5 ways to make virtual design sprints more effective

“Our engagement rates are below par. Can we get the entire team together to hash out new design ideas?” Those were the good, old days when we could get a bunch of eager participants together for a week in a classroom setting, replete with whiteboards and sketch pens and sticky notes.

The absence of physical get-togethers has significantly changed the format & style of conducting design sprints. In this article, I want to share some of the things I have learnt from my virtual design sprints, that could be useful to you all.

But before we get to that, it’s super important to set expectations with your stakeholders when organizing any design sprint. Here’s are some of the things you should be mindful of:

What Design Sprints are Meant For:

• A focused approach toward creative exploration, keeping your end-users at the center of all deliberation
• A work-around for lengthy reviews and debates, especially among cross-functional teams
• Driving ownership amongst your key stakeholders for ideas & decisions (thru active collaboration)
• A first-hand view of how your end-users perceive your ideas & concepts
• Learn (& fail fast) — a great way to quickly understand what works and does not work in your prototype, without sinking months into building a wrong product.

What Design Sprints Are Not Meant for

• Solving minor, tactical issues: A design sprints involves bringing together key stakeholders from cross-functional teams. It simply doesn’t make sense to bring them together to solve something tactical such as a color issue or a minor technical mishap. Design Sprints must have strategic agendas and aim to solve something BIG for your product.
• A solution to unclear objectives — if you can’t pin-point the issue and are simply fishing around for ‘new ideas’, don’t engage in a design sprint. You will have a largely academic discussion and end up wasting everyone’s time
• An answer to all your user problems — No 5-day workshop can do that — a 5-day sprint can provide direction but not detailed solutions to every single customer problem. You might need follow-up sprints to deep-dive into very specific issues that need detailed deliberation.
• A fully functional prototype or product concept — Design sprints are not designed to deliver a fully functional product or concept. There is only so much a team can accomplish in 1 day of prototyping work. Design Sprints are great in providing the necessary concepts, which can then be fine-tuned by the specific product teams in separate track.

With this bit out of the way, here are the 5 things I have been doing to extract maximum value out of my virtual design sprints.

1. Communicate specific objectives for each stage of the workshop

People ‘seem to have a lot less time’ when working virtually, than what I had witnessed when they physically showed up at work. This makes it even more critical to justify why anyone should block out an entire week for your design sprint. Communicate with all your stakeholders and be specific on the goals & objectives that are expected to be accomplished at the end of each session.

It’s very critical that you have your ‘decider’ during each session of your design sprint — someone who can call the shots make the final decision. Else, based on personal experience, sprint sessions run into academic discussions where everyone agrees to disagree, and there is no consensus on a way forward.

2. Spread 5 days over 10 half-day sessions — when in virtual format

I have experimented with all formats — 1 week full day sessions, two-week half-day sessions, three week 3-hours a day sessions, and so on. What I have discovered is:

• Running a 1 week intensive, 8-hour-a-day virtual session is just not viable. People just can’t keep up their screen attention span for that long.
• The problem with extending a design sprint to 3 weeks or more is that it gets rather long and important stakeholders simply can’t commit to blocking out their calendars for such an extended period.

The best trade-off , in my view, is to extend the 5-day program to a 10-day virtual sprint, with 4 hour sessions each day.

3. Use annotation & drawing tools to get participants to engage:

You can’t have your participants just listening to one another and watching a power-point for extended periods of time. Before long, your stakeholders will turn off their cameras and would most likely be fidgeting with their smartphones. Your sprint team needs to be actively engaged and contribute to the creative process. While there are so many collaboration tools in the market, here a few I recommend:

• Whiteboarding: Miro is one of the best collaboration tools (in my view) for virtual whiteboarding. It has a sense of finesse and refinement that many other tools don’t possess.
• Offline Activity: You will need a place where your participants can connect offline. While the easiest solution is to create a MS Teams folder and add everyone to it, the features of MS Teams aren’t much catered toward design sprints. BaseCamp is a much better tool as it has the kind of workflow UI that will help build on the discussions during your design sprint.
• End-user feedback: There is so much you want to know about your end-users who are testing out your prototype — their likes, dislikes, what drew their attention, which parts did not make sense to them at all. I have liked UserTesting as it helps capture both the screen activities of your end-users as well as their facial expressions (that gives a holistic sense of what they are thinking and feeling)

4. Upfront research before design sprints

I can’t stress this enough. The whole point of a design sprint is to look at things from the perspective of your end-users. You can’t do that if you don’t have any research data!

Once you have identified the key problem areas for your design sprint, invest a little time gathering any evaluative or secondary research data you could (from product usage data, blogs, analytics, forums and so on). Also, try and put together a quick generative research exercise — talking to a few of your end-users and understanding from them first-hand. If you need tips to get the most of your UX research, this previous article I have written might help.

Your research data points will act as the base for your sprint discussions and bring about some focus and direction to the conversations. Without them, you run the risk of participants derailing discussions with opinions or prejudices that are not relevant to your end-users.

A disclaimer here — you don’t need to spend months doing research to prep for your design sprint. Stick to an aggressive timeline but get some insights upfront that can act as the basis for your design spring discussions.

5. Bring your end-users LIVE to the final sessions of your design sprints

I have very often seen user feedback being recorded offline and the data presented to the design sprint participants in an excel. The problem with this approach is that the feedback results are open to a lot of interpretation and several key stakeholders don’t fully trust the accuracy of the findings.

A much better way to handle this is to get your end-users LIVE during the final session of your design sprint. Let them explain what they think & feel in real-time. This drives a lot more consensus and ownership amongst your stakeholders, on a way forward.

While bringing your end-users to a design sprint may not always be possible (especially for physical products such as a new ultra-sound machine concept), try and adapt this approach as much as you can.

And lastly, one of the things I do before any design sprint is to ship a little design thinking hamper to all my participants. It is a cute little box with sticky notes, sketch pens, colored paper and glue. It never fails to put a smile on everyone’s face and get them excited about the design sprint.