The product design sprint: decide (day 3)

In this stage of the sprint, we’ll look at how to decide which solutions to flesh out, and how you’ll fit them together into something you can rapidly test with users to learn what’s working and what isn’t.

Combat the group effect

In a sprint, the group effect can cause decision makers to behave more democratically than they do in real life. Once the sprint is over, you can be left with something that doesn’t have true support from the deciders.

To combat this effect, the facilitator often has to draw out the decision-maker to give their honest, true opinion. One method is giving super votes to the deciders during design critiques in Day 2. Most of the time however, you just have to be blunt.

As a facil, you should be upfront with the team if you sense you’ve got a case of groupthink. Let everyone know you need more assertive participation from the deciders.

Search for conflicts

The first thing to do in this phase of the sprint is comb through storyboards to look for conflicts. A conflict is where there are two or more different approaches to solving the same problem. Conflicting approaches are super helpful because they illuminate the choices for you product. Everytime you find a conflict, write it down — write the topic and solutions on sticky notes.

Best shot or battle royale?

You have 2 basic options for what kind of user study you’re going to run at the end of the sprint — the Battle Royale (prototyping several approaches and testing them against each other) or the Best Shot (single protoype)

The advantage of the Best Shot is that you can put a lot more work into that one prototype, or just get it done faster. The user study is less complex, and it gives you more time to see what the users say about your competitors’ products, or interview users which is always valuable.

The Battle Royale works well for newer spaces where there really aren’t many conventions, and you need to figure out which one is going to work best for the user. The disadvantage is that it takes more time and your testers may run out of patience before you get all of the information you’d like to have from them. You may have to bring in more participants and run more studies.

You may also do some kind of hybrid.

To know which one to pick, start with a guy check. If everyone is excited about one option, you may be ready for a Best Shot. Otherwise, go with a Battle Royale if no one can agree.

Test your assumptions

Listing out underlying assumptions is a good way to revisit the big picture. The assumptions can be about the user, the businness, the technology, etc. You can test your assumptions by showing a prototype to users.

Try to come up with a way to test all your assumptions, either in the user study or some other parallel task that can start right away. If you can’t test every assumption now, keep a list for next time. Don’t leave them for too long though, they’ll get nasty.

Now that you’ve picked out which conflicts to explore and which assumptions to test, you’re ready to script your prototype.

Whiteboard the user story

Now we’re going to make a storyboard that shows exactly how the user will step through your prototype, click by click. This storyboard will become the spec for building the prototype. This is the last group activity before you break for prototyping.

Start by drawing a big grid on the whiteboard — each cell should be about as large as two sheets of copy paper. The idea is to draw a comic book that tells a story starting when the user opens the prototype and ending when they complete all necessary tasks.

In each comic book frame, you’ll draw a single action. Don’t worry about layout or design in great detail first, but you do have to think through every action that takes place in the story.

Get one person to draw, but don’t make them figure everything out on their own. The group should be engaged and discussing what happens next.

When you begin drawing, imagine you’re framing the prototype for your user study participant. How will they get to your product? What will they be trying to do when they get there? Hopefully the story will flow easily from there, following the outline you laid out in Day 1.

Keep the gloves off

As you storyboard, theere will be lots of small decisions to make that didn’t come up earlier in the day. That’s expected since you’re working at a siner level of detail now. The facilitator has to work hard here to not let people be too nice. You don’t want design by committee. If there’s a good argument going, don’t try to find middle ground or make people agree. Help the team place a bet on one of the opposing solutions and keep the other in your back pocket if it fails. Call on the CEO to make a tough call when needed. If both solutions are viable, you may want to opt for a “battle royale” — just don’t use it as an excuse to avoid decisions.

In the next phase, we’ll move on to prototyping.