Reflecting On A Design Sprint (a la Google)
Two weeks ago, I planned a design sprint based on Google’s process for a client project. I ran it last week. Kickoffs, workshops and much of our collaborative work at Philosophie are inspired by this process. I’ve never run one, though. My goal was to reach back to the original source, run it without prejudice and draw insights that can make our work in the New York office even better.
I planned to work four hours per day on the sprint. Much of that time would be collaborative. Here’s the agenda that I shared on Friday before the sprint week:
Monday, Day 1
- Review business goals, technical capabilities and user research
- Draw inspiration from other products and services
- Create a stakeholder map
- Create a user proto-journey map
Tuesday, Day 2
- Define design principles
- Sketch eight ideas in five minutes
- Sketch one big idea in five minutes
- Sketch one storyboard in five minutes
Wednesday, Day 3
- Dotvote on ideas
- Review votes and align the team
- Define what we want to learn with a prototype
Thursday, Day 4
- Build a prototype
- Write the test script
Friday, Day 5
- Test the prototype with five “users”
- Summarize and share the week’s work
My Big Takeaway
UX research recruitment was the number one pain point of the week. On Monday, I asked our research recruiter to schedule five interviews for Friday. I thought four days was enough lead time, but I was wrong. By Wednesday and Thursday we had the opportunity to interview a few people the following week. In the interest of being rigorous and learning what we could accomplish in one week, I chose to research with Usertesting.com. It was imperfect, but better than nothing.
Google Ventures has their own variation of the design sprint and we have a copy of their book, Sprint, making the rounds at our office. Marty Cagan plugged it at the Product Management and User Experience Conference (#pmux) a few months ago and since then my colleague Brooke Kao called it “the Kevin Bacon of books” because it seemed connected to every industry blog post we read. Well I guess this post is now one degree away. The next sprint I run will take cues from the book.
