Product Sprints at Google
My class had the opportunity to go to Google where we learned about Material Design and design sprints. It was an informing experience and showed me that Google is constantly on a mission to incorporate design processes into all functions of their company. As a growing designer, it makes me excited to see how design will continue to influence dynamics in a big company and future product releases.
What is Material Design?
Material Design, in Google or any other company is about unifying design language and making it consistent. Google’s definition of consistency that has led to its success of their flagship products is reducing friction + learning time, supporting natural tendency to find patterns. Along with defining usefulness and functionality of their products, developing a strong brand, recognizing other favorite Google products and reinforcing positive experiences are what make Google products memorable, relevant and an important part of our everyday lives.
“Surfaces and edges of our material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality”
In order to develop a strong brand through both visuals and functionality, Material Design is guided by principles with this goal: Understanding how people parse information through dimensionality, responsivenessness, graphics, color and surface and motion. These principles are built on the best practices that are informed through UX design and research.
The ultimate goal is getting through to the entire company. Material Design allows different groups to quickly communicate design ideas using presets that are easy to access and use. It’s one central language, a design system, that unifies collaboration.
How does Google do their product sprints?
Since Material Design makes it extremely easy to create a quick mock-up, it can inspire design sprints that allows teams to think quickly and come up with tangible ideas without too much effort.
The goal of design sprints is to bridge time, culture and space between people collaborating together. An engineer might be thinking about what can be built in a few days vs a designer who thinks in years. Design sprints are very helpful because it supports divergent and convergent thinking and brings cross functional perspective. Google was talking about how it could be challenging to get engineers to participate because their values of design is different from ours. They essentially want tangibility over conceptuality. This means before starting a challenge, a design sprint needs to have a clear goal or problem with clear deliverables.
Design sprints are based on a framework for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with users.
At Google, steps of a design sprint look something like this:
- Understand- What, who, why (inputs)
- Sketch- Pulling from thoughts + problem spaces
- Decide- Gamestorming, “what assumptions do you have with designs before building?”, coming up with details to support why design can work” (from hypothetical to action)
- Validate- Rough test, usability studies, have people do instead of tell
Before designing, it is essential to have :
- A sprint brief with goal and deliverables
With that in mind, here are sprints that Google does with examples of a brief and deliverable to go with it:
Product Sprints
Designing for specific products
Brief: Improve on-boarding experiences for new users
Deliverable: End to end journeys or user flows for multiple users
Process Sprints
Designing existing processes/experiences (used more internally than externally)
Brief: Improve the process of hiring new employees
Deliverable: Process maps outlining new process
Vision Sprints
Thinking about the future
Brief: Create a vision to help homeowners fix problems in their home
Deliverable: Inspirational narrative to illustrate a new model
Moonshot sprints
Making space for innovation
Brief: Re-imagine how people shop for food
Deliverable: A broad range of ideas in sketch form
In conclusion, design sprints are about testing ideas, addressing the question of whether something solves a problem, and agreeing on goals + direction versus designing.
It comes down to what users want, not your opinion or someone else’s.
Ending Thoughts
What I throughly enjoyed about the experience was learning about Google’s values, how their design teams worked and getting advice from a google designer on my thesis project. Cross functional collaboration with internal products and the emphasis to think critically about design while maintaining company brand is essential to working towards the same mission.
Thank you for reading!
To help you get started on owning your design career, here are some amazing tools from Rookieup, a site I used to get mentorship from senior designers:
- Build a portfolio with help from an experienced designer
- Essential tools to strengthen and build your portfolio
- Take control of your time and career by becoming a freelancer
- Tips and tricks to get an amazing design job
Links to some other cool reads:
- Successful UX Design is Intentional Design
- Journey Mapping is the Key to Gaining Empathy
- Prepping for Design Interviews (My Microsoft Onsite Experience)
- The Unspoken Truths of your First UX Internship
- UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design
- The Types of Design Research every Designer should know NOW
- When did Design become so Easy?
