, is it real enough to test? If your test user has never seen what you’ve made and it’s convincing enough, they’ll never know the difference. This means you only need to make a convincing façade to test a pile of your biggest assumptions. There’s no need to spend weeks in production to validate something you could test in a week.

Friday: Test

This is the big day! Test the prototype with existing or potential customers.

The prototype consult in action (apologies for quality)
The prototype consult in action (apologies for quality)

What was our key learning?

Patients yearned for 1:1 connections with their GPs, not with touch-screens

We helped the group design a whole process around a touchscreen, yet it was the human interaction that test participants most desired. Prior to the Sprint, LifeLetters’ initial consult revolved largely around the touchscreen being the focus.

What LifeLetters learned in testing was that patients were far less interested in the touchscreen and more interested in the great service that the GP was providing.

Juicy stuff you can use outside a 5-day Sprint

Time-boxing: It’s your new best friend. Seriously.

Have you ever noticed that you often make your best decisions under the most ridiculous time pressures?

A limited time frame can focus mental energy and effort to bear on a decision more quickly and efficiently than otherwise might have been the case

The timer allowed us to time-box effectively. Everything was split into small timed chunks, which allowed us to keep each slice specific to a goal. This allowed us to establish a pace that would have been impossible otherwise.

  • The use of the timer maintained an external pressure on the group. This takes pressure off the facilitators as they don’t have to constantly remind the group to keep moving.
  • The timer allowed us to establish and maintain a fast-paced rhythm. People eventually became used to working in 3/6/12/24 minute chunks, so even when the time pressure was less, the perceived time pressure was still high due to momentum.
  • The time pressure forces you to ideate quickly and not ‘self-censor’. Your ideas flow freely and unhindered.
  • Time pressure lessens the need to make big decisions. Constantly filtering your ideas and making decisions drains your battery, so instead of making decisions while you ideate, defer the decision-making until after the ideation phase.

The Jedi mind-trick of ‘How Might We’

Prefacing a problem with ‘How Might We
’ shifts the perspective of the problem and turns it into an opportunity.

“The ‘how’ part assumes there are solutions out there — it provides creative confidence. ‘Might’ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.” — Tim Brown, IDEO

  • Everything leading up to this point is about developing a workable scope for the ‘How Might We’ exercise.
  • If your ‘How Might We’s’ are too general to be useful (or are ambiguous), your scope is likely too broad.
  • If your ‘How Might We’s’ are just descriptions of very specific solutions, you’ve gone too narrow.
  • Finding the ‘sweet spot’ is about developing a scope that is ambitious, but achievable.

Work together, alone

Throw away top-down methodologies, and give your staff permission to be creative problem solvers.

  • Working together, alone, is magical; by working together, alone, to solve the problem, we wind up with many more potential ideas than if we’d simply brainstormed by ourselves.
  • In doing this, we wind up with a heap of unfiltered goodness from the entire group rather than a few voices dominating the conversation.

Real enough to test, and not a bit more

Just remember that everything is a prototype. That new dish you tried at that restaurant you like? That was a prototype. The new software update for your phone? Yep, it’s a prototype. There’ll be another release before you know it.

What I’d do differently in future

  1. Go in with a much more specific problem. Work a bit harder to define that before we walk into the room on Monday.
  2. Take time-lapses of process! Document each day a bit better.
  3. Hand the marker to a participant during storyboarding. People got a bit frustrated and had a hard time expressing themselves.
  4. On the prototype day, you really only need 3–4 people. A maker, a writer for the script, and a couple of helpers. Define which participants are needed each day and what their roles are to prevent having too many people in the room.
  5. Make sure daily checklists are written up in a visible place, and publicly check things off. This gives a sense of progress. Get a participant to do it and make it an event.
  6. Better end-of-day wrap-ups. We fizzled on a couple of days and failed to end on a high note (probably because we were exhausted).
  7. Encourage people to be specific with HMWs. We had a lot of overly-general ones that needed to be thrown out.
  8. Encourage everyone to draw. (Again, may be easier to facilitate with a much smaller group)

Resources

This piece was written by Marcel Jacobs, Lead Designer.

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