Design Sprint know-how for businesses as part of the UX strategy with Sarah Rink

Every day more companies are familiarising themselves with the Return of Investment (ROI) in UX: success stories pop out every day on your inbox. And you only have to take a quick look at Google Ventures to see how companies such as Slack and Hubspot have benefited from using Design Thinking frameworks like Design Sprint.

The businesses that already carry it in their DNA have taken the step to implement UX strategies and the continued application of methodologies like Design Sprint can only reinforce that. However, less experienced businesses can try — and succeed with — one-off, isolated actions, but struggle to implement them on the core of their work processes.

For this successful, continuous application of UX strategy based in Design Thinking to be possible, it is necessary not only to be acquainted with the methodologies — which are widely available on the internet — but understanding how to implement them in an effective way, which can be achieved by training different teams within the company.

A practical exercise in understanding

This immersive day and a half workshop will provide valuable information to teams about the way in which they can develop some of their projects taking users into account from the outset, and going from an idea to a validated prototype in only five days.

Participating as a mentor in many workshops, hand in hand with Sarah Rink as Sprint Master, has allowed me to see how a first practical approach of this method — that includes Design Thinking, Lean and Agile — is a great step and helps to understand what the methodology consists of. I also could see firsthand the importance of having a good facilitator (Sprint Master) and working within the timeframes.

This Design Sprint workshop focuses on getting the participants to understand the process and goal of each phase:

• Understand
• Sketch
• Decide
• Prototype
• Validate

Four important aspects

Ensuring the team to focus on understanding the methodology and not on solving the problem is a challenge in which it is important to bear in mind, trying to get the correct insights in the face of future challenges.

The main objective of this sprint is to make sure that teams focus on understanding the methodology, instead of following their nature — which is invariable of trying to solve the problem proposed. If they can understand how the ‘machine works’ they will be able to apply this methodology in future projects.

To enable this, having a tuned-in and experienced Sprint Master is key. Sarah Rink, through her company UXFYP and experience with the Google Design Sprint Academy, highlights four important aspects of this training:

1. The importance of not focusing on the challenge but understanding the methodology

The challenge for the workshop is created and proposed by the Master, and has clear KPIs to help focus the exercise. Based on the challenge, she also assigns roles to each participant, which are key for participants to understand the importance of having a multidisciplinary team in the room for a real Sprint.

“Having a challenge that is exciting but also accessible and understandable for everyone is key. We use a pre-defined challenge because the focus of the session is not solving the problem, but learning how a Design Sprint works, so providing all materials beforehand allows participants to put their focus on the methodology, instead of trying to come up with a new product or interface” Sarah explains.

In this scenario the challenge is not the focus, the important thing to know is that each phase helps to reach unifying ideas, and then create a prototype that can be tested.

2. The feedback at the end of each phase using the Feedback Wall

At the end of each step of the Sprint, we left five minutes for teams to take notes of their learnings about that specific part of the workshop and share on a ‘Feedback Wall’. This allowed them to reflect on each phase individually, and it created a space to externalise questions and anything that wasn’t clear. At the end of the day, teams got together to share what was on the Feedback Wall and were able to recollect the hardest learnings. The objective of this wall is trying to avoid the ‘overwriting effect’: when a new barrier or learning supersedes the previous one.

That made it easier to focus on the relevant points and find potential opportunities to improve when applied in live projects or future training.

3. Team mentor

Having a mentor dedicated to each group helps everyone understand the importance of teamwork and building on each others’ ideas. With a mentor leading each team of 4 or 5 people frees up the Sprint Master to have an overview of the workshop and provide guidelines to help understand the different methodologies, as well as identifying key moments in order to help each team finding its own path and getting the best out of each phase.

4. Having a Design Sprint Intro day

Participants found it particularly helpful to have an introduction to Design Sprint and being briefed on the challenge the day before the workshop. We set up a two hour session where the Sprint Master explained the framework, all phases and the exercises that we would do. We also took this time to assemble teams, assign roles, and do a warm up role play. This meant that everyone was up to speed on the D-day, allowing the session to be much more productive. Participants also talked about what a difference it makes to know ‘what’s coming’, instead of being surprised with each new exercise.

In Conclusion

The DS Know-How for Businesses is an immersive exercise, which helps to understand the dynamics and sense of Design Thinking and Agile methodologies.

It is also practical tool to explore capabilities and talents of different profiles in a team, to take an idea forward, to be able to know the users and to test in a few days. It’s a quick way to understand how valuable are the ideas of different profiles in a business and how much they can add to each others ideas just by working side by side, in a room, for a day.

Participating actively and not in a purely theoretical setting offers the possibility for businesses to understand the cost benefit of implementing UX and Design Thinking methodologies in each project and to understand that, depending on each case, there will be a methodology to suit to the project needs.

Lastly, but perhaps more importantly, understanding that it is easy to interact with end users and making them happy by testing our ideas and especially taking advantage of the knowledge within each area of the company, beyond meetings, and fostering collaborative work.