Two years ago, my Upper Funnel Design team introduced our own version of the Remote Design Sprint. We presented it to UXPA-Boston under the title Our Remote Design Sprint, A toolkit.

Since then, we ran 10+ remote designs sprints and learned a lot in the process. Here are 12 questions you might have.

Suggested pre-read: Our Remote Design Sprint: A Step-by-Step Toolkit.

1. How many people are needed to run a Remote Design Sprint?

You want 2 designers to run the Design Sprint. It helps when running workshops: one is facilitating, the other is managing time, participants’ questions, and taking notes.

2. How do design sprints compare to design thinking?

Design thinking is a global process (Discover, Define, Ideate, Test, Refine) that can leverage relevant methodologies over time. In contrast, Remote Design Sprints offer specific constraints. It defines all the steps and tasks with dedicated timings and expected outputs.

In each step of the remote design sprint, rules of time and tasks keep the team focused on a concrete material that the team will use in the next step. It also allows all participants to contribute simultaneously, regardless of their levels.

3. How do you deal with the bias that emerges from internal people inputting and prioritizing things?

Invite different functions and team representatives that have a say in the final product. When asking other teams isn’t possible, the process captures all information gathered transparently.

Later on, other stakeholders will have the opportunity to see or read what was expressed by the Remote design sprints participants, leveling the field.

4. How many members are there for the design studio activity?

We recommend keeping the group to 10–15 participants max. Using an online board like Miro and the precise process for the Design Studio, it is possible to accommodate up to ~20 people.

5. How do you have team meetings that can last only 30 mins?

We leverage the “alone together” philosophy.

• Gather participants’ opinions and expertise before the meeting by sending a survey.
• Analyze and group answers before the meeting.
• Read the analysis during the meeting and have team members vote on the most important or impactful items. Doing so exposes all participants to each other’s opinions or expertise.
• Ask the team members to add sticky notes for any questions or follow-ups.

6. What are some pitfalls you’ve experienced when making remote design sprints? When does it not work out as planned?

Here are some of them:

Not preparing enough in advance:

1. Make a copy of all the templates: project checklist in a spreadsheet, miro board with all activities, slide deck of each step, surveys, etc. This gives a clear idea of all the steps and how to prepare for them.
2. Project owners need to be onboarded early enough. Set a specific time with your Product Manager to align on who will own what during the design sprint. They need to feel good about the entire process.
3. Book time on people’s calendars two weeks in advance.

Not setting expectations enough:

1. Make sure people understand the output: user tested mocks with a list of specific refinements, and the outcome: an idea has been validated or needs iteration.
2. Commitment is necessary from the remote design sprint participants. About 4 or 5 hours total.
3. Share a clear view of the schedule of all the steps when kicking off the process. Include pictures of the outcome of each step.
4. Communicate that a design sprint is the beginning of the process. The design team will be involved and work with engineers and product managers after.
5. Make your schedule visible on your calendar, block the entire week(s), email auto-responses, and Slack status. On all these, write, “In a Design Sprint from DD/MM to DD/MM, expect delayed answers.”

7. How do you facilitate concept sketching in an entirely remote setting?

The most crucial aspect is designing fast and freely with a high volume of ideas. So we ask participants to sketch on paper and take a picture of their sketch. Participants write details on digital sticky notes in Miro to ensure the concepts are self-explanatory.

8. Do you do any initial research before the Vision phase? If so, do you bring any research insight artifacts into that meeting for reference?

The team can start the vision phase with or without prior research (quantitative and qualitative). If there is no research available, we recommend adding some time between the Vision and Creation phase to do some light Adhoc research talking to internal experts, creating proto journey maps, etc.

When knowledge is available, it is shared with the vision survey (remote sailboat workshop) asynchronously with a slide deck. Reading the documentation is required before answering the survey to ensure shared context. We include:

• A link with the necessary documentation to read as a first section of the survey with a required question stating, “I have read the documentation”.
• A Q&A session during kickoff, the vision workshop, or expert talks, so participants can openly ask questions.

9. Do you include a summary after each day and a morning recap?

Transparency and constant communication are necessary for a Design Sprint. We always have a dedicated slack channel for all project members with a simple daily recap of what has happened each day. It usually comprises a quick paragraph of text with a link to the dedicated frame in Miro.

10. How do you get stakeholders to participate in these and stay available and engaged as needed throughout the remote design sprint?

We never had issues bringing or engaging stakeholders in a design sprint because it is a rare time of intense collaboration between different stakeholders and functions.

If stakeholders are challenging you, communicate that the process allows to create and validate an idea with actual customers within a few weeks. This is often appealing. The straightforward steps and clear outputs will build momentum throughout the process.

11. How deep do you prototype? Do you design and prototype all the interactions? How do you define them?

For a completely new idea, aim for low-fidelity mocks. If you have a robust design system and readily available banks of realistic content (imagery, copy, products, etc.), aim for higher fidelity prototypes.

We prototype critical interactions and the experience flow, including the screen before, during, and after.

• We use “fake doors” to let participants interact with any elements they want. We make a simple unbranded screen that says “end of prototype, return to the previous page” with a back button. This allows users to click or tap on anything more naturally.

Definitions of these steps are based on the flow defined by the team in the vision phase.

12. How many remote sprints did it take for you to feel the process was well-tuned? How do you measure success?

Every team, project, organization, and function has its own set of constraints. For a given context, three design sprints should feel enough to be comfortable running it and onboarding a new designer/facilitator.

We measure success by seeing the ideas generated from the sprint successfully translated to real-world products. Many of the live Wayfair experiences came from Remote design sprints! We also run a retrospective at the end of the process.

If the remote design sprint envisioned a north star experience with cross-functional leads across the company, or if there was something notable that was unlocked, at Wayfair we encourage a Case Study readout to share wins, learnings and optimization opportunities. These types of programs allow for shared knowledge across teams!

Thank you for reading.

Norman Wozniak is currently the Associate Director of Product Design for Marketing Landing and Promotions Experiences at Wayfair.

About Wayfair’s Global Experience Design Community

Global Experience Design at Wayfair is a cross-disciplinary function including product design, user research, and content strategy. We create experiences for all of our end-users, including suppliers, customers, agents, field champions, and internal employees. The Wayfair experience supports our mission to be the destination for all things home, helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home. Join the team reinventing how we shop for it. 🎉

Resources:

Our Remote Design Sprint: A Step-by-Step Toolkit

Big kuddos to my current and past team members in running and improving our Remote Design Sprint process, in particular: Emily Thompson, Lauren Lamperski, Sam Morrison, Weinan Li

Are You Running A Remote Design Sprint? 12 questions you might have. was originally published in Wayfair Experience Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

​​At Wayfair, we’re always finding ways to maximize what we can learn in the minimum amount of time. We’re also on the lookout for ways to better partner as a cross-functional team.

An opportunity led us to do our first 4-day design sprint using the latest “Design Sprint 2.0” created by AJ&Smart. ​

​​A Design Sprint is a 4-day process for rapidly solving big challenges, creating new products, or improving existing ones. It compresses potentially months of work into a few days.

AJ&Smart

​​Using this method, we were able to launch a new feature live on the Wayfair homepage in less than a month considering a list of more than 50 cross-functional and cross-department stakeholders!

1. ​​What is a Design Sprint?

​​If you want to learn about it, there is plenty of content on the topic. Here is a simple list I advise you check out.

• What is a design sprint and why it is important by Gloria Lo.
• The Design Sprint book, created by Google Venture ❤ Jake Knapp ❤ .
• The updated 4-day Design Sprint 2.0, by AJ&Smart that we used. Check out their Masterclass too.
• Many (many!) inspirational success stories of using the design sprint.​​
• How to facilitate a Design Sprint. The Facilitator’s Handbook: 24 Design Sprint Tips, by Jake Knapp

​​2. How did we do it?

​​We strictly followed the Design Sprint 2.0 process. It allowed us to achieve the same goal while blocking fewer days on people’s calendars. It was the perfect balance of involvement vs impact. We managed to get 2 Engineers, 2 Designers, 2 Content Strategist, 1 Researcher (co-facilitator), 1 PM, 1 Analyst, 1 Product Director, and me, the other co-facilitator.

Although there is a lot of literature and advice on how to run a Design Sprint and a Design Sprint 2.0, it still requires a little bit of preparation. The biggest pain points for me were:

1. ​​Finding a room for 4 full days.
2. Finding experts and managing their calendars. My PM Rachel was so helpful in achieving communication — we ended up having the exact 9 Wayfair experts we wanted!
3. Creating a deck with ~100 slides to support all the activities for the 4 days. Here is the template I created for myself: check it out. Feel free to copy it, use it, share it.

3. What did we learn from this experience?

This was the first Design Sprint 2.0 for myself and the team. We were amazed by how much we achieved. And the team was thrilled to have participated in that experience.

“I really liked that all of us participating were on equal footing and all ideas were treated as such. I felt like the format made it easy for me to contribute.”

A Design Sprint participant

Nonetheless, we always want to improve. Here are a few points we’ll be doing differently:

• Better define the initial goal. Our issue was that our goal was too broad and not based around specific customer behavior. The team aligned on: How can we make Wayfair the One-Stop-Shop? We probably should have had something like: We want our customers to engage with Wayfair’s broad offering (Services, Tools, Programs,…) higher up in the funnel.
• Better define the “mapping” exercise. That particular step created a little bit of confusion. Most of it was due to our goal not being specific enough, but we could still have done a better job at explaining the purpose of that step. In the end, even if it took more time, the exercise forced the team to have a conversation about what we were achieving together.
• Share more examples for each step.

Any question? Write them in the comments!

Thanks to Lauren Lamperski, and Emily Thompson for helping write this article.

Design Sprint 2.0 was originally published in Wayfair Experience Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

​​​​At Wayfair, we love our millions of users. We want to give them the best possible online experience. And we have millions of products that we want to showcase to them!

My design team focuses on five primary areas: main navigation, homepage, category pages, account pages, and shops. ​​This is where we get the widest range of customers and where we have the widest range of content to pick from.

​​Part of my role as an experience designer at Wayfair is to build a bridge between two worlds: make Millions of People meet Millions of Products. All while fulfilling our mission: Make shopping for your home a fun experience, and not a source of anxiety.​

One way we’re addressing this is by focusing on how we can better welcome and guide customers across our site. How do we manage to create an experience that flows for everyone? And how can we build something that can work within the current Wayfair technologies and systems?

​​In short: how do we design for scale at Wayfair?

Here are 3 rules to get started that don’t add to your design process. They might even make it faster!​​

​​Rule #1: Don’t design alone

In the past, designers would tackle a project on their own and bring an idea back to their product partners. They would create a beautiful experience, validated by other designers. But sometimes, the design would end up being impossible to build.

​​Something that is going to make the page load slower? Forget it. Something that looks beautiful but buries products? Absolutely not. Something that has a very friendly dynamic text? Forget it.

When designing at this scale, we realized that effortless design could have fewer chances of translating into easy engineering work.

So together, with our product partners, we started to do things differently.

Now, we get together with a product manager, and one or two tech leads to define what we can or cannot do. And as soon as we start narrowing down on a user problem, we go on and brainstorm as a full team.

Frontend, Fullstack, Backend, Data Science, PMs, and QA are all involved. We take an hour to chat and consider scaling constraints from the start.

The meeting provides an opportunity to discuss many potential solutions, and collaborate with tech experts. And it checks the scalability of a solution on 2 aspects:

• ​​It brings more mindsets, so we get to see how different people think or appreciate a potential solution.
• ​​It brings multiple expertise from a technical standpoint. We attack the problem from all the angles.

Also, bonus point: It’s a great team building activity and gets people excited about the problem we’re solving!

​​Rule #2: Open up the feedback, check your data, bring in the numbers

Did you know something as small as changing the header color can cost your business? When we changed the Wayfair header to purple we saw a decrease in our core business metrics. At this scale, even the tiniest change can have a significant impact.​​

​​​​We recently decided to improve the visual hierarchy of our header. During the ideation process, I offered one concept that had a purple background. The team was excited about it because we believed it’d be a great way to reinforce our brand, make the header distinct, and greater emphasize the page content and product imagery.​​

​​We were fortunate that during one of our design reviews, one PM remembered about a past test where a similar concept was presented to our customers. It had failed.

​​​​We have multiple ways to make sure we leverage our prior knowledge. We involve our amazing data scientists colleagues as much as possible. They help us make decisions every step of the process. But we also bring multiple PMs into our design reviews, so we can leverage their expertise and institutional knowledge.

​​​

​​Rule #3: Know your technology, befriend your system

​​To help our customers find the right products for their home, we need to come up with simple ways to browse our catalog. Finding products when you face a product catalog with millions of possibilities is overwhelming.

On the other hand, manually curating the Wayfair catalog, is simply impossible.

​​When creating a new concept, we have to be smart about what technology our site is currently using. And ask ourselves:

“How can we leverage the technology in new ways?”

We recently worked on the launch of a new flagship brand on Wayfair, a brand that is all about colors. In our initial brainstorms with the core team, we started to think about a “shop by color” component. How could we show multiple products but allow customers to quickly see different colors? The way we have done it in the past is by having somebody manually find products of the same colors, create a list, put that list in the database, and connect it to the live component. This is very hard to scale.

So we started to think: What if we could use our filters instead and automatically show a subset of products filtered by color?

And this is how we created a simple component that would show 6 products of the same color, using the filter technology in the background. And with just a click, customers can switch between 6 different colors to see what are the most loved products of the same color. It looks great!​​

Because of the way we built it, that component is fully scalable to our entire catalog. It could be a “Shop by Brand”, a “Shop by Material”, a “Shop by Price”, pretty much anything that you can find within our current filters!

​​In conclusion, by bringing more functions in the design process, making sure we gather learnings at scale and understand how to leverage our technologies differently, we are finding innovative ways to make the shopping experience fun and easy.

By keeping the scale at the core of our design process, we can create solutions that will work for the masses and adapt to all the use cases. All while having more fun as a team!​​

​​If you are in a company that has millions of users, here is what you could be doing right now:

• Rule #1 Take 30 minutes with your PM, engineer, data scientist to brainstorm on your current project.​​
• Rule #2 Review the different concepts with people who have experience within your company, as well as different areas of expertise.
• ​​Rule #3 Grab coffee with a few engineers and talk about the technology that actually powers your experiences, and how you can use it to better personalize them.

And ask them, could I use that technology elsewhere?…

Thank you Connor Doherty for your help!

Design for the millions was originally published in Wayfair Experience Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.